EnGendering AIDS

Deconstructing Sex, Text and Epidemic

In an original and stimulating analysis of gender and AIDS, Tamsin Wilton assesses safer sex health promotion and health education discourse, and considers their unintended consequences for the cultural construction of gender and sexuality. Taking a queer/feminist constructionist position, she links issues of power, gender, sexuality and nationalism to offer a sound theoretical foundation for an effective and radical HIV/AIDS health promotion strategy.

EnGendering AIDS draws on safer sex materials from the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Scandinavia, and sets current practice against the historical context of VD/STD education, dissecting the role played by STDs in the cultural construction of gender. Wilton debates the meanings that erotic minorities read into bodies and desires, and how these have been transformed by AIDS, and suggests a new model of pornography that disengages the sexually explicit and/or erotically arousing from gendered power relations.