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Given the imperatives of HIV and gender equality, South African researchers have foregrounded transactional sex as a common practice that contributes to unsafe and inequitable sexual practices. This paper presents findings from a qualitative study with a group of students at a South African university, drawing on narratives that speak to the dynamics of reportedly widespread transactional sex on campus. Since many of these relationships are inscribed within unequal power dynamics across the urban-rural and local-‘foreigner’ divides, and across differences of wealth, age and status that intersect with gender in multiple, complex ways, it is argued that these may be exacerbating unsafe and coercive sexual practices among this group of young people. The paper further argues for a critical, reflexive position on transactional sex, pointing to the way in which participants articulate a binaristic response to transactional relationships that simultaneously serves to reproduce a silencing of a discourse on female sexual desires, alongside a simplistic and deterministic picture of masculinity underpinned by the male sexual drive discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging men in work towards gender equality is a critical aspect of gender and development. However, there are few documented grassroots-level approaches to undertaking such work. This paper argues that context specific stresses on local constructions of masculinity, such as unemployment, poverty and high HIV prevalence, may provide useful entry points for work with men towards gender equality. While these stresses may act to undermine men's ability to 'achieve' the requirements of traditional constructions of masculinity, particularly the role of men as providers, they simultaneously create spaces for change. In this research, land-use provided a basis from which to engage with a group of older men (45-75 years) around a range of issues, including HIV and AIDS and health. Increases in levels of communication around HIV, household resources and health are used as indicative of the men's moves towards gender-equal behaviour. The paper argues that this was achieved by supporting positive aspects of traditional masculine identities, particularly the role of men as breadwinners, in a social and economic context where these roles are threatened or placed under pressure, while simultaneously working around 'sensitive' issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the manifestation of HIV-related stigma in seven- and eight-year-old white South African children's responses to HIV and AIDS. Drawing from elements of ethnographic and interview data, it shows how young children's responses to HIV and AIDS are inscribed within popular accounts of contagion and articulate gendered, sexual, raced and classed discourses in South Africa. Rejecting static accounts of stigma, the paper shows how children resist and confirm power inequalities involving intense self-regulation as well as inscribing within discourses of care and concern for others infected with HIV and AIDS. The findings have implications for scaling up educational efforts to address awareness of HIV and AIDS and stigma, but also to build on positive insights that young children demonstrate with regard to the disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ritual male circumcision is among the most secretive and sacred of rites practiced by the Xhosa of South Africa. Recently, the alarming rate of death and injury among initiates has led to the spotlight of media attention and government regulation being focused on traditional circumcision. While many of the physical components of the ritual have been little altered by the centuries, its cultural and social meanings have not remained unchanged. This paper attempts to understand how some of these cultural and social meanings have shifted, particularly with respect to attitudes towards sex and the role that circumcision schools traditionally played in the sexual socialisation of Xhosa youth. Ritual circumcision is often defended on the basis of its usefulness as a mechanism for the maintenance of social order, particularly in relation to the perceived crisis in youth sexuality marked by extremely high levels of gender-based violence as well as HIV infection. However, the paper suggests two key ways in which traditional Xhosa circumcision has changed. These include the erosion of the role which circumcision schools once played in the sexual socialisation of young men and the emergence of the idea that initiation gives men the unlimited and unquestionable right to access to sex rather than marking the point at which sexual responsibility and restraint is introduced into the lifestyle of young men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary objective in this study was to explore what HIV and AIDS mean to seven- and eight-year-old children in South Africa and how sexual and gender dynamics are embedded within these meanings. Against representations that associate young children with innocence, the paper argues for a more capacious view of young children as sexual and gendered agents with the ability to exercise their rights. In contrast to research that addresses children as relatively passive desexualised beings, focusing on their dependence on adults, their innocence and their need for protection, this paper examines how HIV and AIDS are constructed and negotiated by young people. It views children not simply in terms of their need for sexual rights but as potentially