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

[Xxxx Xxxxx Xxxxxx <xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>

Yoshie wrote:

> >One shouldn't
> >idealize the Third World & think that this type of ignorance doesn't
> >exist in Africa & elsewhere.

This is not the point I am making. Of course, gays are stereotyped in Africa
to the extent that  they are ostracized in other cultures, but there is a
nuance here. Spread of HIV virus can not be related to the stereotyping of
gays in third world countries per se. If you assume so, you think sexuality
(or gays) is the root of the problem, not the system, not matter what the
cultural common sense says gays lie at the root of the AIDS problem. Moreover,
these countries, because of high economic poverty and social devastation,
cannot even properly differentiate safe sex from unsafe sex, so they do not
even enjoy the luxury of being biased against gays in the same degree that we
straight folks have here. Given that gays and straights are both vulnerable to
AIDS equally (not one or the other as cultural stereotypes endorse), we should
be more concerned with "Social Darwinism" stereotyping rearticulated as
"modernization ideology" by imperialist transitional elites in the third
world: That gays are degenerate, that blacks are backward, that African
culture is inherently reactionary, that african people are underdeveloped,
belong to the same Social Darwism crap imposed on and then internalized by
third world countries during their encounter with imperialist modernization.
Remember that this stereotyping has also profound affects on African gay
people who are living in many countries below poverty line and constitute the
poor class. (We can not  measure the exploitation of african gay people on
equal grounds with the exploitation of american gays who have established a
more secure position in advanced industrialized countries than their lovers
elsewhere. They don't care either, btw, as far as I can tell!)


anyway,  I am not an expert on sexuality.


--

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



____________NetZero Free Internet Access and Email_________
Download Now     http://www.netzero.net/download/index.html
Request a CDROM  1-800-333-3633
___________________________________________________________