Ironies of Subordination: Ambivalences of Gender in Religious AIDS Interventions in South Africa

This article is based on a presentation given at the conference “Mixing Morals and Money: Gender and Faith-based Development” at the Department of International Development, Oxford University, 21–22 September 2007. For stimulating and critical discussions of earlier versions of this text I would like to thank Deborah Fahy Bryceson (Glasgow), Maria Jaschok (Oxford) as well as two anonymous reviewers. The field research period in South Africa as well my entire PhD project from which this article emerges were generously funded by Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst, Germany.

Abstract

Situated at the interface between the sociology of religion and gender studies, this article explores the complex relationships between faith-based activities and gendered arrangements of domination in the context of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. It argues that the linkages between religion and gender work in two directions: existing gender relations affect the shape of religious AIDS interventions just as these interventions influence dominant models of femininity and masculinity, and provide alternative models. Drawing on two case studies from the fields of sexual education and AIDS support, the article explains how emerging religious spaces mediate the ways in which female subordination is partially transformed into a gendered asset in successfully managing everyday life in an environment of bio-social risks.

Notes

This article is based on a presentation given at the conference “Mixing Morals and Money: Gender and Faith-based Development” at the Department of International Development, Oxford University, 21–22 September 2007. For stimulating and critical discussions of earlier versions of this text I would like to thank Deborah Fahy Bryceson (Glasgow), Maria Jaschok (Oxford) as well as two anonymous reviewers. The field research period in South Africa as well my entire PhD project from which this article emerges were generously funded by Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst, Germany.

¹ ART suppresses the reproduction of the virus potentially below levels that are diagnostically traceable without stopping it completely. In contrast to the history of prevention programmes, South African mission churches were pioneers in implementing ART programmes in their hospitals and in the scaling-up of services surrounding treatment, such as counselling and testing, medical education and care. Treatment programmes implemented by the Catholic Church in the province of KwaZulu Natal were so successful that the government even decided to refer patients from public clinics to them and supply them with drugs.

² In South Africa, the increasing age gap between women and men as sexual partners has contributed to the fact that among the younger cohorts infection rates for girls are two to three times higher than for boys of the same age group (Harrison et al., 2001; Hallman, 2005). For a more detailed assessment of the literature on HIV/AIDS and sexual dynamics in South Africa, see Burchardt (2007a).

³ Nevertheless, there are signs of change. Mark Hunter (2004, p. 123) has commented: “Day by day, funeral by funeral, AIDS bears harder down on the isoka masculinity… some of the most virile, popular, and independent bodies are steadily transformed into diseased and dependent skeletons”. Iliffe (2007, p. 46) describes the Zulu concept of isoka as “the handsome, popular, and irresponsible hero who displayed his masculinity, in one of the few ways available in a township, by having penetrative sex with girlfriends whom he could not afford to marry”.

⁴ There has been a heated debate about the status of poverty as an explanatory variable for epidemiological patterns and sexual practice within social science research on AIDS. For a summary, see Stillwaggon (2003); on social inequality and AIDS in South Africa, see Gilbert & Walker (2002).

⁵ For an analysis of patterns of blame as a result of cultural constructions of the female body, see Ingstad (1990) and Leclerc-Madlala (2001a). Obbo (1993) and Haram (1996) provide evidence for prevailing cultural logics of women-to-men one-way-transmission of the HIV virus in other African countries. For a theoretical argument on blame as a societal reaction to risk, see Douglas (1992).

⁶ When women are sick with full-blown AIDS, the burden of care is then usually passed on not to the husband but to other women within the extended family or to women from neighbourhood networks.

⁷ On attempts by women to distance themselves from negative stereotypes through deploying “rhetorics of the moral self”, see Sobo (1997).

⁸ For an analysis of experiences of HIV/AIDS and biographical uncertainties, see Burchardt (2010).

⁹ All names in this article, except for Monwabisi, have been changed.

¹⁰ For a general account on South African life-skills education, see James (2002).

¹¹ Think Twice began its operations in 1998 and claims to have reached a total of 1476 learners through all of their programmes.

