Honors 260 (Global HIV) Course Guide: Home

This book examines the various psychosocial and sexual ordeals of African American people living with HIV or AIDs (PLWH/PLWAs) as depicted in African American literary narratives dealing with HIV/AIDs published from 1981 to 2010. Central to these texts are the psychosocial and sexual challenges faced by the African American PLWH/PLWAs and the various adaptive strategies they choose to come to terms with their HIV/AIDS identity. Although PLWH/PLWAs irrespective of race confront these brutal realities, the intersection of a mythologized black sexuality, homophobia and intra-community marginalization places African American PLWH/PLWAs in an unenviable position. While abjection and social death rupture the social self of PLWH/PLWAs, the ostracization they suffer as a result of their diagnosis affects their sexual self, leading to sexual death. In addition to illustrating the social and sexual issues of PLWH/PLWAs in relation to race, sexuality and gender, the African American HIV/AIDS literary narratives studied here also foreground various coping strategies conscripted by PLWH/PLWAs to surmount the onerous psychosocial and sexual challenges they face. In view of the above concerns, this study analyses social death, sexual death and coping in relation to HIV/AIDS at three levels, namely the intersection of blackness, sexuality and HIV/AIDS; the impact of such an intersection on the sexual life of black PLWH/PLWAs; and, finally, the envisioned coping strategies for affirmative survival. This book offers insightful critical analysis of HIV/AIDS literary narratives by celebrated authors such as Samuel R. Delany, Cheryl L. West, Essex Hemphill, Michael B. Hunter, Steven Corbin, Charlotte Watson Sherman, Sapphire, Pearl Cleage, Sheneshka Jackson, Gil R. Robertson, and Marvelyn Brown.

Birth in the Age of AIDS is a vivid and poignant portrayal of the experiences and struggles of HIV-positive women in India during pregnancy, birth, and motherhood at the beginning of the 21st century.

In Zambia, due to the rise of tuberculosis and the closely connected HIV epidemic, a large number of children have experienced the illness or death of at least one parent. Children as Caregivers examines how well intentioned practitioners fail to realize that children take on active caregiving roles when their guardians become seriously ill and demonstrates why understanding children's care is crucial for global health policy.   Using ethnographic methods, and listening to the voices of the young as well as adults, Jean Hunleth makes the caregiving work of children visible. She shows how children actively seek to "get closer" to ill guardians by providing good care. Both children and ill adults define good care as attentiveness of the young to adults' physical needs, the ability to carry out treatment and medication programs in the home, and above all, the need to maintain physical closeness and proximity. Children understand that losing their guardians will not only be emotionally devastating, but that such loss is likely to set them adrift in Zambian society, where education and advancement depend on maintaining familial, reciprocal relationships.   View a gallery of images from the book (https://www.flickr.com/photos/childrenascaregivers)

This open access book introduces the theoretical frameworks and academic debates concerning sexual cultural practices and HIV/AIDS in Africa. It shows how these frameworks have been applied in a practical sense in Africa to investigate sexual cultural practices and their link with HIV/AIDS. The author provides an overview of both the field of study and the methods used during fieldwork. Finally, it assesses the implications of the findings for the conceptualization and provision of current and future HIV/AIDS policies and programs in Africa. This monograph will appeal to policy makers and practitioners working in the field of HIV/AIDS in the Global South as well as academics and students.

In this book Klaus Fiedler offers a candid critique of religious faith healing claims - a critique that extents to the Voluntary Male Medical Circumcision Campaign (VMMCC). The book reveals the lack of substantive evidence to back such healing claims and the contradiction between the VMMCC claims and the consequences of those claims in sexual health and practice.

Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary "Lammy" Award in LGBTQ Studies The first book to examine the correlation between mixed-race identity and HIV/AIDS among Native American gay men and transgendered people, Indian Blood provides an analysis of the emerging and often contested LGBTQ "two-spirit" identification as it relates to public health and mixed-race identity. Prior to contact with European settlers, most Native American tribes held their two-spirit members in high esteem, even considering them spiritually advanced. However, after contact - and religious conversion - attitudes changed and social and cultural support networks were ruptured. This discrimination led to a breakdown in traditional values, beliefs, and practices, which in turn pushed many two-spirit members to participate in high-risk behaviors. The result is a disproportionate number of two-spirit members who currently test positive for HIV. Using surveys, focus groups, and community discussions to examine the experiences of HIV-positive members of San Francisco's two-spirit community, Indian Blood provides an innovative approach to understanding how colonization continues to affect American Indian communities and opens a series of crucial dialogues in the fields of Native American studies, public health, queer studies, and critical mixed-race studies.

There is now a vast literature on HIV and AIDS but much of it is based on traditional biomedical or epidemiological approaches. Hence it tells us very little about the experiences of the millions of people whose living and dying constitute the reality of this devastating pandemic. Doyal brings together findings from a wide range of empirical studies spanning the social sciences to explore experiences of HIV positive people across the world. This will illustrate how the disease is physically manifested and psychologically internalised by individuals in diverse ways depending on the biological, social, cultural and economic circumstances in which they find themselves. A proper understanding of these commonalities and differences will be essential if future strategies are to be effective in mitigating the effects of HIV and AIDS. Doyal shows that such initiatives will also require a better appreciation of the needs and rights of those affected within the wider context of global inequalities and injustices. Finally, she outlines approaches to address these challenges. This book will appeal to everyone involved in struggles to improve the well-being of those with HIV and AIDS. While academically rigorous, it is written in an accessible manner that transcends specific disciplines and, through its extensive bibliography, provides diverse source material for future teaching, learning and research.

Presents a unique approach to HIV prevention at the intersection of sociological and public health research Although the first AIDS cases were attributed to men having sex with men, over 70% of HIV infections worldwide are now estimated to occur through sex between women and men. In Men at Risk, Shari L. Dworkin argues that the centrality of heterosexual relationship dynamics to the transmission of HIV means that both women and men need to be taken into account in gender-specific HIV/AIDS prevention interventions. She looks at the "costs of masculinity" that shape men's HIV risks, such as their initiation of sex and their increased status from sex with multiple partners. Engaging with the common paradigm in HIV research that portrays only women--and not heterosexually active men--as being "vulnerable" to HIV, Dworkin examines the gaps in public health knowledge that result in substandard treatment for HIV transmission and infection among heterosexual men both domestically and globally. She examines a vast array of structural factors that shape men's HIV transmission risks and also focuses on a relatively new category of global health programs with men known as "gender-transformative" that seeks to move men in the direction of gender equality in the name of improved health. Dworkin makes suggestions for the next generation of gender-transformative health interventions by calling for masculinities-based and structurally driven HIV prevention programming. Thoroughly researched and theoretically grounded, Men at Risk presents a unique approach to HIV prevention at the intersection of sociological and public health research.

Doing business in China can be hazardous to your health. Occupational Hazards follows a group of Chinese businessmen and government officials as they conduct business in Beijing and western Yunnan Province, exposing webs of informal networks that help businessmen access political favors. These networks are built over liquor, cigarettes, food, and sex, turning risky behaviors into occupational hazards. Elanah Uretsky's ethnography follows these powerful men and their vulnerabilities to China's burgeoning epidemics of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV/AIDS. Examining the relationship between elite masculine networking practices and vulnerability to HIV infection, Occupational Hazards includes the stories of countless government officials and businessmen who regularly visit commercial sex workers but resist HIV testing for fear of threatening their economic and political status. Their fate is further complicated by a political system that cannot publicly acknowledge such risk and by authoritative international paradigms that limit the reach of public health interventions. Ultimately, Uretsky offers insights into how complex socio-cultural and politico-economic negotiations affect the development and administration of China's HIV epidemic.

