Hegarty Benjamin, Thajib Ferdiansyah, Handayani Amalia Puri, Mallay Rully, Marischa Arum
Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, Kensington, Australia.
Institute for Near Eastern and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Friederich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany.
Med Anthropol. 2025 Jan 2;44(1):69-82. doi: 10.1080/01459740.2024.2425042. Epub 2024 Nov 18.
The history of HIV/AIDS is often told from the Global North, a viewpoint that is naturalized in policies and programs that privilege biomedical models of treatment and prevention. This article explores how one Indonesian transgender population known as became the subject of various forms of research since the 1980s. Research was one way that waria came to be classified as part of the key population of "transgender people." Drawing on an oral history project conducted in 2021/2022, we show how - while necessarily hierarchical - ethnographic accounts of other HIV/AIDS histories can rethink fundamental global health concepts.
