Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa

by Mark Hunter

In some parts of South Africa, over one in three people are HIV positive. Love in the Time of AIDS explores transformations in notions of gender and intimacy to try to understand the roots of this virulent epidemic. By living in an informal settlement, collecting love letters, cell phone text messages, oral histories, and archival materials, Mark Hunter details the everyday social inequalities that have resulted in untimely deaths. Hunter shows how first apartheid and then chronic unemployment have become entangled with ideas about femininity, masculinity, love, and sex and have created an economy of exchange that perpetuates the transmission of HIV/AIDS. This sobering ethnography challenges conventional understandings of HIV/AIDS in South Africa.

Genres: Sociology, Anthropology, Africa, Nonfiction

303 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2010

Reviews

[John]

After reading the first few chapters setting the historiographical context, I thought there was no way I was going to make it through this book. However, it just got better and better. Hunter does a great job of showing what's important, and outlining why, exactly, AIDS is so bad in KwaZulu-Natal. A fantastic, detailed, and interesting ethnography.