Gender, Migration and Caste: Interrogation of Statist Representation of Care-workers in the Context of HIV/AIDS Discourse

This paper captures how the emigration of Dalit women for domestic work was represented as sexual slavery and deemed to be the leading cause of the spread of HIV in the Konaseema region of Andhra Pradesh.The anti-trafficking bandwagon was orchestrated at a juncture when the HIV infection rate was increasing among Dalits, providing legitimacy to regulative policies.The paper argues that the healthcare narrative ignores the complex pathways of HIV transmission and unnecessarily implicates migrant Dalit women even though their labour is unrelated to prostitution and HIV infection.Centring the study on the processes of migration and the actual experiences of Dalit women in the care economy, this paper contests the statist representation; it argues why the cause of HIV infection cannot be attributed to Dalit women's migration and how it is the unsafe practices of their men that is the likely cause.It also throws light on the harmful effects of the anti-trafficking rhetoric on subaltern women.