Molecular and Municipal Politics: Research and Regulation in Dakar

Commercial sex work is regulated in Dakar, and those women who are registered with the state must attend regular health checks at the state clinic. This chapter examines the history of policing, data gathering, and care practiced at the clinic and the integration of biomedical research into its functioning. I consider some of the changes that have taken place at the clinic, as state sanitary regulation is influenced by and practiced through biomedical research. I discuss the strategic leveraging of resources for research that helped to build capacity and to begin the process of making state regulation congruent with research objectives. I pay close attention to the banal bureaucratic practices that predate the arrival of biomedical research, but also shift to accommodate research work. I argue that social workers, doctors, and scientists have collaboratively created a new kind of regulation that breaks with the practices of sanitary state policy while still bearing traces of older regimes.