Global Struggles, Local Contexts: Prospects for a Southern African AIDS Feminism

Abstract

At the launch of the 2004 United Nations Task Force Report on Women and Girls in Southern Africa, Secretary General Kofi Annan made the following remark: ‘Across all levels of society, we need to see a deep social revolution that transforms relationships between women and men, so that women will be able to take greater control of their lives, financially as well as physically’ (UNAIDS 2004). In calling for a social revolution, Mr Annan was reflecting the thoughts of many AIDS activists and researchers in the region who were long familiar with the tragic consequences of gender inequality in the context of HIV/AIDS. The need to accelerate the global struggle against patriarchy and its system of endorsing male privilege while promoting female vulnerability is perhaps nowhere more clearly evinced than in Southern Africa today. Here, young women are three to six times more likely to be HIV infected than young men of the same age. Among older women marriage appears to be a primary risk factor for infection. In one regional study it was found that 60–80 per cent of HIV positive women reported to have had sexual relations only with their husbands (UNAIDS 2004). At every stage in the maturation of this epidemic, from the prevalence of HIV infection to the management of the AIDS sick, dying and orphaned, women in Southern Africa are disproportionably infected and affected by the disease.KeywordsBlack WomanSexual ViolenceGender InequalityGender IssueSouthern African Development CommunityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.