ABSTRACT
For a growing number of women in rural Mexico – and around the world – marital sex represents their single greatest risk for HIV infection (UNAIDS 2004). These women are infected by the very people with whom they are supposed to be having sex – indeed, according to social convention in many countries, the only people with whom they are ever supposed to have sex. The situation challenges existing approaches to HIV prevention: abstinence is impossible, unilateral monogamy is ineffective and marital condom use is complicated by women’s deep, culturally supported commitment to the fiction of fidelity. This chapter presents the findings from one of the sites involved in a five-site comparative, ethnographic investigation funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development that explored the social organisation of married women’s HIV-related risk (Hirsch et al. 2007; Parikh 2007; Smith 2007; Wardlow 2007; Phinney 2008; Hirsch et al. 2010).1 The goal was to assess how men contribute to women’s risk of acquiring HIV, going beyond the focus on ideological aspects of masculinity that characterises current programmatic approaches to improving women’s reproductive health by shifting norms of ideal masculinity (Pulerwitz and Barker 2008; Barker and Ricardo 2005). This work draws on Connell’s idea of gender regimes as composed of the intersecting micro-and macro-level domains of labour (who does what work, both domestically and in societies), power (micro-level decision making as well as social, political and military deployment of authority) and affect (socially constructed desires and the emotions that surround those desires) (Connell 1987, 1995; Hirsch et al. 2010). The aim is to extend previous work, which focused primarily on women’s perspectives, to explore how social, cultural and economic factors intertwine to shape married women’s risk of HIV infection. This chapter also describes the intersection of culturally constructed notions of reputation with structurally patterned sociosexual geographies. Overall, the point is that extramarital sex, although typically portrayed (in Mexico and elsewhere) as a breach of social norms, is a fundamental if tacit dimension of gendered social organisation rather than the product of individual moral failings or a breakdown in social rules. This chapter also presents the concept of extramarital opportunity structures,2 which calls attention to how extramarital sex is produced and facilitated by social, cultural and economic forces (Sobo 1995; Hirsch et al. 2002).
