Reflection on women's rights issues at the AIDS conference
Analysis falls short of rhetoric
The International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada this week attracted more than 24,000 activists, policymakers and scientists to reflect and strategise on responses to the global pandemic.
Celebrities such as Bill and Melinda Gates, Bill Clinton and Richard Gere, brought much needed public attention and media to the feminization of HIV/AIDS, however, it also highlighted the danger of having these personalities dominate the discourse and promote a depoliticized analysis of women's rights, as was often witnessed in Toronto this week.
Despite increased rhetoric on women's rights, what was missing from the analysis was how to bridge the incredible inequality that women suffer, how to empower women, and what does prevention and care mean in contexts where women are facing severe violations of all their rights let alone the right to negotiate safe sex or access treatment.
While celebrities were lauded for championing key issues and bringing much needed resources to the fight against this global pandemic, it had not gone amiss that they lack the analysis developed by those living with HIV/AIDS and those feminists and civil society actors who have been involved in the struggle against it for 25 years.
Especially in light of the fact that their approach was to talk about women's empowerment as a technical fix that can be brought about by more access to condoms (male & female) or the development of microbicides or an effective HIV vaccines. This approach further fails to recognize that these "tools" in themselves cannot bring about women's empowerment any more than the internet or chemical abortions have done.
Even when women's empowerment is talked about in terms of ending discrimination, gender inequality and poverty, a strong feminist analysis is needed to understand what this really means.
While Stephen Lewis played an important role in highlighting some of this, his approach was still to talk about vulnerable groups, grandmothers and AIDS orphans in an attempt to pull at the public heartstrings. Whereas, the Bill Clintons and Bill Gates' of this world were unlikely to talk about the real structural changes needed to bring this about, i.e. ending trade injustice, reforming the United Nations or the World Trade Organisation.
Though most of the conference headlines were about women's rights issues, it was not the real faces of this pandemic whose voices were grabbing the attention of the world.
In the words of Everjoice Win from Action Aid International "Where were the African women that they all spoke about, couldn't they speak for themselves in a big plenary?"
It was ironic to have some of the only few good feminist discourses in the big plenary sessions put forward by privileged, white, well-educated North American women and not by women from the Global South who are disproportionately affected by both HIV/AIDS and the interlinking issues of discrimination and poverty that fuels the epidemic.
Once again, the women's movement was challenged as to their engagement with the broader HIV/AIDS movement and women from this movement. While the conference had a strong presence of feminists, most of the feminist sessions were organized in the Global Village (which was outside of the formal program) and there did not seem to be enough engagement of feminists within the broader discourse around the pandemic.
As one delegate from Argentina said, "As the women's movement, we have to see this as a challenge to get more organized and take leadership in the analyses and responses to HIV/AIDS".
Despite these shortcomings the AIDS conference has made huge steps forward in transforming itself from a space that was primarily about the medical community sharing the newest "science" on the virus to a place where there is just as much, if not more emphasis on the issues of human rights and universal access.
The planning committee's efforts to make the conference accessible were witnessed by the diversity of presence in the conference, even if not all the voices made it to the plenary. The fact that they had a public open space for networking for community activists was a positive space despite sometimes feeling a little ghetto-ized from the "main" and "paid for" session space where some of the more "serious" discussions happened.
In conclusion, what was really missing was a nexus between the "medical" and "activism" ends of the conference especially when it seems like the world is at a breaking point in terms of the "science" that has been done and what this tells us about how to stem the pandemic.
Many may venture to say that we already know enough to really effect a chance in the lives of millions living with HIV/AIDS and those most at risk of contracting it and that what is really lacking is political will, not more science.
This doesn't mean that we should block the development of potentially new and exciting tools such as microbicides or an effective HIV/AIDS vaccines, but we do need to develop a rights-based approach to these and we also need to be very clear that these are not magic bullets in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
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