| Regulating Romance: Youth Love Letters, Moral Anxiety, and Intervention in Uganda's Time of AIDS Contributor(s): Parikh, Shanti (Author) |
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ISBN: 0826517781 ISBN-13: 9780826517784 Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press OUR PRICE: $39.55 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2016 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Medical | Aids & Hiv - Social Science | Anthropology - Cultural & Social - Medical | Health Care Delivery |
| Dewey: 362.196 |
| LCCN: 2015003150 |
| Physical Information: 0.9" H x 7" W x 9.9" (1.50 lbs) 336 pages |
| Themes: - Topical - AIDS - Cultural Region - East Africa |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, two hundred fifty interviews, and over three hundred youth love letters, author Shanti Parikh uses lively vignettes to provide a rare window into young people's heterosexual desires and practices in Uganda. In chapters entitled Unbreak my heart, I miss you like a desert missing rain, and You're just playing with my head, she invites readers into the world of secret longings, disappointments, and anxieties of young Ugandans as they grapple with everyday difficulties while creatively imagining romantic futures and possibilities. Parikh also examines the unintended consequences of Uganda's aggressive HIV campaigns that thrust sexuality and anxieties about it into the public sphere. In a context of economic precarity and generational tension that constantly complicates young people's notions of consumption-based romance, communities experience the dilemmas of protecting and policing young people from reputational and health dangers of sexual activity. They arrested me for loving a school girl is the title of a chapter on controlling delinquent daughters and punishing defiant boyfriends for attempting to undermine patriarchal authority by asserting their adolescent romantic agency. Sex education programs struggle between risk and pleasure amidst morally charged debates among international donors and community elders, transforming the youthful female body into a platform for public critique and concern. The many sides of this research constitute an eloquently executed critical anthropology of intervention. |
Contributor Bio(s): Parikh, Shanti: - Shanti Parikh, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African & African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, is coauthor of The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV (also published by Vanderbilt). |