"Somos Parte de la Solución": Women Activists' Knowledge of Gendered Risk and Their Educational Responses to HIV/AIDS in the Peruvian Amazon

This dissertation is a critical ethnography conducted in the Amazon jungle city of Iquitos, Peru--a city where sex work and sex tourism are becoming increasingly prevalent, and where AIDS cases in women are on the rise. In recent years, HIV positive and sex worker women activists in Iquitos have made significant strides to respond to the AIDS crisis through social movement organizing and educational outreach. This dissertation exposes the nuanced gender relations perspectives of HIV positive and sex worker women activists and underscores the importance of including these subjugated knowledges in solution-oriented discourses in HIV/AIDS education. I deployed a combination of gender relations and postcolonial feminist theories to pursue two lines of inquiry. First, I investigated HIV positive women and sex worker women activists' own understandings of gender relations and gender-related risk factors for HIV. Second, I explored the varied educational spaces that activist women produced to disseminate this knowledge to other affected populations and the wider public. Results show that women activists' collective organizing around their stigmatized identities positioned them to critically comment about how gender influences HIV risk for both women and men and also enabled them to encourage their stakeholders to re-think and re-learn gender in ways that would reduce their risk to HIV. As the title of this dissertation reads, women activists asserted that they are "part of the solution" to combat HIV/AIDS in Peru. My dissertation shows that "activist knowledge" is critical to re-conceptualize the ways that local expressions of masculinities, femininities and gender relations are taken up in HIV/AIDS education initiatives.

Department dc:contributor.department

Curriculum, Teaching and Learning

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Lalani, Yasmin

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• McCready, Lance T.

• gender studies
• HIV/AIDS
• adult education
• Latin American studies
• non-formal education
• health education

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/

Language dc:language.iso

en_ca

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/43633

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/43633