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Women, Poverty and AIDS: Sex, Drugs and Structural Violence. Edited by Paul Farmer, Margaret Connors, and Janie Simmons. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1996, 473 pages+ xxi. Paper, $19.95.
Reviewed by Lawrence Hammar, Ph.D., Department of Sociology /Anthropology, Smullin Hall, Willamette University, 900 State Street, Salem, Oregon 97301.
Women, Poverty and AIDS is innovative in both organization and theme. Some of its nine provocative chapters are singly authored and others are collectively so, but their argumentative and writing styles are surprisingly even. Hammering persistently at the connections between AIDS, structural violence, and women, it departs radically from most AIDS-related literature. Most social, scientific, biomedical, and public health models involve gender to explain pathogens and transmission dynamics, but too many still consider gender to be an independent variable.
Such is not the case here. This book moves the debate forward greatly by engendering sexually transmitted disease. The editors began in a profound void: Their search of an AIDS database for "women + AIDS + poverty" found that "there are no references meeting these specifications" (p. xiv). The authors wrestle thereafter with the fact that sexually transmitted disease, while ubiquitous, is absent from typical research and reportage. They show just how complex are the links between gender, biology, social structure, culture, and political economy: Each interacts synergistically with HIV infection and AIDS-related symptoms, but neither evenly nor predictably so.
The authors seem uncomfortable dealing with the instability of moving targets. Though HIV and AIDS are manifest differently across time, space, and body-often wildly so-they emerge intact here. The authors explore the socioeconomic relations upon which HIV and AIDS are founded, but not really their own constructions; for example, when they conflate HIV with its antibodies, HIV disease with HIV infection, and AIDS with a virus. Their strong suit is to question why disease and suffering burden are so unequally shared. They ask that we link rich and poor as we model risk and risk-taking and that we connect individuals to groups without overstating personal agency. They argue with us when we choose cultural models of risk that reify and exoticize personal behavior over political-economic ones that consider transnational forces such as poverty, racism, and sexism.
Implicitly and sometimes explicitly they also ask why women comprise a group...