ABSTRACT
Introduction Exploring and examining the intersections of masculinities, religion and the HIV epidemic in Africa, this chapter engages in various elds of study: masculinities and development, masculinities and HIV and AIDS, masculinities and religion, and religion and HIV and AIDS (cf. Haddad 2011). Within development studies gender is a central theme, but until recently discussions often narrowly focused upon women. Only with the turn of the new millennium, as a late reception of masculinity studies, did development scholarship and practice begin to widen its scope to include ‘the other half of gender’. However, this trend is not yet reected in studies of religion and development, where gender continues to be conceptualised predominantly as referring to issues that concern women. Cleaver (2002) identies several arguments for the need to pay attention to men and masculinities in global development, and three of them are particularly relevant to the focus on HIV and AIDS in Africa in this chapter: arguments concerned with gendered vulnerabilities, the crisis of masculinity and strategic gender partnerships. The idea of gendered vulnerabilities means that not only women but also men can be disadvantaged by certain concepts of masculinity. This has proved to be especially true in the context of the HIV epidemic, where the virus infects and aects both men and women. The notion of ‘crises of masculinity’ refers to multiple processes of social, economic and cultural change that undermine and challenge traditional men’s roles and forms of masculinity, and it is clear that in contemporary Africa the epidemic has posed serious threats to men and masculinity. Finally, if the HIV epidemic in Africa is a gendered phenomenon, as is now generally acknowledged, then the response to the epidemic should also be gender-based and thus involve men and address questions of masculinity. To build such a strategic partnership, men indeed have become special ‘targets for a change’ in Africa (Bujra 2002). In this chapter we explore these and other themes related to men, masculinities and HIV in Africa, critically examining their intersections with religion. In the process, our focus is on Sub-Saharan Africa, and the discussion is limited to the three major religions on the continent: African traditional religion, Christianity and Islam, with one section looking in particular at Pentecostal strands of Christianity.
