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and this is particularly relevant to this study to better understand the impact of HIV/AIDS on affected households and the roles which different members of the households take up when a particular member of the household becomes sick.
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Much of the published work on women and AIDS, especially medical and scientific publications,197 has concentrated on women as care givers of people with AIDS and possible transmitters of the HIV virus, with the focus highly on prostitutes and pregnant women.
Influenced by feminist concerns, a number of writers198 have raised concerns about gender inequalities as they frame popular discourses and representations about AIDS which particularly stigmatise women, or as they are manifested in processes of negotiating sex or in expectations that girls and women bear the responsibility of caring for sick people or for taking precautions when it comes to sex.
It is one thing to say AIDS is a women’s issue or a feminist issue. As feminists demand that we should “not only be concerned about how HIV/AIDS affects women in particular, but also how women’s subordination influences their risk status and experience of HIV/AIDS”?199 In the AIDS crisis, women are often invisible, and “face severe and sometimes insurmountable obstacles to coming out with a positive HIV status.”200They are rarely provided with adequate care, and are expected to take care of others.201The development of health and social services to care for and support people with AIDS or other HIV-related illness, demands an understanding of women’s unpaid work in the home, in particular their responsibility for the care of family members.
Within feminist theory sexuality is defined as a site of struggle in which men exercise power over women, although important differences exist between feminist in “the significance attributed to sexuality in understanding women’s oppression.”202 Acknowledging the power
197Doyal, L. et al., (1994):45
198Doyal, L. et al., (1994): 45
199Doyal, L. et al. (1994):45
200Doyal, L. et al., (1994): 45
201The ACT UP, (1990) :243
202Holland, J. et al., (1990):5
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relations embedded in sexual relationships helps to explain both how and why women can find the process of negotiating safer sex difficult. Most public education campaigns around AIDS/HIV, in assuming individual choice and personal responsibility do not address the issue of relative power in sexual relations.
We need to address gender power relations, gender roles and gender expectations. Taking a socialist feminists perspective view, a look at the economy of households, and how this is sustained by particular gendered arrangements and roles is examined in this research, and the particular ways in which these impacted on household members across gender, status and position, as well as how household members responded to these.
In addition the impact on households when particular male and female household members become sick, such as male adult breadwinners who may be the main source of household incomes or female adult and child members who may be responsible for domestic duties including provision of care for the sick people was explored. Furthermore, the household dynamics in terms of response strategies employed in relation to gender, as well as to the general gender situation in the country or more specifically in the study area was explored to link the impacts these have on HIV infection and mitigation efforts.
Feminist perspectives of households, thus, are highly critical of structural functionalist perspectives for justifying and legitimating the polarisation of gender roles and power relations, along the lines of husbands and fathers as breadwinners and wives and mothers as unpaid carers who provide emotional support and care for family members and are responsible for domestic tasks as well as other activities. While functionalists, such as Parsons, present these gendered roles as complementary feminists such as Hanrahan, argue that these are exploitative, in large part because the role of women is unpaid which in effect renders their contribution to the economy and dynamics of the household invisible as well as undermining their status in the
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household and contributing to patriarchal notions of women as being subordinate to men.
However while the structural functionalism of Parsons and others has been highly critiqued by feminism for presenting an idealised view of families and households in men and women complement each other to function positively as an economic and social unit to contribute to the benefit of the family members and the wider community, the questions posed by functionalism about roles men and women play in families are also posed by feminist writers even if these are configured in very different ways. Thus feminists pose questions about the subservient role of women in the family and how this ensures that the family functions in a particular way.
Drawing on feminism, I also pose such questions in my research, which focuses on how HIV/AIDS impacts on households which are mediated by unequal gendered relations in which caring is feminised and unpaid and the breadwinning role is masculinised. What happens when HIV/AIDS infects male “breadwinners” and/or female “carers”? How does this affect the dynamics of the households and the roles which men and women play?