‘Brothers are Doing it For Themselves’: Remaking Masculinities in South Africa

Abstract

The AIDS pandemic in South Africa has contributed towards prising open questions on sexuality and sexual rights in ways that were unprecedented in the past. Partly as a result of exposure to HIV/AIDS prevention programmes driven by the international health agencies, the state, NGOs and social movements such as the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), parents and politicians are increasingly compelled to talk openly about sex and sexual rights in the home and in public domains. Meanwhile gender, gay, AIDS and anti-rape activists have responded to the pandemic by highlighting the need to activate and realize the gender and sexual rights provisions in South Africa’s progressive Constitution. However, the AIDS pandemic and the promotion of new sexual and gender rights have also triggered a conservative backlash from religious leaders and ‘traditionalists’. So, while social movement, NGOs, and public health responses to the AIDS pandemic may have contributed towards a ‘sexual revolution’ in terms of which formerly taboo topics on sex have morphed into morally respectable subjects for discussion and debate in both private and public spaces, this had not translated into the realization of the sexual and gender equality as envisaged by the architects of the constitution. It is within this contested setting that new forms of AIDS activism and sexual citizenship are emerging.