Exploring masculinities in the context of ARV use: a study of men living with HIV in a South African village
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Date
2010-08-19
Authors
Mfecane, Sakhumzi
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Abstract
Abstract
The dominant social constructions concerning what it means to be a man have been studied in
relation to various HIV risks that they may pose for men and women. It has been shown that men
worldwide tend to embrace notions of manhood that encourage them to have multiple partners
and not pay attention to their health needs. This study focuses on men who have taken an HIV
test, disclosed their HIV results and are using antiretroviral medicines provided in a public health
facility in South Africa. It investigates their experiences of living with HIV in relation to how
they constructed and experienced their masculinity. This focus is unusual in South Africa. Most
research focuses on men who are resisting health services and who have not taken an HIV test.
Based on a fourteen-month ethnographic fieldwork in a South African village, findings show that
living with HIV poses unique challenges for a man. From the onset of a disease men are faced
with difficult decisions to make, such as whether or not to seek help, where and with whom.
These decisions, I argue, are not made in a vacuum, but are highly mediated by pre-existing
views about manhood, culture, HIV stigma, perceptions of treatments, and other belief systems.
Thus when someone becomes ill he draws from the various meanings offered by these discourses
to decide on how to respond to a physical discomfort. Most men in this study embraced the
dominant social definitions of what it means to be a 'real' man before they became ill. These
definitions discouraged men from using public health facilities; they encouraged men to have
multiple partners as a way of proving manhood and gaining social respect, and they constructed
manhood as a powerful, controlling and an independent gender. This thesis engages with men
living with HIV to find out how they dealt with these expectations when they became ill and
needed to receive help. Most importantly it investigates how these definitions and experiences of
masculinity have been challenged and then transformed by the experience of being ill and what
'alternative' definitions of manhood have been forged out of experiences of being sick and using
lifelong medications.