Grasping the Gender Dimensions of HIVAIDS

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Grasping the Gender Dimensions of HIV/AIDS

• Sylvia Tamale
• Makerere University

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Purpose of this Session

• To answer two WHY social questions
• Why are women more infected than men?
• Why are women more affected than men?

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Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of HRs

• All human beings are born free and equal in
  dignity and rights

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The Battle Against HIV/AIDS

• Africans are fighting the scourge on several
  fronts-
• The Virus itself
• Poverty (Social Class)
• Gender Oppression Discrimination

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Sexuality A Social Construction

• Gayle Rubins conception of a Sexual Hierarchy

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Equal Opportunities Commission Act, 2007

• Section 15(6)(d)
•   The Commission shall not investigate any
  matter involving behaviour which is considered to
  be
• immoral and socially harmful or
• unacceptable by the majority of the cultural and
  social communities in Uganda

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Reasons for controlling/Policing womens
sexuality

• Domestication of womens bodies for Cheap
  Domestic Labour under patriarchal/capitalist
  conditions
• Guarantee paternity legitimacy of children
• Womens bodies as symbol of nationhood
• Power of the Erotic (womens reproductive Power)

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Power of the Erotic Audre Lorde 1984

• THERE ARE MANY KINDS OF POWER, used and unused,
  acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a
  resource within each of us that lies in a deeply
  female and spiritual plane

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• In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression
  must corrupt or distort those various sources of
  power within the culture of the oppressed that
  can provide energy for change. For women, this
  has meant a suppression of the erotic as a
  considered source of power and information within
  our lives.

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The Erotic (contd)

• We have been taught to suspect this resource,
  vilified, abused, and devalued

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• As women, we have come to distrust that power
  which rises from our deepest and nonrational
  knowledge. We have been warned against it all our
  lives by the male world

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• But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and
  provocative force to the woman who does not fear
  its revelation

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• As women, we need to examine the ways in which
  our world can be truly different the necessity
  for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of
  our lives and of our work, and of how we move
  toward and through them.