Thank you very much, Tim. And thank you for having me.
And Oxford University. And thank you all for coming.
I'm very excited to be here and this is my first time in Oxford, so it's also an opportunity for me to visit.
My research has been concerned with gender relations in marriage and the political economies that shape gender relations in marriage.
Looking at changes over time, so I do look at both the historical and contemporary changes or aspects that shape gender relations in marriage.
In the last few years, I have been concerned with the ways in which then gender relations do shape
with vulnerabilities within marriages in Kenya for very particular reasons.
First, I have been involved in the HIV walk with some organisations in Kenya and also in there addressing gender inequalities.
I have involved myself with organisations that seek to address gender issues and particularly women's positions within within Kenya.
And that got my interest into looking at the ways in which gender inequalities within
marriage then ship the vulnerabilities of both men and women within within marriage.
And then I began to get concerned with the ways in which public health was also addressing issues of HIV vulnerability in marriage.
And that is what I want to talk about today. So if you look at my first clip here, I walk into a very diverse regions in Kenya.
One is in the capital city Nairobi, where I work with middle class couples.
So my interviews are a couple level based, and then I work in a very small rural community,
a cash crop in a community that grows tea and coffee and has very small market towns, which is a very homogeneous community.
And then and the reason for this is to look at the ways in which the political economies of
those two different geographical regions do shape gender relations within within marriages.
And that's that's where I work. So from Kenya to Nairobi to the community I work in, Embu is about 200 kilometres.
And in Nairobi, I work in a middle class area, a very middle to upper middle class.
And in Nairobi, I work with rural marginalised couples, which means that if you go to the rural areas, they are also diverse groups of people.
They are wealthier populations. They are wealthier families and we have really the very marginalised families.
And I work with the more marginalised couples because I want to understand the vulnerabilities of the two different groups of people.
And so over time, my sample has grown.
I did begin with a sample of about 27 couples.
I had 13 in Nairobi and 14 in the rural area in my sample.
Since 2013 actually has grown to date. I have 50 328 from the rural area and 25 middle class couples,
and I also interview NGOs and community based organisations that work to address HIV issues.
And they I use participant observation, which means I would be following couples,
men and women in their daily walk looking at what men are doing, what women are doing,
where they are going, to which social networks involved with if they go to the clubs and go to the clubs with them,
except for the rural area where I don't go to the clubs and say why.
And I've also been looking at a lot of HIV texts. So today I speak about HIV and marriage and why why HIV within marriage?
So Kenya is HIV high burden country, which means it's one of the most affected countries within the African region,
with national prevalence that has fallen from double digits 10 plus percent to.
Now we talk about five percent. In the last evaluation that was done, heterosexual sex accounts for about 83 percent of HIV infections,
and this varies with geography so that in some areas we have a high prevalence of 21 percent.
In the 1990s, it was in the 30 percent.
And you have other areas or geographical regions that have 0.1 percent in the two areas that.
I walk in in Nairobi, and in the variation is from is 6.1 percent in Nairobi and two point eight percent in in Embu.
And if we think about the global governance of HIV,
we do know that UNAIDS or United Nations AIDS then leads in terms of policy making and implementation
and monitoring and evaluation so that all the HIV policies and practises with some localisation,
as they say, then respond to the UNAIDS policy.
So we sort of have a hierarchical structure of AIDS management now.
Marriage was not a side of HIV transmission for a long time.
It had remained outside the purview of global public health policy because marriage was assumed to be a safe place.
Despite demographic and health surveys showing emerging trends of HIV infection within marriage and other heterosexual partnerships in the 1990s,
there was no specific intervention for HIV transmission in these partnerships.
I turned around in public health.
Concern within marriage came with surveys that were conducted in 2007 and 2008, which highlighted high levels of couple discordance,
which means that discordant couples where one partner is HIV positive and the other
is HIV negative and couples concordance where both partners who are HIV positive.
These surveys, according to the AIDS managers,
shockingly revealed that 44 percent of all new HIV infections occurred amongst married and cohabiting partners,
while prevalence amongst women was twice that of men and the statistics have remained the same.
So marriage account for about half of all HIV infections in Kenya.
Research also indicated that the primary pathway to HIV infection was and still is through mostly men's
extramarital sex due to gender power inequalities that limit women's capacities to negotiate safe sex practises,
mostly fidelity and condom use within marriage.
This new evidence sparked a series of interventions which included a revision of the Kenya National AIDS Strategic Plan, or framework,
which was then the second framework since the president of the then president, Moy acknowledged that HIV was a national disaster in 1999.
So we were at that point working with the second framework,
and that had to be quickly revised after these studies that began to show that there were high levels of HIV within marriage.
So in later 2000, in some states after those surveys, with now a new and revised policy framework in place,
experts in public health launched a very direct response to concern about the spread
of HIV in marriage with both biomedical and behavioural change interventions.
Behavioural change into biomedical solutions, which continue to consume the largest share of AIDS resources,
included scaled up treatment of both concordant and HIV discordant couples.
And then they scaled up in in in fact introduced in some communities voluntary adult medical male circumcision.
Because clinical trials have shown that medical male circumcision does reduce HIV by 60 percent.
There are a lot of debates around that why you didn't introduce circumcision to in some communities and whether that is meaningful.
And then there was a scaled up prevention of mother to child transmission in recent times.
Kenya has adopted an accelerated treatment as prevention,
which is called the PRP as part of the UNAIDS policy strategy towards ending the epidemic by 2030.
I must say that in 2015, W h o then introduced the pre-exposure prophylaxis as treatment or as a prevention method for HIV and for HIV infection.
And this means that the groups of people that are considered most at risk.
