Commodities of Care: The Business of HIV Testing in China

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How global health practices can end up reorganizing practices of care for the people and communities they seek to serve

Commodities of Care examines the unanticipated effects of global health interventions, ideas, and practices as they unfold in communities of men who have sex with men (MSM) in China. Targeted for the scaling-up of HIV testing, Elsa L. Fan examines how the impact of this initiative has transformed these men from subjects of care into commodities of care: through the use of performance-based financing tied to HIV testing, MSM have become a source of economic and political capital.

In ethnographic detail, Fan shows how this particular program, ushered in by global health donors, became the prevailing strategy to control the epidemic in China in the late 2000s. Fan examines the implementation of MSM testing and its effects among these men, arguing that the intervention produced new markets of men, driven by the push to meet testing metrics.

Fan shows how men who have sex with men in China came to see themselves as part of a global MSM category, adopting new selfhoods and socialities inextricably tied to HIV and to testing. Wider trends in global health programming have shaped national public health responses in China and, this book reveals, have radically altered the ways health, disease, and care are addressed.

Reviews

"Commodities of Care is a forceful examination of how global health is working to transform patients from biomedical entities into market commodities. Elsa L. Fans ethnography is a tour de force, tracing the regime of HIV testing through the organizations established to serve gay men in China to show how they are co-opted by global audit regimes. This book will serve as an important bridge between global health and anthropology to begin dialogues that must happen for these fields to move forward."Elanah Uretsky, author of Occupational Hazards: Sex, Business, and HIV in Post-Mao China

"[Commodities of Care]continues the conversation among global health scholars on the unintended and sometimes negative consequences of metrics and audit culture. This book would be well suited for both graduate and undergraduate courses on gender and global health."Gender & Society

Author Bio

Elsa L. Fan is associate professor of anthropology at Webster University.