Katarina Jungar and Elina Oinas
Ever since the global panic around HIV/AIDS started, Africa has been represented in extremely catastrophic terms as the lost continent (Patton 1997). There is now growing attention to the fact that young women (and babies) are the major HIV risk group in Africa (UNAIDS/99.2, UNAIDS/99.16E). In both research literature and popular media the striking statistics of Sub-Saharan Africa are presented at the beginning of each article: for example that almost one fourth of pregnant mothers in South Africa are infected (Gilbert and Walker 2002). In this study we ask if this new emphasis in media reports has, in fact, any impact on HIV/AIDS prevention strategies, and whether women are actually taken into account. We focus on one debate, that of male circumcision as prevention strategy in Africa.
We analyze the male circumcision texts in medical journals by tracing stories about two themes: gender and race. Regarding gender. How are women and girls represented in the texts? If the suffering of women is the new AIDS icon, are real women taken into account? Our approach to the theme of race is inspired by Cindy Patton’s work on “African AIDS” as a social construct (Patton 1997). If the suffering of Africa is reproduced (again), what kind of representation of Africa is at work?
During the last few years male circumcision has become intensely discussed as a new possible strategy for HIV prevention in Africa. This chapter focuses on this discussion, in medical media and also to some extent in popular news media. We will show that the contemporary debate on male circumcision bases its questions and research interests on a mythological understanding of HIV/AIDS as something specific for Africa, and that these assumptions and questions are based on and reproduce colonial imaginations of ‘African sexuality’. Further, we ask what the implications of this are for women. The background for this study is an interest in the concerns raised by women’s activism and HIV activism in Southern Africa. We wish to explore how the debate on male circumcision relates to the concerns of activists, who point to the urgency of protecting women from HIV and to the importance of changing sexual power relations in order to do so. Our conclusion will be that the male circumcision debate not only completely ignores women and girls but also maintains a (hetero) sexual politics of male power, in tune with the idea of ‘different’ African sexualities and ‘different’ African AIDS (cf. Patton 1997; Ratele, this volume).
Arnfred Page 98 Wednesday, March 3, 2004 2:38 PM