Gender, Generation, and HIV in Rural South Africa: Implications of Rights and Equality

Abstract:

Twenty years into democracy and roughly thirty years into the HIV/AIDS epidemic, South Africa offers stark evidence that health is inseparable from social context.  Few nations grapple with such stark inequities, and this is linked both with who is most affected by HIV, and how effectively they are able to cope. Successfully achieving better health entails mitigating these various inequities, and this is contingent on understanding the cultural meanings and conceptual categories that shape inequality in South Africa today. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the rural Eastern Cape, this talk addresses this issue by examining how gender is understood, with a focus on how gender difference is lived and reproduced in daily life. This discussion is grounded in debates about gender violence, human rights, and equality, and uses the example of bride abduction to show how inequality is integral to what gender, generation, and sexuality mean in the rural Eastern Cape.  Interventions that aim to reduce rates of HIV transmission in this region are unlikely to succeed unless they address how inequality is intrinsic to gender difference in the rural Eastern Cape today.

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