Over the past weeks, we have explored topics relating to the overarching theme of crisis and disease. The areas explored have been engaging, and opened my mind to things I previously I had not considered. I found myself most deeply engaging with topics which related to the experiences of women through crisis and disease. Predominantly, I found the topic of HIV/AIDS affected me quite deeply through my discovery of the HIV positive poet Mary Bowman.
Initially approaching the topic through Musa W. Dube’s anecdotal essay reflecting on the AIDS/HIV pandemic in Botswana, I was touched by the human experience of the virus. This led me to dig deeper, and find the work of Mary Bowman.
Dube’s text brings up many fascinating points on discourse surrounding the pandemic, particularly how language builds a narrative which extends to the national and social scale. A particularly poignant quotation which I’d like to unpack reads as follows:
“I describe HIV and AIDS as a text that wrote itself upon our physical and social bodies.”
Breaking this down, I’d like to think about the usage of the term “text” to describe HIV/AIDS, and the concept of physical and social bodies.
In this statement the pandemic is described as an active force acting “upon” the nation. There is a sense of the pandemic being central to the narrative of a nation’s identity through its description as a text in this active form. It is not a passive part of the nation’s story, but rather integral to it—the author seems to consider the pandemic as part of Botswana itself.
This gained further multitudes when I considered what could be meant by this idea of “physical and social bodies”. Clearly, HIV physically affects the body. However, Dube’s idea of the “social” body stood out as it gets to the root of what differentiates a pandemic from just a prevalent disease. A pandemic deeply affects these social bodies, whether these bodies be families, local communities, or otherwise.
The text goes on to consider “The historic discovery of HIV among gay communities, and later among other vulnerable communities such as sex workers and injecting drug addicts, seemingly associated the virus with sexual and moral discourse.” This furthers these ideas of the “social” body. A narrative was constructed which categorised the nation into groups of higher and lower morality, associating the virus with these groups.
This all gave a much greater sense to what Treichler perhaps meant writing “The AIDS epidemic is simultaneously an epidemic of a transmissible lethal disease and an epidemic of meanings or signification.” This writing of HIV as a text upon social bodies, separated by community, does indeed make it an epidemic of signification. Ingrained beliefs about the communities at the heart of the discovery of the virus adds signification upon both these communities, and upon the story of the virus itself.
The poetry of Mary Bowman reflects on these ideas, in a somewhat abstract way. The idea of HIV acting upon the “social” body is poignant here as Bowman was born HIV positive as a result of her mother’s drug addiction. In this case, the “social” body is that of the family. This poem, Dandelions, was Bowman’s way of revealing that she had lived with HIV her whole life, and the stigma surrounding the virus. Bowman’s mother died when the poet was just three as a result of complications. One line in particular stands out in light of Dube’s and Treichler’s ideas.
“I will gladly give myself as the sacrifice if it means that all the dandelions in the world become viewed as more than the consequence of sins behind closed doors.”
The experience of these two women—the woman speaking, and the woman spoken about—was deeply affective. A further topic which struck me was a discussion of women and how data affects diversity and equality.
A line from Simone de Beavoir’s introduction to her seminal work, The Second Sex, is a strong sounding off point for discussing this issue: “Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him.”
In this particular week’s lecture, the point was made that “as mathematical representations of how systems work, they are dependent on assumptions already written in”.
If the default assumption is man, how does this affect women? As de Beauvoir said, humanity is male. Language is gendered, “man” refers to humans. Alma Graham’s oft-quoted analogy is apt here:
“If a woman is swept off a ship into the water, the cry is ‘Man overboard!’ If she is killed by a hit-and-run driver, the charge is ‘manslaughter!’ If she is injured on the job, the coverage is ‘workman’s compensation!’ But if she arrives at a threshold marked ‘Men Only,’ she knows the admonition is not intended to bar animals or plants or inanimate objects. It is meant for her.” (Graham)
If the systems supposed to serve us begin at a point of masculinity, this harms women everywhere. A clear example of the ways in which quantifiable data harms women is the GDP.
The European Institute for Gender Equality has found that:
- Improving gender equality would lead to an increase in EU (GDP) per capita by 6.1 to 9.6%, which amounts to €1.95 to €3.15 trillion by 2050
- Improvements in gender equality would lead to an additional 10.5 million jobs in 2050
- Countries with more room to improve gender equality have much to gain. On average, improved gender equality in these countries is expected to lead to an increase in GDP of about 12% by 2050
The last point was especially significant to me, as I’m originally from Poland and current debate around women’s reproductive rights highlight just this. In January, a near total ban on abortion was passed. Further to this, a Government policy named 500 Plus awards families a benefit of 500PLN per month per child, a clear encouragement for women to stay home and be homemakers. This brings me to my main criticism of this EIGE study. It does not consider the impact which accounting for only male-dominated, classically value-creating activities, disregarding domestic and caregiving activities. Riane Eisler, author of The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, has conducted research which shows that were this caregiving and domestic work to be included in the GDP, it would constitute between 30% and 50% of the GDP.
This is a blatant show of the ways in which data is skewed against women. This shows the ways in which the systems we base much of our daily life on, from the language we speak and how it is coded, to the world’s foremost economic indicator, are all rooted in the assumption of male as default.
To conclude, the topics which I felt most strongly engaged with were the human stories behind this overarching theme of disease and crisis, particularly the stories of women. Though seemingly disparate topics, both these areas covered stories of an entire cross-section of society disregarded, and how this can be rectified. In the case of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Bowman’s poem is a wishful one, hoping for an end to the stigma associated with the virus. In the case of the effect of data on gender equality, the prevailing story is also one of hope—of what can be gained if rather than perpetrating inequality, we recognise the failings of our current systems and remedy them.
References
Alexander, Reed. “Is One Of The World’s Most Widely Used Financial Metrics — GDP — Sexist?”. Marketwatch, 2021, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-one-of-the-worlds-most-widely-used-financial-metrics-gdp-sexist-2018-01-11.
Dube, Musa W. “The HIV and AIDS Collective Memory: Anecdotal Notes on Texts of Trauma, Care-Giving and Positive Living.” Botswana Notes and Records, vol. 48, 2016, pp. 435–438. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/90025361. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.
“Economic Benefits Of Gender Equality In The EU”. European Institute For Gender Equality, 2021, https://eige.europa.eu/gender-mainstreaming/policy-areas/economic-and-financial-affairs/economic-benefits-gender-equality.
Graham, Alma. “The Making Of A Nonsexist Dictionary”. Language And Sex: Difference And Dominance, B Thorne and N Henley, Newbury House Publishers, Rowley, Mass, 1975, Accessed 26 Mar 2021.
Treichler, Paula A. How To Have Theory In An Epidemic. Duke University Press, 1999, p. 11.