Doyal brings together findings from a wide range of empirical studies spanning the social sciences to explore experiences of HIV positive people across the world. This will illustrate how the disease ...is physically manifested and psychologically internalised by individuals in diverse ways depending on the biological, social, cultural and economic circumstances in which they find themselves. A proper understanding of these commonalities and differences will be essential if future strategies are to be effective in mitigating the effects of HIV and AIDS.
Background: Better understanding and addressing health inequities is a growing global priority.
Objective: In this paper, we contribute to the literature examining complex relationships between ...biological and social dimensions in the field of health inequalities. Specifically, we explore the potential of intersectionality to advance current approaches to socio-biological entwinements.
Design: We provide a brief overview of current approaches to combining both biological and social factors in a single study, and then investigate the contributions of an intersectional framework to such work.
Results: We offer a number of concrete examples of how intersectionality has been used empirically to bring both biological and social factors together in the areas of HIV, post-traumatic stress disorder, female genital circumcision/mutilation/cutting, and cardiovascular disease.
Conclusion: We argue that an intersectional approach can further research that integrates biological and social aspects of human lives and human health and ultimately generate better and more precise evidence for effective policies and practices aimed at tackling health inequities.
My active involvement with HIV research began in 2005, after Professor Jane Anderson invited me to talk about gender to health workers involved in HIV services in the UK. Over coffee afterwards she ...discussed her desire to find out more about the lives of the African women for whom she was providing clinical care. I was keen to help, using my knowledge of qualitative research in the sociology of health. We, therefore, planned a collaborative study of the experiences of African women living with HIV who were receiving health care in a London hospital.
Most social science research on HIV has focused on prevention. The arrival of new therapies generated more studies on life with HIV. However most have been carried out in developed world contexts. ...Much less is known about the vast majority of those living with HIV and dying from AIDS. If this gap is to be filled, more qualitative research will be needed on affected individuals in the developing world and also among migrants who have left developing countries to live in the diaspora. It will also be essential to explore the lives of individuals from the same communities who may experience HIV in very different ways as a result of their gender and/or sexuality. This paper presents findings from three studies of Black African migrants living with HIV in London. It uses an intersectional approach to examine the similarities and the differences between the experiences of heterosexual women, heterosexual men and gay and/or bisexual men. The article highlights the importance of research of this kind both for providing the evidence base for context-specific policy development and also for making better conceptual and theoretical sense of the impact of HIV on individuals and their lives.
20 Waldron I. Contributions of changing gender differentials in behaviour to changing gender differences in mortality. In: Sabo D, Gordon G, eds. Men's health and illness: gender, power and the body. ...London: Sage Publications, 1995.
Gender equity is increasingly cited as a goal of health policy but there is considerable confusion about what this could mean either in theory or in practice. If policies for the promotion of gender ...equity are to be realisable their goal must be the equitable distribution of health related resources. This requires careful identification of the similarities and differences in the health needs of men and women. It also necessitates an analysis of the gendered obstacles that currently prevent men and women from realising their potential for health. This article explores the impact of gender divisions on the health and the health care of both women and men and draws out some of the policy implications of this analysis. It outlines a three point agenda for change. This includes policies to ensure universal access to reproductive health care, to reduce gender inequalities in access to resources and to relax the constraints of rigidly defined gender roles. The article concludes with a brief overview of the practical and political dilemmas that the implementation of such policies would impose.
Four-fifths of all blind or vision impaired people live in middle-income and low-income countries with the African region and parts of Asia and the Middle East bearing the heaviest burden. At the ...same time, we know that around two thirds of all blind people in the world are female. Hence, the poorest (and usually the oldest) women are most likely to have their lives limited by visual impairment. While recent strategies have focussed on international variations in eye health, very few have paid attention to the gender differences that are an inextricable element in these inequalities. This review will explore possible explanations for the advantage of men in the exercise of one of the most basic of human senses. It will show that this cannot be understood through the use of a biomedical approach alone. Broader social perspectives will also be needed in order to create an appropriate knowledge base for tackling global inequalities in blindness.
Many studies are now documenting the circumstances of people living with HIV/AIDS in different parts of the world. We know an increasing amount about the experiences of women who make up the majority ...of those infected in countries in sub-Saharan Africa. However, very few researchers have examined the lives of female migrants from the region living with HIV. This article begins to fill that gap by exploring the situation of 62 women from different parts of Africa receiving treatment from the National Health Service in London. It is based on a qualitative study carried out between 2001 and 2002 using semi-structured interviews. The analysis explores the ways in which the women's lives are shaped in complex ways by their sex and gender, by their status as migrants and by their seropositivity. It examines the nature of their survival strategies, focusing mainly on the management of information, the use of health services and the importance of spirituality in their lives. The article concludes by highlighting the paradox whereby these women have access to treatment that would be unavailable in their own countries but their survival depends on them remaining in a country which few regard as ‘home’.
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