Bhuvaneswar C; International Conference on AIDS.
Int Conf AIDS. 2000 Jul 9-14; 13: abstract no. ThPeD5624.
C. Bhuvaneswar, Stanford School of Medicine, 7A Escondido Village, Stanford CA 94305, United States, Tel.: +1 650 497 2848, E-mail: chayab@leland.stanford.edu
This paper offers an ethnographic analysis of the effectiveness of a Chennai-based prevention program, Project for AIDS Prevention (PAP), which uses street theater and the already-existing structures of a government-sponsored literacy program to inculcate self-employed women, sex workers, and domestic workers with prevention messages. Using discourse analyses, participant surveys, and a medical anthropological understanding of Tamil women's own categories of illness and the female body, "sexual health" and the cultural meanings of AIDS will be discussed in light of how folk strategies for prevention have tried to engage these indigenous categories to achieve better health communication. The paper describes some of the program's results, including increased awareness, by participants, of safer sex practices and clinical services for HIV testing and care as measured by a post-intervention questionnaire. The paper also offers criticisms of how the program may reflect the biases of its upper-middle class, Western-educated founders, and suggests how these biases might be overcome with greater leadership by the "target" community. The paper integrates this NGO case study with other accounts of the connections between women's literacy, Tamil folk heroines (such as Kannagi, invoked by women afraid of being tested, as a figure of courage), and women's ability to gain preventive and treatment services. The possibility of integrating literacy services, using a Freirean model, into effective prevention that does not, at the same time, fail to engage oral, vernacular traditions and practices, will be examined, with the goal of proposing a modified,anthropologically-informed prevention model based on this NGO's experiences.
Publication Types:
Keywords:
- Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome
- Educational Status
- Female
- Humans
- India
- Marriage
- Nuclear Family
- Safe Sex
- education
- prevention & control
Other ID:
UI: 102242250
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