Approximately 70% of the global total of people living with HIV/AIDS in 2016 were in sub-Saharan Africa. After delayed governmental responses, the media has been consistently deployed as an essential tool for prevention. But HIV prevention campaigns reflect multiple conflicting and shifting agendas that encompass far more than the imparting of information about how to limit the spread of the virus. In Prevention: Gender, Sexuality, HIV, and the Media in Côte d'Ivoire, Christine Cynn draws from postcolonial, queer, and feminist film and media studies to critique global HIV prevention efforts and how they attempt to reshape gendered sexualities and notions of family in line with the rationality of neoliberalism. More specifically, Cynn argues that through the bolstering of normative conceptions of gendered sexualities and families, HIV prevention media campaigns seek to actively create proper subjects, a goal corresponding with nation-building projects and reproducing their terms of belonging. During periods of increasingly virulent political and economic struggles in Côte d'Ivoire, such HIV prevention messages have lent support to lender- and state-mandated structural adjustment policies and to the exclusionary logic that casts some--such as those suffering from AIDS-related illnesses, those labeled as "homosexual," sex workers, intravenous drug users, and the HIV-positive child--as implicitly unassimilable to the community and nation. Deeply interdisciplinary, Prevention brings to light new forms of exclusion and expands scholarship on gender and sexual normativities as it intersects with that on public health, neoliberalism, and film and media.  

HIV represents not only an unprecedented pandemic but also a site of civil society innovation. In the midst of devastation, activists in sub-Saharan Africa are progressing from traditional forms of health advocacy to strategies that engage human rights principles, techniques, and language. Employing a comparative case-study approach, Resilience and Contagion considers the efforts of nine local civil society organizations in Ghana, Uganda, South Africa, and Botswana. Kristi Heather Kenyon examines who adopts rights-based discourse and why, arguing that leadership, individual beliefs, and structure all play a critical role in framing advocacy. Beyond changing laws or policies, the most important impact of promoting the rights of people living with HIV, she attests, is that it enables individuals to interact with health services from a position of resilience, strength, and empowerment. This book delves into discourse at the juncture of human rights, social theory, and global health, prompting significant and relevant discussion on advocacy's evolution in the region of the world hit hardest by the HIV pandemic. Drawing on 145 interviews, extensive participant observation, and fascinating document analysis, Resilience and Contagion foregrounds the voices of civil society actors who have conducted the most vocal, widespread, and innovative health advocacy to date.

Speech and Song at the Margins of Global Health tells the story of a unique Zulu gospel choir comprised of people living with HIV in South Africa, and how they maintained healthy, productive lives amid globalized inequality, international aid, and the stigma that often comes with having HIV. By singing, joking, and narrating about HIV in Zulu, the performers in the choir were able to engage with international audiences, connect with global health professionals, and also maintain traditional familial respect through the prism of performance. The focus on gospel singing in the narrative provides a holistic viewpoint on life with HIV in the later years of the pandemic, and the author's musical engagement led to fieldwork in participants' homes and communities, including the larger stigmatized community of infected individuals. This viewpoint suggests overlooked ways that aid recipients contribute to global health in support, counseling, and activism, as the performers set up instruments, waited around in hotel lobbies, and struck up conversations with passersby and audience members. The story of the choir reveals the complexity and inequities of global health interventions, but also the positive impact of those interventions in the crafting of community.

A witch's curse, an imperialist conspiracy, a racist plot--HIV/AIDS is a catastrophic health crisis with complex cultural dimensions. From small villages to the international system, explanations of where it comes from, who gets it, and who dies are tied to political agendas, religious beliefs, and the psychology of devastating grief. Frequently these explanations conflict with science and clash with prevention and treatment programs. In Witches, Westerners, and HIV Alexander Rödlach draws on a decade of research and work in Zimbabwe to compare beliefs about witchcraft and conspiracy theories surrounding HIV/AIDS in Africa. He shows how both types of beliefs are part of a process of blaming others for AIDS, a process that occurs around the globe but takes on local, culturally specific forms. He also demonstrates the impact of these beliefs on public health and advocacy programs, arguing that cultural misunderstandings contribute to the failure of many well-intentioned efforts. This insightful book provides a cultural perspective essential for everyone interested in AIDS and cross-cultural health issues.