ABSTRACT
Marie Fox and Michael Thomson highlight some of the considerations that scholars and practitioners must take into account when advocating male circumcision as an HIV/AIDS prevention measure. In particular, their social justice approach highlights overlooked stakeholder groups whose voices must be included in any discussion of HIV/AIDS prevention and male circumcision in particular. The social justice framework adopted by Fox and Thomson requires analysis of the mutually reinforcing nature of inequalities and the way that patterns of disadvantage are structured; it alerts us to the moral significance of these inequalities. It is therefore clear that a social justice approach to the HIV/AIDS crisis will foreground the role of gender inequalities in the spread of the virus and the perpetuation of disadvantage for marginalized groups. Given development’s tendency to imagine women in relation to their reproductivity, it is little wonder that women emerged in the HIV/AIDS discourses as potential transmitters of the virus to male partners or to their unborn children.
