Gender Mainstreaming in HIV/AIDS

Seminar proceedings

The impact of gender in fuelling HIV/AIDS has become a fundamental aspect of addressing the pandemic. It is clear that gender plays a pivotal role in how women and men respond to counselling, testing, treatment, care and prevention programmes.

Women's property and inheritance rights are recognised in international law and in a growing number of countries worldwide, yet women in many developing countries do not have the right to own or inherit property. At the same time, women are increasingly heading up households and are in critical need of land and property for economic security, particularly in the context of the AIDS epidemic - in fact, secure property rights are believed to be a factor in reducing women's risk of contracting HIV and in protecting them from domestic violence.

Baba: Men and Fatherhood in South Africa provides answers to some of the most difficult questions about fatherhood in South Africa: Who is a father? What does it mean to be a father? Is it important for fathers to do more for children in a world that assumes that mothers take the primary parenting role? Do different people understand fatherhood in different ways? What evidence is there of new fatherhood styles emerging in South Africa?

People often wear their causes on their t-shirts, in their choice of traditional attire or other garments, or by way of specific costumes, pieces of jewellery or particular accessories. In Was it something I wore? Dress; identity; materiality, the contributors explore the construction and performance of personal and social identities. The essays point to the significance of dress as material culture in social science research not only in their content but also in their focus on a variety of methodologies including memory work, visual studies, autoethnography, object biographies and other forms of textual analysis.