"Vulnerable" desires
Subtitle: contesting Namibian (homo)sexuality in the era of HIV/AIDS.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 208
Description: Namibian AIDS awareness campaigns, as in most African countries, target persons who are assumed to engage exclusively in heterosexual behavior. Ironically, while same-sex sexuality is elided beneath prevention/education initiatives that target 'the heterosexual' and 'the conjugal unit', 'homosexuality' is loudly sounded in legislative arenas where notions of ideal citizenship are contested. On March 19, 2001, President Sam Nujoma called for the arrest, imprisonment and deportation of all gays and lesbians in Namibia during his address to students at the University of Namibia. This homophobic announcement was made on the grounds that 'homosexuality', as an imported European cultural practice, threatened Namibian national identity. In this thesis I illustrate how the numerous anti-homosexual discourses deployed by ruling government officials since 1995 have greatly reinforced silences around gay and lesbian health concerns related to HIV transmission. This thesis aims to redress this elision by referring to 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with young black men and women who access Namibia's only sexual diversity NGO, The Rainbow Project, and who live in the impoverished township known as Katutura. I explicitly discuss how "homophobia", which gets constituted through the historical contingencies of race, gender, ethnicity and class, operates in the daily lives of social actors to shape contexts of extreme HIV-vulnerability. In this thesis, I particularly emphasize collective modes of resistance and other forms of social capital that could be further mobilized in order to fight the epidemic.
Notes: Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-06, Section: A, page: 2273.