This project explores the social impact of AIDS in Africa, examining how the epidemic is shaping gender relations. Specifically, this project asks: how is the AIDS epidemic affecting conceptions of masculinity in Kampala, Uganda's capital city? The field research for this project consists of twelve months of ethnographic participant observation, comparing two communities within Kampala. The project investigates discourses about masculinity in these communities and asks how men, and women, understand themselves in relation to current ideas about manhood. The research also aims to illuminate how such self-understandings shape their encounters with HIV/AIDS. By charting the impact of AIDS on masculinity, this project provides insight into the cultural logic animating sexual behavior, and may help illuminate how gender relations are connected to declining HIV prevalence in Uganda. It extends previous research on masculinity in Africa into new territory by analyzing how the AIDS epidemic is shaping conceptions of manhood. While this project will clarify how masculinity is lived in Kampala today, its findings will also provide a valuable reference point for understanding the social impact of AIDS more generally. The research also probes how norms about manhood change, an area that remains underdeveloped in the masculinity literature. The broaer impacts of this project include the following. By focusing on urban Uganda, this project broadens the participation of African voices in American sociology, as research subjects, research assistants, and academic colleagues. In addition, this project aims to show how research conducted in an African setting is relevant to core sociological issues such as gender, sexuality and social change. The broader impacts of this project derive, in part, from global nature of the AIDS pandemic and the need for the results of this research to be shared widely. Through workshops and conferences this research will be shared with colleagues in African studies, anthropology, and public health. By presenting this research in ways most familiar to the mass media and policy-makers, the results of this project are intended to reach a large audience beyond academia. This proposal was cofunded by the Sociology Program and the Office of International Science and Engineering.
