ABSTRACT
HIV/AIDS has widely come to be seen as a threat to human, national and international security. Yet as critical scholarship on the securitization has argued, this can lead to a politics of blame in which certain groups or individuals come to be seen as representing a threat to others. Analyses of the ways in which heterosexual men have been treated in the global health discourse has demonstrated that such a politics of blame is often (explicitly or implicitly) in evidence. Three particular critiques have emerged: i)men are frequently viewed as a cause of ‘the AIDS problem’ in sub-Saharan Africa but written out as part of the ‘solution’; ii) that underpinning such an understanding are assumptions about a supposed ‘African sexuality’ which fuels the epidemic; and iii) that the policy responses to the threat posed by men focuses on addressing individual ‘problematic’ male behaviours rather than engaging with the structural issues that affect not only women, but also men (albeit in different ways and to different extents). In this chapter, I examine whether these critiques apply to the declared strategies of four of the leading global AIDS institutions. I argue that there is no explicit evidence of the kinds of explicitly racialized assumptions about ‘African sexuality’ that have been seen in previous eras, but that there continues to be a focus on heterosexual men as part of the AIDS problem rather than part of the solution, and a continued failure to address the various ways in which men as well as women can be subject to structural violence resulting from a range of different sectionalities (for example, of class, ethnicity, or social status). It is argued that a simplistic blaming of heterosexual men risks disengaging those men, and missing out on opportunities to involve them in positive response efforts that could benefit the human security of all people, regardless of their gender.
