ABSTRACT
Katya Burns focuses on the double binds that Japan faced when it took on the leadership role to combat HIV/AIDS by creating the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.Despite its long-term commitment to public health and history of establishing hospitals in the developing world, Japan was unable to transcend the problems that plagued other donors and overdetermined standard global solutions that targeted stigmatized groups as the primary routes for transmission. Important opportunities were missed to develop alternative programming for young married women in their childbearing years, a key conduit for the rapidly escalating transmission of HIV/ AIDS to the general public in South and Southeast Asia.Burns argues that the elusive breakthrough in this instance would involve a gendered grammar of intervention to challenge the social, economic, and family factors that isolate and disempower these women in particular, limiting their access to health information and threatening them with social death after their husbands succumb to HIV/AIDS and they themselves are discovered to be HIV-positive.
