Capture-recapture, a method initially devised for estimating wildlife population sizes using technologies like bird bands or fish tags, has been repurposed for use with hard-to-count and ‘elusive’ human populations, including men who have sex with men (MSM) in Africa. Population size estimate techniques like capture-recapture have been sites of immense
financial and human resources investment in the past decade, given that vulnerable ‘key populations’ (MSM, transgender persons, sex workers) are the ‘last frontier’ in the global push to end AIDS by attaining HIV testing and treatment goals.

This talk, based on discourse analysis and ethnographic work with an LGBTI-rights organization in Malawi, takes an unsettling population size estimate technology (capturing men as if they were animals in order to count them) as analytic entry point. Playing on the dynamics of predator/prey and hunter/hunted that characterize capture-recapture techniques in the field, I excavate more oblique and mundane forms of capture (of labor, affect, value, and viral material) and re-capture (producing captive experimental populations and labor forces ready for future research) through which ‘key populations’ have come into being.