Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The paper will examine the ways in which notions of ´female pollution´ as a source of ´male illness´, and the social relations in which these have been embedded, are being transformed in attempts to articulate a local perception of the AIDS pandemic in a rural region in South Africa.

Paper long abstract

Several recent studies focussing on southern African societies, including my own conducted in former Venda, South Africa, have identified an ethnomedical model of HIV/AIDS sexual transmission which has constructed women who have used contraceptives and/or undergone abortion as ´givers´ of disease to men as ´recipients´. In this paper I will interrogate this model as to the ways in which it has mobilized constructs of difference - of male/female and ´traditional healing´/biomedicine - to articulate and act upon anxieties over transformations of gendered authority structures and cultural identity in the post-apartheid, neo-liberal context. One of the suggestions of this paper is that local perceptions of ´AIDS prevention´ following from the model and centring on controlling women's engagement with biomedical technologies, have provided an arena in which contestations over women's increasing autonomy and (re)productions of a ´Venda medical tradition´ have taken place in the same language of embodied signs and disease aetiologies.