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

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Xxxx:

>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.

Cultural factors are *not* the root cause (btw, neither the review
nor the book reviewed claims that they are), but they do make *some
difference* in survival.  Do you recall that when symptoms of AIDS
were first being discovered in the West, they were popularly called
"gay cancer," and many people chalked up AIDS to "gay lifestyle,"
recreational drug use, etc.?  People with AIDS were often ostracized,
and some conservatives were calling for the quarantine of people with
AIDS.  It is thanks to much efforts of GLBT, sex ed, & other
activists that this type of ignorance, homophobia, & discrimination
has become somewhat declined.  There is *no denying* that cultural
factors such as ignorance affect the transmission of AIDS.  For
instance, if you believe it is only homosexuals who get AIDS, you end
up believing that heterosexuals are safe.  Thus you can rationalize
your avoidance of safe sex if you are straight.  One shouldn't
idealize the Third World & think that this type of ignorance doesn't
exist in Africa & elsewhere.  Even people who are very well educated
can be (willfully?) ignorant -- for instance, South Africa's Thabo
Mbeki, who regrettably provided distraction from needs for safe sex
education, needle exchange, etc. by questioning whether AIDS is
caused by HIV.

The devastating spread of AIDS cannot be due to the existence of the
virus alone, of course.  Poverty, lack of access to free health care,
prohibitive prices of drugs dictated by pharmaceutical companies,
etc. are responsible for the present state of affairs.  We need the
fundamental transformation of social relations that would abolish the
material conditions that turned curable, preventable, or manageable
diseases into lethal ones.  However, in the meantime (since such
transformation won't come tomorrow), we must educate ourselves & undo
ignorance to the extent we can.  "Local community groups" of the kind
mentioned in the review are not final answers, but they are vastly
preferable to police repression of prostitutes & a romantic notion
that the problem of ignorance, denial, etc. does not exist (for it
exists -- and not just among the poor in poor nations!).  Knowledge
is not power, but it helps sometimes.

Yoshie