51. Engendering care: HIV, humanitarian assistance in Africa and the reproduction of gender stereotypes
- Author
-
Deborah Mindry
- Subjects
Adult ,Male ,Health (social science) ,Sexual Behavior ,media_common.quotation_subject ,HIV Infections ,Context (language use) ,Economic Justice ,Article ,Feminism ,South Africa ,Catchment Area, Health ,Health care ,Humans ,Sociology ,media_common ,Stereotyping ,business.industry ,Humanitarian aid ,Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health ,Gender studies ,Helping Behavior ,Altruism ,Masculinity ,Development aid ,Female ,Construct (philosophy) ,business - Abstract
This paper takes as starting point research conducted in Durban, South Africa to unravel the complexities of care ethics in the context of humanitarian aid. It investigates how the gendering of care shapes humanitarian aid in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemics in Africa constructing an image of “virile” and “violent” African masculinity. Humanitarian organizations construct imagined relations of caring invoking notions of a shared humanity as informing the imperative to facilitate change. This paper draws on varied examples of research and NGO activity to illustrate how these relations of care are gendered. Humanitarian interventions which invoke universalizing conceptions of need could instead draw on feminist care ethics that seeks to balance rights, justice and care in ways that attend to the webs of relationships through which specific lived realities are shaped. Essentialising, feminized discourses on care result in a skewed analysis of international crises that invariably invoke women (and children) as victims in need of care and, at best, ignore the lived experiences of men, and at worst, cast men as virile and violent vectors of disease and social disorder.
- Published
- 2010