Gender, Sexuality and HIV

This week (Week 5) the readings focused on issues of HIV in relationship to youth, gender and sexuality.  Admittedly, for me this was a difficult week of readings.  Ideally, discussions of gender and sexuality need to be framed by giving the students a set of terms, readings, and initial ideas.  Given that none of the students are Women's Studies majors, very few of them would have had exposure to these ideas in their regular coursework.

Therefore in some way it was a challenge.  Before we can really discuss issues like heteronormativity, gender relations, and sexuality it is ideally necessary to introduce these concepts, explain their meanings and their applicability in terms and with examples that might be familiar to students in their everyday practice.  Certainly, if I had the opportunity to teach the class again, I would have provided more basic women's studies readings of this nature in order to set the tone for the discussion.  After that, then it is possible to have a discussion about heteronormativity in relation to HIV prevention and education.

That being said though I felt the students did a good job with the amount of material and the difficulty of the material presented to them.  In the aggregate, I provided this week's readings so that students could get more of a sense of the structural and systemic issues that effect HIV prevention.

What are the reasons why women might be more vulnerable to HIV infection beyond simple biology? How do societies structured by patriarchy contribute to increased risk of infection? How is poverty feminized and racialized in ways that expose particular groups of women (both in the developing world and in the United States) to disease?  How do the same mechanisms of patriarchy and heteronormativity silence and add stigma to both women and lgbti (lesbian gay bisexual transgender and intersex) individuals, and how does this present additional challenges to tackling the epidemic in the African and U.S. contexts?  How do these same mechanisms conspire to marginalize and de-prioritize the voices of youth?

I hope that the readings were an opening to help students begin to engage the complex  issues of sexuality as culturally constructed, gender roles and expectations as culturally mandated and potentially coercive and, heteronormativity and patriarchy as mechanisms that add to and intersect with other forms of structural inequalities such as race and class.  What I also hope that students were able to learn from of the readings was that these mechanisms of gender inequality also have a negative effect on men as well.  That is gender expectations and norms often have the effect of hurting men as much as they hurt women.