Viviane Namaste is Professor and Concordia University Research Chair in HIV/AIDS and Sexual Health, Simone de Beauvoir Institute & Womens Studies. Namaste is a Canadian feminist scholar, author, researcher and professor, whose work focuses on health and transsexualism, more specifically HIV/AIDS and being seropositive. Namaste's research focuses on health, sex work,transsexuality, transgenderism, bisexuality, and swinger communities.

She has commented that research that maintains the gender binary can exclude communities. Her research examines the involvement of public health in HIV prevention among swinger groups in Montreal, Quebec. Namaste has been noted for criticizing Judith Butler in her work Undoing Gender by discussing how transsexuality intersects someone's identity and how it attributes to the treatment of transsexuals and more specifically their murder.

The feminist journal, Hypatia, has called Namaste's work, "extremely important" because she "excels at focusing readers' attention on the most marginalized of transsexuals, at analyzing the ways in which different systems of oppression work together."Namaste considers activism more important than work within the humanities.