Re: A Prostitute Community's Response to Aids in Urban Senegal

[Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx <xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> Africa Today 46.2 (1999) 138-140
>
> >Book Review
>
> >Renaud, Michelle Lewis. 1997. Women at the Crossroads: A Prostitute
> >Community's Response to Aids in Urban Senegal. Amsterdam: Gordon >and
> >Breach Publishers. 172 pp. $21.00 (paper).
>
> >Instead of entering the field with a rigid, preconceived research
> >question, Renaud expresses the goals of wanting her involvement to
> >respond directly to the needs of policy makers, local researchers,
> >and women at risk for contracting HIV. She disbands with her original
> >proposal of contributing to AIDS research among non-prostitute
> >Senegalese women in favor of focusing on those most at
> >risk--prostitutes in Kaolack, which is the city with the highest rate
> >of infection. Renaud states that her revised project was to assess
> >the ability of the local clinic's AIDS program to educate the
> >prostitutes and to understand how cultural factors affected the
> >transmission of HIV. In practice, she provides little information as
> >to the clinic's ability to educate but reveals much about the stories
> >of individual women and her interactions with them as a Western
> >researcher.
>

While "local community groups" may help empower (educate) third world
women in issues related to AIDS, they suggest very little evidence in
changing the material circumstances that make women vulnerable to AIDS.
Many of these researchers, such as the author herself, lack any serious
understanding of global capitalism as political economy, for example,
when she suggests to "understand how cultural factors affected the
transmission of HIV". Putting culture as the root of the problem is
nothing but the most dangerous form of Social Darwinism we can ever see
on the planet, wrapped in a white/bourgeois feminist rhetoric; it assumes
that African people have certain cultures that make them vulnerable to
certain diseases. Different people, difference cultures--here you have
racism; "backward races in need of reform", in other words.  Robinson
Williamson's book _Promoting Poliarchy_ is a  very good starting point to
asses how the US in fact promotes local community activism (through NGOs
in the third world in the name of sustainable human development and
population control programs backed by the IMF and the World Bank) as a
new strategy of neo-colonialism and political control over the third
world people. From a Gramscian historical materialist perspective,
Robinson argues that these groups, rather than constituting a major
threat to the capitalist system, in fact articulate and reaffirm the
transitional elite point of view, that is, the "modernization"
perspective: "more money, more education , more enlightenment of the
backward races" rhetoric.  I sent a long review of the book to the list
written by comrade Andy Wayne Austin (that well researched, brilliant
thinker, btw), which must be in the archives of the list.


Xxxx








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Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222



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