EnGendering AIDS: Deconstructing Sex, Text and Epidemic »

Wilton, Tamsin (Univ of the West of England)

In an original and stimulating analysis of gender and AIDS, Tamsin Wilton assesses safer sex health promotion and health education discourse and considers their unintended consequences for the cultural construction of gender and sexuality. Taking a queer/feminist constructionist position, she links issues of power, gender, sexuality, and nationalism in an attempt to offer a sound theoretical foundation for an effective and radical HIV/AIDS health promotion strategy. EnGendering AIDS draws on safer sex materials from the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Scandinavia and sets current practice against the historical context of VD/STD education, dissecting the role played by STDs in the cultural construction of gender. Wilton debates the meanings that erotic minorities read into bodies and desires, and how these have been transformed by AIDS, and suggests a new model of pornography that disengages the sexually explicit and/or erotically arousing from gendered power relations. EnGendering AIDS suggests a radically innovative approach to the development of effective safer sex promotional strategies based on new thinking in health promotion and on the insights of both radical feminism and queer theory. This book will be of interest to professionals in health promotion and health education, and also to students and academics in women's studies, gender studies, lesbian and gay studies, sexuality, cultural studies, media studies, social policy, and medical sociology.