Masculinity + HIV = Risk: Exploring the Relationship between Masculinities, Education and HIV in the Caribbean

David Plummer

Using qualitative data, this chapter analyses the impact on men of shifting gender roles in the Caribbean region. In recent decades, Caribbean women have made great strides in educational attainment. In contrast, gender taboos mean that opportunities for a boy to secure his gender identity have increasingly shifted away from educational achievements towards physical dominance, including through hard, physical, risk-taking, hyper-masculine activities such as bullying, harassment, crime, violence and risky sexual behaviour. Boys who engage in intellectual pursuits are vulnerable to being considered ‘suspect’ by their peers. For example, boys who show a preference for reading regularly report homophobic criticism: homosexuality is perhaps the deepest masculine taboo of all. Likewise, through the twin mechanisms of masculine obligation and taboo, a wide range of risk-taking behaviours, including those related to vulnerability to HIV infection, have become resiliently embedded in the social fabric and are, as a result, extremely resistant to change. ‘Social embedding’ exerts its effect via gender roles, peer group dynamics, taboo and stigma, and socio-economic inequalities.

Read this paper online (Flash required)
Download this paper (PDF, 328KB)

This entry was posted on Friday, December 26th, 2008 at 10:43 am and is filed under Section I: The New Geography of HIV, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.