‘Turning Sex into a Game’: Gogodala Men's Response to the AIDS Epidemic and Condom Promotion in Rural Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT Rugby league is the national sport of Papua New Guinea and the game's huge popularity and international profile has been used in recent condom promotion campaigns in the nation's fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In this paper, I argue that the promotion of condom use through rugby league requires a national campaign strategy that includes understandings of condom use and masculinity at the rural level. I demonstrate this through a study of Gogodala men's understandings of the epidemic and condom use in Western Province. The Gogodala are a Christian‐based society and many blame the national condom promotion strategy for an increase in promiscuity and for ‘turning sex into a game’. Condom availability in this rural area continues to be restricted to a family planning program that promotes Christian values and excludes unmarried men. I explore the male condom dilemma where young men are more concerned with avoiding accusations that their sexual behaviour puts them at risk of contracting HIV despite acknowledging the preventative value of using condoms. In this context young men disassociate themselves from the disease and condom use through a process of calculated risk or risk minimisation.     

Great Ancestral Women: Sexuality,Gendered Mobility,and HIV among the Bamu and Gogodala of Papua New Guinea

Faced with a potentially devastating epidemic of HIV/AIDS in Papua New Guinea (PNG), sexuality and mobility have become a focus of national research and prevention programs. In Gogodala and Bamu communities in the Western Province, gendered mobility and sexuality intersect with ancestral narratives that form part of a wider series of Hero Tales found in the southern regions of PNG and Irian Jaya. In this paper we highlight the way these stories detail the travels and activities of female ancestors – known as Sagalu among the Bamui and Sawiya among the Gogodala. We outline the way such ancestral figures are now linked to understandings of contemporary STIs such HIV/AIDS as well as gendered mobility and sexuality more generally. Among the Bamu such links are sometimes directly asserted, with Sagalu represented as the origin if not cause of a uniquely defined variant of HIV/AIDS. Among the Gogodala, however, HIV/AIDS is predominantly understood as something external to the Gogodala and unrelated to ancestors like Sawiya. To explain this difference we note that, historically, Gogodala women have been less mobile and less transactable than their Bamu counterparts who have continued to enact unique understandings of the intersection of heterosexual marriage, gendered mobility, and illness. We argue that the mobility and sexuality of gendered ancestors is salient to understanding these contemporary enactments and their potential implications in light of the HIV epidemic in PNG.     

After the Exception: HIV/AIDS Beyond Salvation and Scarcity

Abstract: Access to treatment for HIV/AIDS became a flashpoint for global justice struggles in the late 1990s. An expanding international response, premised to a significant extent on the idea of HIV/AIDS as an exceptional global problem, has since delivered treatment, care and prevention to growing numbers of people. HIV/AIDS exceptionalism, however, has increasingly been questioned, many aspects of the response have been critiqued and donor funding has started to decline. I argue that, having been framed as an exceptional humanitarian emergency, the question of HIV/AIDS as a global problem is increasingly located within a discourse of scarcity. Tracking the growing entanglement of global HIV/AIDS relief with neoliberal governmentality and the emergence of something I term therapeutic neoliberalism, I argue that the shift from a rationality of salvation to one of administration poses new challenges for global health activism. Questioning the discourse of scarcity remains essential to an alternative global health agenda.     

Wealth alone does not buy health: Political capacity,democracy, and the spread of AIDS

Although there have been have numerous studies on AIDS documenting its mortality, its epidemiological features, and its relationship to poverty and development, few studies have systematically analyzed how political factors and policies may help curtail the spread of AIDS. In this paper I consider how a variety of domestic factors influence HIV infection rates across countries. I argue that states with higher state capacity are better able to reduce the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Moreover, I argue that while strong autocracies can implement efficient policies with fewer constraints, democracies tend to be more responsive to the needs of the population and can be more efficient in curtailing the spread of HIV/AIDS. I empirically evaluate the hypotheses using a cross-sectional time-series sample of 117 countries. The empirical results indicate that greater state capacity indeed appears to help curtail HIV/AIDS infection rates.     

Gendered Nations: Nostalgia,development and territory in Ecuador {1}

Drawing upon original substantive research, the paper argues for a consideration and analysis of the imagined geographies of gendered nations. Drawing upon Anne McClintock's work on temporality, the article proposes that a gendered spatiality underlies discourses of nationhood. Focusing particularly on national press and government reports over recent years in Ecuador, it is suggested that women appear in the national discourses around nostalgia, development and territory. While previous work has frequently noted the ambivalent position of women in the modern project of nationhood, the way in which this ambivalence is structured around place (and also significantly around 'race' and class) has not received as much attention. Geographers and feminists have not been as attuned as they might to the complex gendered imaginative geographies of the nation, and the multiple ways in which the nation constitutes gendered subjectivities.     