active participants in the negotiation of their rights. Viewing children's rights as highly contested, the notion that young children have sexual rights opens up possibilities for children (including those from marginalised groups) to talk about their concerns and pleasures, fears and hopes, as well as issues relating to sexual rights and resistances. By working creatively with teachers, it may be possible to broaden young children's knowledge of HIV and AIDS and sexuality within a more supportive environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the approaches heterosexual men and women in South Africa use to engage their partners in discussions of HIV and risk factors in their relationships. These strategies entail balancing the risks of infection while managing the challenges of maintaining a relationship. In a context in which there is a great deal of insecurity in relationships it is especially challenging to discuss HIV risks with partners. Our findings reveal that concerns about children or the desire to have children provided a legitimate basis for discussing HIV risk with partners. The focus of these discussions is on the future for their children. Research in South Africa should attend to men's and women's desires to have and to raise children. HIV prevention and treatment programmes can capitalise on concerns regarding children, and the future of the family, to engage men and women in discussing mutually acceptable strategies for preventing infection and ensuring safe conception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore South African Life Orientation teachers' perception and practice of teaching HIV/AIDS and sexuality in a cultural perspective. We aim to investigate how teachers respond to perceived cultural differences between the local community and the content of their teaching. Data were collected through interviews with teachers who taught students in grades 8 or 9 in public high schools. The teachers expressed differing viewpoints regarding the rationale for teaching about HIV/AIDS and sexuality. Many teachers saw teaching these topics as a response to declining moral standards, while others suggested that they were teaching issues that parents failed to address. The teachers were more concerned about young people's sexual behaviour than about preventing HIV/AIDS. They perceived that cultural contradictions between what was taught and local cultural values were an issue to which they needed to respond, although they differed in terms of how to respond. Some took an adaptive approach to try to avoid conflicts, while others claimed the moral neutrality of their teaching. Teaching about sexuality was perceived to be challenging in terms of language and communication norms. Teaching about HIV/AIDS was perceived as challenging because teachers often needed to convince students about the reality of AIDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from ethnographic, archival and secondary research, this article examines multiple-sexual partners in historical perspective in KwaZulu-Natal, a South Africa province where one in three people are thought to be HIV positive. Research on masculinities, multiple-partners, and AIDS has been predominantly directed towards the present day. This paper stresses the importance of unraveling the antecedents of contemporary masculinities particularly the gendered cultural politics through which they have been produced. Arguing against dominant conceptions of African masculinity as being innate or static, it charts the rise and fall of the isoka , the Zulu man with multiple-sexual partners, over the last century. Showing how the isoka developed through changing conditions occasioned by capitalism, migrant labour and Christianity, it contends that an important turning point took place from the 1970s when high unemployment threatened previous expressions of manliness, notably marriage, setting up an independent household and becoming umnumzana (a household head). The high value placed on men seeking multiple-partners increasingly filled the void left by men's inability to become men through previous means. Turning to the contemporary period, the article argues that, shaken by the huge AIDS deaths, men are betraying increasing doubts about the isoka masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South Africa, as elsewhere in the world, responses to HIV and AIDS have been accompanied by calls to ‘break the silence’ and to openly talk about aspects of intimate life, otherwise considered private. These calls have been followed by the production of new bodies of knowledge about sex, and projections of transparent sexualities. In this context, the concept of counselling has taken on particular significance in terms of re-conceptualising diverse institutional sites as places of education, advice giving and moral inculcation with a view toward behavioural change. In this paper, I trace a series of processes and practices of negotiation whereby in a big church in the city of Cape Town sexuality has been rendered an object of knowledgeability and inquiry. The same processes work as conditions of possibility for the emergence of counselling practices by facilitating the circulation of concepts such as ‘responsible relationships’, ‘responsible choices’ and so on through the sites of faith-based health activism. Adopted from public health discourse, but inflected by religious idioms, these concepts allowed for the dissemination of new vocabularies of sex in which counselling is construed as a key mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]