What is it about?
Although some identities may give people more privilege or power, other aspects of their identity may exclude them. This article shows how whiteness, class, professional standing, and sexual orientation influenced how two openly gay men experienced and responded to AIDS in the early years of the epidemic in apartheid South Africa.
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Why is it important?
This article draws on the intimate and personal narratives of two men to reveal how their specific narratives about, and experiences of, being 'white', gay men in a racist, homophobic, and repressive context link the emotional and personal, to the political and ideological.
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This page is a summary of: Two Tales about Illness, Ideologies, and Intimate Identities: Sexuality Politics and AIDS in South Africa, 1980–95, Medical History, April 2014, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/mdh.2014.7.
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Resources
Politics, Polemics, and Practice - A History of Narratives about, and Responses to, AIDS in South Africa, 1980 – 1995
The original PhD thesis from which this work was drawn and which provides one of the few histories of the early years of AIDS in South Africa.
Time-Travelling Through an Epidemic: HIV, History and the Here and Now
A podcast of the first lecture of the Medical Humanities series, presented by the School of African and Gender Studies, Anthropology and Linguistics, and the Institute for Creative Arts (formerly GIPCA), in Cape Town, South Africa, 14 April 2016.
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