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Gay Asian Sexual Health in Australia: Governing HIV/AIDS, Racializing Biopolitics and Performing Conformity

University of Melbourne, Australia, aisy{at}unimelb.edu.au

This article critically examines how the public health governance of HIV/AIDS has constructed the racialized biopolitics of the gay Asian Australian community. The old biopolitics of health that excluded the Asian at the turn of the 19th century is now eclipsed by a new biopolitics that foregrounds the racialized body as a site of inclusion. The new biopolitics has emerged from within policy innovations in Australia's multicultural sexual health programs. Since the mid-1990s, the diversity of Asian communities was recognized in various AIDS councils through the employment of ethno-specific social workers, carers and peer-to-peer educators. This article problematizes how diasporic gay Asian sexuality has emerged in queer, mainstream and modern Australia through such a viral politic of containment. These policies, I argue, have paradoxically contributed to the production of a new queer Asian Australian body aesthetics that has enabled the conditions of possibilities for new sexual subjects.

Key Words: Asia • Australia • governmentality • HIV/AIDS • queer diaspora

Sexualities, Vol. 11, No. 1-2, 227-244 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1363460707085471


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