Transnational abductions and transnational responsibilities? The politics of ‘protecting’ female Muslim refugees abducted from Spain

This article examines evolving gendered protection narratives surrounding four ‘abduction’ cases in which Sahrawi refugee girls and young women living in Spain were ‘abducted’ by their birth-families and forcibly returned to the Algerian-based Sahrawi refugee camps between 2002 and 2009. By exploring Spanish state and civil society responses to these girls' ‘abductions’, I argue that there has been a major shift in the ways in which legitimate responsibility and authority over Sahrawi refugee women as Muslim female forced migrants have been conceptualised and invoked by Spanish actors. I therefore assess the gendered nature of competing claims of responsibility to ‘protect’ Sahrawi refugee women both within and outside of the Algerian-based Sahrawi refugee camps, exploring the motivations and implications of different actors' in/actions towards these girls and women. With Polisario claiming to represent and act as a liberal ‘state’ committed to protecting the rights of its ‘refugee-citizens’ in some instances, while denying politico-legal responsibility in others, the question of ‘who’ or ‘what’ claims the legitimate authority to ‘protect’ Sahrawi refugee women and girls is thus accentuated by such cases. By exploring shifts in Spanish public and political discourses of responsibility over the past decade on the one hand, and the accentuation of competing discourses as presented by Spanish, Polisario and Algerian actors on the other, this article highlights the complex nature and implications of the ‘intimate’ Spanish civil society networks that ensure the physical and political survival of the Sahrawi refugee camps. Ultimately, I argue that Sahrawi girls and women have become hypervisible in Spain, being conceptualised as women who ‘belong’ to the Spanish nation that in turn has a responsibility to ‘protect’ ‘our’ Sahrawi women from ‘their’ culture.     

Performing ‘Oriental’ masculinities: embodied identities among Vietnamese men in London

The young British-born Vietnamese are a largely unrecognised group in society and are generally not considered part of multiethnic Britain. A key characteristic of their racial positioning has been the very specific forms of hegemonic gendered labelling shaped by discourses of Orientalism. These Orientalist discourses subject Vietnamese men to pernicious stereotyping linked to ‘passive’ and effeminising forms of ‘subordinate’ masculinity. The ethnic and gendered dimensions of male Vietnamese youth experience are further compounded by the intersecting processes of social class and urban geographies which provide a distinct range of identity outcomes; these are particularly acute for working-class men living in highly urbanised areas. This article explores how young Vietnamese men subvert Oriental labels and stereotypes by using a range of unexpected, creative and ‘spectacular’ manipulations of hair, dress, style and comportment. I argue that Vietnamese men negotiate and perform ethnic masculinities through conscious and strategic forms of agency which entail everyday mundane forms of ‘risk’. The article draws upon primary data from in-depth, narrative interviews and participant observation.     

AIDS,speech and silence in South Africa (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Confessional technologies are frequently deployed to deal with the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In South Africa, these are most eagerly embraced by activists of the urban‐based Treatment Action Campaign, who use speech such as public confession and testimony to overcome pathos. However, fieldwork in the Bushbuckridge area of the South African lowveld shows wide resistance to direct speech about AIDS. In this article I explore reasons for such resistance. In addition to the stigma of labelling and poor treatment options, I argue that villagers feared the innate power of words such as ‘HIV’ and ‘AIDS’ to crystalize sickness, and bring fears of death into consciousness. In conclusion, I suggest that rather than insist upon confession, health providers could use speech and silence as alternative modes of dealing with AIDS.     

Separating the Men from the Boys: Masculinity and Maturity in Understandings of Shell Shock in Britain

This article examines gendered discourses of shell shock inBritain during the First World War. Located within the contextof the ideas about shell shock as a form of male hysteria putforward by Elaine Showalter, it examines the ways in which thecontemporary discourses of soldiers, medical professionals andpopular novelists used ideas of maturity and self-control tounderstand a condition that appeared to undermine both the wareffort and national masculinity. It argues that contemporaryunderstandings of authority and maturity helped to normalizeshell shock as a medical condition, thereby lessening its perceivedthreat to society.     

