HIV/AIDS and the Naz Project: Race, Sexuality, and South Asian AIDS Activism in Britain, 1990–2000

Abstract

This article focuses on the work of the South Asian HIV-AIDS charity Naz Project in Nineties’ Britain. Naz’s advocacy, outreach and prevention work among South Asian communities foregrounded new intersections around race, migration and sexuality in British HIV-AIDS activism. Analyzing Naz’s interventions and networks across a range of transnational sites in Britain, Western Europe and South Asia, I argue for new entry points to understand the anxieties that AIDS provoked around immigrant mobility. This article makes four arguments: i) that Naz foregrounded race as vital to devising effective HIV prevention programs for South Asian minorities in Britain, shaping its engagements with the intersection of race, mobility and migration that AIDS presented; ii) that such engagements helped professionalize Naz into a new kind of sexual health charity that worked in tandem with inter/national health structures; iii) that this professionalization transformed Naz into an influential transnational entity, able to mobilize and unify disparate South Asian publics in Britain and the subcontinent.