Sexually Transmitted Diseases (Current Controversies) (Contemporary issues companion)
Examines the possible source of HIV, analyzing a number of theories concerning its origins and investigating current scientific inquiries into HIV, AIDS, and the search for a cure.
Heterosexual Africa? The History of an idea from the age of exploration to the age of AIDS explores the historical processes by which a singular, heterosexual identity for Africa was constructed. Epprecht argues that Africans, just like people all over the world, have always had a range of sexualities and sexual identities. Heterosexual Africa? aims to understand an enduring stereotype about Africa and Africans. It asks how Africa came to be defined as a "homosexual-free zone" during the colonia...
We Are Having This Conversation Now
by Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr
Drama for Life, University of the Witwatersrand, aims "to enhance the capacity of young people, theatre practitioners and their communities to take responsibility for the quality of their lives in the context of HIV and AIDS in Africa. We achieve this through participatory and experiential drama and theatre that is appropriate to current social realities but draws on the rich indigenous knowledge of African communities." Collected here is a representative set of research essays written to facili...
Broadcasting the Pandemic tells the story of a South African television show, Beat It! Created during the aspirational years of the political transaction in which the broadcast media were posted to democratise the airwaves, Beat It! was first screened on public television in 1999 and developed into one of the most powerful health education initiatives in contemporary history. Broadcasting the Pandemic traces the show’s evolution, exploring how Beat It! used the medium of television to inform its...
The revelation of being HIV positive continues to be a discourse fraught with meaning. In Infecting the Treatment: Being an HIV-Positive Analyst, Gilbert Cole offers an intimate and deeply insightful examination of disclosure of his HIV seropositivity on his analytic sense of self and on his clinical work with patients. Cole begins his journey of discovery by meditating on the meanings that being HIV positive have had for him, and by situating these personal meanings within the multiple meanings...
In 1986, 26-year old Ruth visits a friend at the hospital when she notices that the door to one of the hospital rooms is painted red. She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who would tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she's done, word spreads in the community that...