Gender and HIV in South Africa: Advancing Women’s Health and Capabilities (Global Research in Gender, Sexuality and Health) - Hardcover

Sprague, Courtenay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1137559969 ISBN 13: 9781137559968

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Synopsis

This book addresses the ongoing problem of HIV in black South African women as a health inequity. Importantly, it argues that this urgent problem of justice is changeable. Sprague uses the capabilities approach to bring a theory of health justice, together with multiple sources of evidence, to investigate the complex problem of HIV and accompanying poor health outcomes in black South African women. Motivated by a concern for application of knowledge, this work discusses how to better conceptualise what health justice demands of state and society, and how to mobilise available evidence on health inequities in ways that compel greater state action to address problems of gender and health. 
HIV in women, and possible responses, are investigated on four distinct levels: conceptual, social structure, health systems, and law. The analysis demonstrates that this problem is indeed modifiable with long-term interventions and an enhanced state response targeted at multiple levels.  This book will be of interest to academics and students in the social health sciences, gender and development studies, and global health, as well as HIV/health activists, government officials, policy makers, HIV clinicians and health providers interested in HIV.

About this title

Review:

“Path breaking.”  (Diane Cooper, Professor, School of Public Health, University of Western Cape, South Africa)

“Courtenay Sprague shines a bright light on the gritty daily interchanges between unequal sex, inaccessible health care and continuing social injustice. This book reveals the roots of these damaging interchanges by giving voice to South African women living with HIV, while detailing structural barriers they still face more than two decades after the end of apartheid. This is such a valuable book.” (Cynthia Enloe, author of The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy)

“A seminal work that demands we understand the structural connection between gender-based violence, the HIV epidemic and women’s right to access healthcare; it confirms that this socially constructed human rights violation is one that can and must be solved.” (Bonita Meyersfeld, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa)

“Courtenay Sprague’s volume on women, HIV and gender justice in South Africa is global public health scholarship at its best.  In clear and accessible language, it offers a rare synthesis of research from disciplines as varied as anthropology, psychology, political philosophy, policy analysis, epidemiology and the biological sciences...Her analysis includes questions of treatment access and the quality of health services, but it also looks further afield, providing a wide-ranging reflection on the many gendered social and structural determinants of health for HIV positive women. The result is a rich, critical and holistic assessment of the ways in which the capacity of women living with HIV to live full, free and healthy lives has been foreshortened by social and structural barriers.” (Christopher Colvin, Associate Professor and Head of Social & Behavioral Sciences, School of Public Health & Family Medicine, University of Cape Town, South Africa)

About the Author:

Courtenay Sprague is Associate Professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security & Global Governance, and the Department of Nursing at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. She holds a joint appointment with the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

About this edition

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1137559969
• ISBN 13: 9781137559968
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 434