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Re-focusing the Gender Lens: Caregiving Women, Family Roles and HIV/AIDS Vulnerability in Lesotho

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Abstract

Gender and HIV risk have been widely examined in southern Africa, generally with a focus on dynamics within sexual relationships. Yet the social construction of women’s lives reflects their broader engagement with a gendered social system, which influences both individual-level risks and social and economic vulnerabilities to HIV/AIDS. Using qualitative data from Lesotho, we examine women’s lived experiences of gender, family and HIV/AIDS through three domains: (1) marriage; (2) kinship and social motherhood, and (3) multigenerational dynamics. These data illustrate how women caregivers negotiate their roles as wives, mothers, and household heads, serving as the linchpins of a gendered family system that both affects, and is affected by, the HIV/AIDS epidemic. HIV/AIDS interventions are unlikely to succeed without attention to the larger context of women’s lives, namely their kinship, caregiving, and family responsibilities, as it is the family and kinship system in which gender, economic vulnerability and HIV risk are embedded.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge project research support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (HD050469), the National Science Foundation (SES-0218139), the Institute of Southern African Studies (ISAS) at the National University of Lesotho, and the Population Studies and Training Center (PSTC) at Brown University, which receives core support from the NICHD (5R24HD041020). We thank John Karl for his contributions to the fieldwork, Thandie Hlabana and Ana Mascareñas for their contributions to data analysis, and Kelley Smith, Rachel Goldberg, and Daniel Jordan Smith for their excellent comments on earlier versions of this paper. Finally, we express our gratitude to the many families and community members in Lesotho who participated in or otherwise supported this research.

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Research protocols were reviewed and approved by the Brown University Institutional Review Board.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University, 68 Waterman St., Mencoff Hall, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Abigail Harrison & Susan E. Short

  2. Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Program in Public Health, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Abigail Harrison

  3. Department of Sociology, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Susan E. Short

  4. Statistics South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

    Maletela Tuoane-Nkhasi

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  1. Abigail Harrison
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  2. Susan E. Short
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  3. Maletela Tuoane-Nkhasi
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Correspondence to Abigail Harrison.

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Harrison, A., Short, S.E. & Tuoane-Nkhasi, M. Re-focusing the Gender Lens: Caregiving Women, Family Roles and HIV/AIDS Vulnerability in Lesotho. AIDS Behav 18, 595–604 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10461-013-0515-z

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