ABSTRACT
At an early stage of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, male circumcision was mooted as a possible biomedical response to the public health crisis it generated (Fink 1989, Moses et al. 1994, Cardwell and Cardwell 1996). Indeed, some advocates promoted the procedure as a ‘natural condom’ (Fink 1989). Over time the purported relationship between circumcision status and HIV status has been an increasing focus for scientific enquiry. A key aim of this chapter is to contextualize and problematize the increasingly influential public health discourses that posit circumcision as a key prevention technology in the ‘war’ on HIV/AIDS in subSaharan Africa (Waldby 1996). We suggest that these discourses need to be read against a historical backdrop of attempts to use medicine to manage the bodies of African and African-American men. We are influenced in this project by scholars who have traced the ways in which the bodies of black men, women and children have been (mis)used in medical research (Duh 1991, Washington 2008), and also, more generally, how they have been subjected to oppressive medical regulation rooted in negative stereotypes of black sexuality. Often this results in the application of different standards of consent to bodily interventions (Roberts 1997). In our contribution to this volume we seek to explore the implications of these public health policies for managing the sexuality of the men and boys who are most directly affected by pro-circumcision policies, but we also examine the significant implications of these policies for women’s health, an issue that is often neglected when public health policies target the male body.