¹² Nevertheless, in the interviews Think Twice educators frequently complained about having too little time for getting their messages across, fearing that the information learners receive outside the class room could easily override their own efforts.

¹³ This, however, is an aspect in which the discourses of educators and learners sharply diverge. While for the educators the negative consequences of sex clearly outweigh the pleasures, the learners’ comparatively positive associations of sexuality derive from the positive connotations of pleasure. It is also in the context of discussions about the consequences of sex, namely in relation to the question as to how sex affects people physically and socially, that resistance to the rational model of sexuality surfaces again. With regard to bodily aspects in situations of intimacy, one of the girls remarked: “You just feel it, your blood is boiling and then something must be finished. You don't think when you get horny … So you keep on doing it” (on associations of sexual activity with blood within Southern African culture, see Bähre, 2002).

¹⁴ On the phenomenon of information fatigue, see also Levine & Ross (2002, p. 96).

¹⁵ For a similar argument on sexual discourse in Ghanaian Pentecostalism, see Soothill (2007).

¹⁶ I use the term “nominal Christians” in order to distinguish those who consider themselves as Christians but prioritize other forms of cultural belonging from firm believers who also refer to themselves through religious identification in everyday discourse through phrases such as “we, as Christians …” I employ this distinction for heuristic purposes without claiming that it captures the existing variety of religious belonging and belief.

¹⁷ The South African-based Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) is one of the most influential social movement organizations dedicated to fighting AIDS worldwide. TAC's activism is seen as key to the initiation of ART programmes through the public health sector. Especially when the the South African government was still highly sceptical of biomedical solutions for AIDS, TAC activists tirelessly mobilized through a mix of street politics and legal action for access to these life-saving drugs free of cost (see Friedman & Mottiar, 2006).

¹⁸ For a discussion on “Kululeka” as a laboratory for the formation of new masculinities, see Robins (2006).

¹⁹ On issues of AIDS support for HIV-positive mothers in the township of Nyanga, see Besteman (2008, p. 221ff).

²⁰ It is important to note that the kind of support that support groups are meant to provide is not always self-evident. During an HIV/AIDS workshop in Queenstown in the Eastern Cape Province, one local activist complained: “We have tried very hard but we don't have … all the information we need about how to run a support group and what a support group is supposed to do. I mean, we just sit down and we don't do nothing [sic] because we don't know”. Support groups not only pass on skills to their members, they also require skills to be run and managed.

²¹ It is obviously ironic that a predominantly female support group was founded by a man. It was hard to imagine that conversations about male/female relations could unfold in the presence of men with whom female members had a less trustful relationship than with Monwabisi himself. In this case, much of the trust also originated from shared faith. In the neighbourhood, people would in fact often admiringly refer to Monwabisi as “a man of faith”.

²² For a more comprehensive sociological discussion on HIV/AIDS support groups as a means of managing risks and uncertainties through solidarity, see Burchardt (2007b).

²³ For broader accounts on the centrality of the responsibility for care to female gender roles and constructions of morally upright womanhood, and on the ways social change affects the organization of care, and—by extension—the ways in which women cope with cultural definitions of legitimate femininity, see Hochschild (2000) and Hochschild & Ehrenreich (2003).

²⁴ The groups are also places where women—in and through collective negotiations—bestow meaning to the otherwise often abstract and hardly intelligible pieces of biomedical information they are given at the clinics. They are arenas for the lay appropriation of modern science, for “lay expertification”, and thus in a more generic sense for genuine attempts to grapple with modernity (see Burchardt, 2007b).

²⁵ In The Hearts of Men, Barbara Ehrenreich (1983) has perceptively argued that in modern societies women's access to formal labour markets invariably began in fields of work that could somehow be construed in analogy to domestic occupations and the skills those require.

²⁶ In general, one often hears men dismissing the idea of support groups as “talk shops”. Besides, we must take into account that within the support groups sharing private and personal information is not only a possibility; it is also established as a normative expectation. Again, this expectation effectively works to keep men at a distance from support groups; for intimacy is less valued in the public spaces where men feel “at home”.