Engendering Care Revisited: Decolonizing Global Health and Dismantling Gender Stereotypes in HIV Care in Africa

This paper takes as starting point research conducted in Durban, South Africa to unravel the complexities of care ethics in the context of humanitarian aid. It investigates how the gendering of care shapes humanitarian aid in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemics in Africa, perpetuating an image of “virile” and “violent” African masculinity. The humanitarian interventions being deployed to address HIV/AIDS in Africa invoke universalizing conceptions of need, failing to consider the legacies of colonial (and in the case of South Africa, apartheid) expropriation and sexualization. Instead, they replicate these assertions that the problems and “need” that Africans face are a result of gendered “disorder” in African culture. This paper draws on varied examples of research and NGO activity to illustrate how these relations of care are gendered. Essentializing, feminized discourses on care result in a skewed analysis of international crises that invariably invoke women (and children) as victims in need of care and, at best, ignore the lived experiences of men, and at worst, cast men as virile and violent vectors of disease and social disorder. This translates into HIV interventions focused on rescuing and empowering African women without attending to the challenges men face. More recent efforts have begun to focus attention on the ways in which global health narratives and policies shape local health care delivery in ways that are raced and gendered. Much work remains to decolonize health services and ensure the inclusion of men in ways that meet their needs as well as those of women.