Sex worker activists' HIV/AIDS educational outreach with young women and older men in two social contexts in the Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

abstract This Briefing highlights two key findings of a critical ethnography about female sex worker activists' (SWAs) HIV/AIDS education initiatives in the remote Amazon jungle city of Iquitos, Peru. Using a gender relations analysis, I show how SWAs seek to educate young women and older men about HIV prevention in two different but inter-related social contexts. First, given the recent boom in sexual tourism to Iquitos, SWAs try to encourage young local women who frequent the tourist zone of the city, to attend the sex worker organisations’ HIV/AIDS prevention talks; however, some young women in this zone do not classify their relationships with tourists as sex work and thus, they reject the health information. In the second case, I describe how SWAs successfully teach their younger and their older male clients about the benefits of condom use during condom negotiation scenarios in brothels and hotel rooms. In both cases, I explain how the social constructions of youth, older-age, beauty, regional expressions of masculinities, femininities and ambiguous relationships for economic exchange all work together to shape HIV risk. Poverty in Iquitos normalises the intergenerational relationships between older men (both local and foreign) and younger women. Thus, sex worker organisations in Iquitos play a critical role in bringing HIV/AIDS prevention education to these two disparate but vulnerable groups in both public and private spaces.