ABSTRACT
Our focus on the potential for harnessing women’s organisational capacities around campaigns of protection and support highlights contradictions which the pandemic poses. Women are a source of strength and the backbone of both public sector and community-based initiatives aimed at care and protection (Whelan, 1999). In investigating how the energy, expertise and traditions of mutual support among women can contribute to the struggle against AIDS, we have drawn on Ulin’s observation that:
The solidarity of women in rural African communities may be their greatest source of strength for coping with the AIDS epidemic…
(Ulin, 1992:64)
However, AIDS also exposes women’s vulnerability. Both men and women are affected by AIDS, but women particularly so, given how gender relations configure with sexual behaviour and economic security. Gender relations not only underlie women’s particular vulnerability; they also inhibit women’s attempts to protect themselves and their families. If interventions around AIDS are to be effective, they must address the factors which drive the epidemic. Such factors are deepseated and intransigent, embedded in the very power relations which define male and female roles and positions, both in intimate relations or the wider society. Women (and men) need protection now and cannot wait for deep structural changes. However, we argue that it is crucial for short term interventions to be consistent
with and not contradict more long term objectives, so that they contribute to rather than inadvertently reinforce those power relations which drive the epidemic. The question is how far women’s organisations can contribute to the struggle against AIDS along these lines.
