ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a critical and comprehensive assessment of the relationship between gender, inequality and vulnerability to HIV infection and AIDS. The normative aspiration of the book is to stress the enormity and complexity of the relationship between gender inequalities, sexuality and HIV and AIDS, and the impact this has on the lives of affected and infected people, as well as on our work as development practitioners, academics, and activists. The epidemiological statistics show that today women are more vulnerable to HIV than men for a variety of biological and social reasons that will be discussed in this introduction and throughout the book. The book draws on research carried out in the US, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa; we will first give a short overview of the genealogy of HIV and comparative epidemiological trajectories.