‘When the Bull Elephants Fight’: Kwame Nkrumah,Non-Alignment,and Pan-Africanism as an Interventionist Ideology in the Global Cold War (1957–66)

From independence onwards, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana pursued a position of positive neutrality and non-alignment. Historians claim that the Congo crisis and the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 led Nkrumah to question the viability of strict non-alignment. Newly declassified Ghanaian sources and an analysis of the components that make up the pan-African ideology, however, suggest that these events validated Nkrumah's pan-African worldview. Only a combination of continental unification and non-alignment was considered to be an effective strategy to avoid a repetition of the Congo debacle. Ghana's public diplomacy tactics switched from targeting political activists to convincing people through a vociferously anti-colonial propaganda campaign, a modification that cast doubt on the sincerity of Ghanaian neutrality at a moment when non-alignment actually began to affect Ghanaian diplomacy on all levels.     

Green,red, yellow and purple: gendering the Kurdish Question in south-east Turkey

This article discusses the role of women in the contemporary ethno-territorial struggle of Kurdish Question in Turkey. I argue that gendered development has become the primary terrain where Turkish and pro-Kurdish political groups articulate their nationalist interests. The Kürt Sorunu (Kurdish Question) – the enduring debate over the political status and rights of Turkey's Kurdish population – is Turkey's largest geopolitical challenge to date. In the last decade, Turkish government policy towards the predominantly Kurdish south-east region has shifted from military intervention to gendered and socio-economic development. Simultaneously, the popularity and growth of a formal pro-Kurdish political movement has given the campaign for Kurdish rights an institutionalized voice and stronger role in regional affairs. The primary work of both the Turkish national government and local pro-Kurdish municipality of late has focused on women. Drawing on historical analysis and participant observation of development activities, I describe the symbolic and physical role women play in the contemporary Kurdish Question. Geographically, this pointed focus on women marks a territorialization of political power upon gendered spaces of the home and neighbourhood. I describe this process of territorialization through an examination of education curriculum, neighbourhood mapping and nationalist landscapes.     

Impact of the Ryan White CARE Act on the Availability of HIV/AIDS Services

This article assesses the extent to which the availability of HIV/AIDS services in the Baltimore and Oakland eligible metropolitan areas (EMAs) increased after receipt of funding under Title I of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act. Survey data on the availability of HIV/AIDS services in each EMA were collected from samples of organizations at two points in time: 1 year before (1991) and 1 year after (1993) the Oakland and Baltimore EMAs received their first installments of CARE Act Title I funds. Cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of the data were performed to assess changes in the availability of HIV/AIDS services. The results showed that after CARE Act Title I funding became available, the availability of ambulatory medical and social support services in the Baltimore and Oakland EMAs increased. However, the way service availability increased varied significantly, reflecting differing opportunities and constraints present in each community. In Baltimore, the increase in the availability of HIV/AIDS services was due largely to the creation of new organizations that used Title I funds to provide services (system expansion). In Oakland, relatively few new organizations were created, but existing organizations added new HIV/AIDS services (service line expansion). Our data also indicated that in both EMAs the majority of HIV/AIDS organizations receiving Title I funds expanded the capacity of their existing services to meet growing demand.     

Reproduction rates in multiregion modeling systems for HIV / AIDS

The persistence of HIV/AIDS has seen a revival of academic interest in the development of modeling systems to assist understanding the population dynamics of this infection. Moreover, it has become increasingly recognized that a key component of these systems for interpreting disease prevention is their reproduction rate, which provides an indication of whether an epidemic might start in a community described by a particular set of epidemiological characteristics. The properties of these rates have been explored in detail for models of a single risk behavior but not for multiregion formats that allow for the transfer of infection between geographical units. Therefore, in this paper I derive reproduction rates for a multiregion HIV/AIDS model together with their associated critical thresholds that estimate the minimum population of susceptibles necessary for an epidemic to begin. These statistics are interpreted for a simplified global setting representing regional variations in the potential onset of HIV/AIDS. In the discussion I examine the potential applicability of these results to understanding HIV/AIDS prevention.     

Claiming and Controlling Space: Combining heterosexual fatherhood with artistic practice

This article is structured around nine short vignettes that explore the complex and embedded gendered relations of fatherhood for heterosexual male contemporary Canadian visual artists at different stages of life. In contributing to the geographical literature on work, gender, and identities, this article answers the questions: What form does hegemonic masculinity take in the visual arts? How do male artists organize and conceptualize work life and family life? What impact does fatherhood have on artistic identity construction? In formulating answers to these questions, I argue that dominant discourses of masculinity have left some men feeling illegitimate as both artists and fathers, and reliant on spatial control as a mechanism to ‘fix’ their artistic identities.     

Drought policy in Australia: gender mainstreaming or gender blindness?

