Gender and HIV: Evidence from Anthropological Demography in Nigeria

Abstract

In Africa, and arguably more widely, the AIDS epidemic has heightened the stakes of normative gendered practice and sexual intimacy. As the spread of the disease has magnified the risk of infection, sickness, and death, the moral discourses HIV has generated have made behaviors related to gender and sexuality—whether it is how people dress, whom they have sex with, or how they negotiate relationships with their partners—the object of increased social scrutiny. Even as changes associated with modern, urban social life in Africa have provided people—perhaps especially women—with new liberties and opportunities, gender inequality is reproduced in novel and powerful ways. In this chapter, I examine how unmarried young women in Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, navigate the complicated landscape of migration, work, sex, and social relationships in the era of AIDS, as their strategies to survive and to improve their lives are often judged through moral lenses shaped by the epidemic. I then examine the reverse side of the gendered dynamic, focusing specifically on married men and their extramarital sexual behavior. The analysis links economic and gender inequality to powerful moral economies that undergird gendered disparities and also influence people’s understandings of and responses to AIDS and the social changes associated with it.