Inventing ‘African AIDS’

The theoretical frame of reference within which the analysis is conducted draws from postcolonial feminist theory (Mohanty 1991; Spivak 1988) and feminist de­constructive readings of AIDS. According to Paula Treichler (1999) AIDS should be viewed as constructed through language—in particular through the discourses of medicine and science. This construction according to her is ‘true’ or ‘real’ only in certain specific ways—for example, insofar as it guides research or facilitates clinical control over the illness. The name AIDS in part constructs the disease and makes it comprehensible (Sontag 1991). Treichler argues that while it is not pos­sible to look behind language to determinate what AIDS ‘really’ is, it is of impor­tance to explore the sites where such conclusions and fixing occur (cf. Epstein 1995). Treichler, among others, assesses that the social dimensions of AIDS epi­demic are marginalized in the biomedical discourse. In this chapter we will show that the social construction of AIDS is a complicated matter: in a paradoxical ar­gumentation the medical media maintain a representation of HIV/AIDS based on simple biological determinism while, in the very same texts, the constructions of HIV/AIDS are based on stereotypical ideas of Africans and ‘African culture’.

Patton claims that “Western science today is slowly consolidating around a particular construction of ‘African AIDS’, which elaborates on the colonialist mystifications of the past century”(1997:387). One important part of this con­struction is the idea that Africa and Africans are already lost to the pandemic. An­other widely spread thought is that AIDS in Africa is spreading in a different way than in the West. Patton maintains that the idea of ‘African AIDS’ is very much connected to constructions of ‘African sexuality’, which stem from Western co­lonial imagination of African sexuality as closer to nature and therefore different to the West’s. Frantz Fanon’s classic work (1971) demonstrates how the black

Preventing HIV? Medical Discourses and Invisible Women

man/black penis is used as the uncivilized imagery in the service of white sexual­ity (see Ratele, this volume). What does this mean for women in the specific con­text of HIV/AIDS prevention?

In 1988 a new theory was put forth: Africans are afflicted by genital ulcers that can increase transmission of the virus from women to men: “Conference visual aids during the genital ulcers era were never complete without pictures of dis­eased genitals—projected to 6 or 8 feet high to get over the point that the equip­ment of men and women in Africa is ‘different’” (Patton 1997:398). It is around this time that for the first time in medical media speculations about the connec­tion between male circumcision and HIV transmission are mentioned (Fink 1986). As in the genital ulcers theory, here too the focus is on genital ‘difference’. There is a clear parallell here to what Eisenstein calls “a phallocratic construction of racism” (Eisenstein 1996: 38) where ‘different’ penises are needed to represent ‘race’. We argue that the male circumcision debate operates within this same logic, “disguised as Western altruism”—as Patton characterizes Western attempts to ‘help’ the Africans (1997:387). We continue from Patton’s point by asking how women are situated in the discourse on male circumcision.