Australia is experiencing a major drought, one that has devastated the landscape and people for up to ten years. This major disaster has accelerated ongoing rural restructuring and created changes in the way farm family members order and live their lives. Yet despite evidence that drought is a gendered experience, that is, that generally women and men experience and respond to drought differently, and despite a rhetorical move to gender mainstreaming in Australian policy circles, drought policy remains significantly gender blind. In this article I use the example of emergency support to poverty stricken farm families to show how agricultural departments that attend to a notional norm of family farming as a unitary male pursuit can actively discriminate against women in their efforts to preserve the farm and support their families. The article exposes gender mainstreaming as an ‘empty signifier’ that is contextually grounded and that its success is highly dependent on making these issues transparent. For gender equity efforts to reach women at local levels, I argue that gender mainstreaming requires international collaboration by gender specialists to facilitate greater attention to gender assessments by national bodies. It also requires national coalitions of gender expert units, women's organisations and academics to work together to expose culturally specific gendered issues and discriminatory outcomes.     

“Let Me Come to Tell You”: Loide Shikongo,the King,and Poetic License in Colonial Ovamboland

In this paper, I explore cultural discourse, gender and the subjectivities of local people on the frontier of empire in mid‐20th century southern Africa. Using the example of Nekwaya Loide Shikongo, a prominent woman from Ondonga in northern Namibia (the colonial “Ovamboland”), and an epic poem on the deposed King Iipumbu yaShilongo that she performed in 1953, I discuss how gender was constituted and mediated. The narrative of a remarkable woman’s life and her poetry is told to understand how gender in relation to other forms of identity was constructed in different cultural discourses. I argue that both the Christian mission’s cultural discourse and the South African colonial administration’s efforts to masculinise the “native” political authority gendered Owambo elite women whose identities had previously included “gender” only as a rather contingent component. The example of Loide Shikongo, however, also shows that many Owambo continued to pursue heterogeneous, and sometimes ambiguous, strategies in their claims to Christian models of modernity.     

Private Mark Graham,un/known soldier: not just any body can be a citizen

On 4 September 2006, Private Mark Anthony Graham, a 33-year-old black Canadian, was killed in Afghanistan in a so-called friendly fire incident. An elite athlete prior to his military career, Graham, who was born in Jamaica and grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, had also been a member of the Canadian 4 × 400-metre relay team that competed in the 1992 Olympic games. This article examines the mainstream television and print media accounts that emerged following Private Graham's death to explore the connections between race, masculinity and discourses of national belonging. For example, media narratives emphasized Graham's physicality and track and field career, rather than his status as a citizen-soldier who died in the service of his country. I argue that the prominence ascribed to Graham's corporeality signals his racial alterity, a delineation which facilitates his exclusion from white settler society. Moreover, beyond revealing the enduring legacy of Canada's history of anti-black racism, I suggest that the media's treatment of Private Mark Graham is indicative of the reconfiguration of white cultural nationalism in post-9/11 narratives of citizenship and Canadian identity and efforts to reinstate white men as the true embodiment of masculine heroism and patriotism.     

HIV/AIDS financing: a case for improving the quality and quantity of aid

There is no doubt that increasing amounts of funding are needed to provide a full package of HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and mitigation interventions to Africa. However, even the existing funding flows are posing considerable challenges at a national level. In the quest for rapid results, donors have too often chosen to alleviate the lack of local capacity by bringing in foreign technical assistance or building parallel systems for delivering commodities such as drugs that may not be sustainable over the long term once external assistance stops. Even when such interventions may be relevant, they do not address the biggest challenge, namely how to build up the capacity and the systems needed for large-scale implementation of the AIDS response. This article argues that to attain the needed efficacy in HIV/AIDS mitigation programmes, further sustainable increase in external financing is certainly required (particularly for treatment programmes), but even more important is the need to implement them.     

The politics of civil society in confronting HIV/AIDS

Civil society organizations have been at the forefront of the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. However, the contributions and the models of action they offer have remained marginalized by most governments and international organizations. This article looks at the initiatives of civil society actors. It discusses some of the political reasons and rationale behind the less than enthusiastic support for these initiatives from governments and large aid agencies. Two reasons are suggested: many politicians fear providing support and credibility to civil society organizations that might then build upon their success to question and challenge development failures; and the threat perceived by national and international bureaucrats to their own assumed expertise and solutions to the pandemic. In some cases, civil society organizations have been co-opted to fill gaps that governments themselves can not or will not address. However, even here, governments assume the credit for 'successes' in controlling HIV/AIDS.