Toggle Main Menu Toggle Search

Open Access padlockePrints

Feminizing risk at a distance: critical observations on the constitution of a preventive technology for HIV/AIDS

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Duika Burges WatsonORCiD

Downloads

Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.


Abstract

Distance is a key idea in contemporary literatures on geography and the government of risk, and it is central to the work presented in this paper, which focuses on Western media representations of an innovative 'first-generation' non-contraceptive microbicide, Carraguard. A preventive technology that has been developed under the auspices of the US Population Council and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Carraguard is represented in the media in ways that produce certain noteworthy cultural geographies of HIV/AIDS. Via an analysis of a selection of such media representations of Carraguard, and focusing on sexual citizenship, political subjectivity and three socio-spatial orderings of risk (displacement, replacement and reorientation), we posit that Carraguard has effected a feminization of the government of risk at a distance. Specifically, we contend that HIV/AIDS has been displaced from the marginalized spaces of metropolitan centres of the West and replaced at the world's under-developed margins, being reoriented from dangerousness/deviance and the masculine to risk and the feminine in that process. In this work, we have taken up Dean's (1999) call to use an analytics of government to highlight the effects of certain ways of thinking and acting, and have also sought to respond to observations by Craddock (2000) that the silences in geography about HIV/AIDS and the regional coordinates of risk and vulnerability need to be addressed. In the final analysis, it appears that media representations of Carraguard reproduce and intensify much older geopolitical and socio-spatial orderings and relations of power that give effect to conceptions and practices of political obligation and sexual citizenship.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Burges Watson D, Stratford E

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Social & Cultural Geography

Year: 2008

Volume: 9

Issue: 4

Pages: 353-371

ISSN (print): 1464-9365

ISSN (electronic): 1470-1197

Publisher: Routledge

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649360802076907

DOI: 10.1080/14649360802076907


Altmetrics

Altmetrics provided by Altmetric


Share