So in other words, people in marriages that are discordant where one partner is at risk of infection from the other partner,
then the other the partner that. Is not HIV positive, we'll take the pre-exposure prophylaxis on a daily basis to prevent infection,
and the same PR prep is used for other at-risk groups, such as the commercial sex workers.
And what is in public health terms called men having sex with men as there is an at-risk group and the other at risk group is people who inject drugs.
And W.H.O. has also introduced the methadone treatment as part of the biomedical strategies to reduce HIV now.
Behaviour change interventions, which is what I want to focus on today, was meant to reduce power inequalities that exacerbate HIV in marriage,
and these included very active projects on women's economic empowerment.
And then there was a very powerful and intensive mass media campaign on marital fidelity and condom use.
In 2009, the Ministry of Health, in partnership with US eight UK and UK aid,
launched a national campaign on multiple and concurrent relationships commonly known as Pango.
What go back under is the Kiswahili one for multiple and concurrent partnerships.
Pongo, a condo in in LATAM's, really means like an alternative arrangement or a side dish.
Yeah, that's that's that's what it basically means.
But it stood for multiple and concurrent relationship, and the first campaign had the tagline which means avoid HIV.
And then following that, after some time, they introduced in Pango, a kind of campaign which had the tagline Phunya Subbu, which means count the cost.
In other words,
Bungoma condo or extramarital sex was seen as the only one way in which people could get infected and therefore to avoid risks of infection,
then people will adjust to stop having extra marital sex.
And what I want to do very quickly is to show just one clip on Pango a condom.
So perhaps before I do that too, just quickly give you the token because it is in Swahili.
So a man sleeping next to a woman in a hotel is startled by a voice of another man, a figment of his imagination.
The figment edges the man to avoid Punggol white candle and takes him through an itemised monthly spending on an
extramarital affair that totals to Aaravv $410 to emphasise that he spends almost all his money on his girlfriend.
The man's family is shown without any food and adequate clothing.
He urges the man to consider or calculate the cost of this affair against the benefits
of remaining and infected with HIV and being able to provide for his family.
The man now, having considered this quickly jumps out of bed.
The figment now invisible, loudly repeats the message.
Phunya has some watch Pango account. In other words, counting the cost.
Stop infidelity, at which the man hurriedly leaves the room without the knowledge of the still sleeping female partner.
Oh, etapa, the Muslims intercourse of the day or net negative, according it to go to the bathroom.
There somebody else, you're not quite here. Would you stop?
Okay, I'm with you. Alright, I felt done only to continue my policy to.
Convenient shopping phone. Not easily.
And what kind of city if you only got home, I don't think I do what I do by now.
Well, imagine you need to know when to when on ballet based on a female me.
About how that was all done last week help us and we to the 34000 kilo, whether or not it's a home confinement.
Because all came with an agenda of what to give a victory, both the you want to go on.
I don't. Following that failure has some, I think, public health, after a long time decided to now introduce a condom campaign for women,
in other words, US women who are in extramarital relationships to consider the benefits of using condoms.
So I'll quickly show one that was developed for women who are in extramarital relationships, somebody who is not very above a mission.
And before I do that, I'm sorry. I will quickly read so that you understand what I'm talking about and then theorise all those together to women.
Friends, Mama, Michelle and Prisca meet in a local open-air market in a somewhat filthy neighbourhood.
Priska asks mom and Michelle about her husband's well-being. To each moment,
Michelle responds with a conversation about her unhappiness in marriage because
her husband has become a habitual drunkard who spent all his time in bars.
Priska then ask her about her other partner or the Pango, a kind of boy referred to as mugwort, which they give each other I had is my mama.
Michelle tells Prisca that even though her husband no longer fulfilled her needs,
sexual needs and companionship, but did meet all these all these needs.
She goes on to tell Prisca that she and Beauvoir have known each other for a long time and are in love.
But what is brought into view in his shoe kiosk,
attending to a younger female customer with whom he is laughing indicates to the viewer as sexual network of HIV risk?
Preska, who now notices the interaction between VAWA and his customer, then turns to Mama Michelle and asks her whether they used condoms.
Mama Michelle's jovial face expression and interest in the conversation drop to signify that they did not.
Taking a cue from Mama Michelle's reaction, Prisca then advises her on the need to protect herself and though she loves her
children and the family who are shown around running in the market through condom use.
Mama Michelle at first looks surprised and at and at this advice,
and then uncomfortably manages a smile at her friend's houses after an evening shortcut.
Venerable Michelle Alexander Amen lower her dodgy Yandy working in the upper.
How about you live a little? Why, then, is it while you're looking at like a committee of women in other global stores?
Not to be nothing, but less than that.
Not for anatomy. A condom. Now you have not been looking.
Would you mind your coinage? Why would you choose?
We really don't know what being a sugar family and.
We'll start with a colloquy, Daniel Michael Sauer, Georgia Tech memoir What King Know What Happened a Week Ago by Gunning.
Their campaign provides a graphic illustration of how public health conceptualise is in frames.
HIV risks morality and gender relations in marriage.
I argue that it capitalised on extramarital sex to sell or impose a particular conception of societal organisation,
which I call individuals responsibility and morality.
This often contradicts the everyday moral reasoning that is informed by the social context and discourses that shape behaviour.
It also, at the same time drew from and contradicted local social and gender relations.
Moreover, by governing risks through techniques that are grounded in notions of sexual morality, rational choice and individual responsibility,
the campaign failed to account for how extramarital sex is produced and facilitated by the gendered structure of marriage and
how socio structural contexts and discourses shape decisions on extramarital sex and capacities to use or negotiate condom use.
This technique of risk management draws attention away from comprehensively promoting
gender equality and addressing other socio determinants that drive the epidemic.
And it may inadvertently entrench gender inequalities so gender inequalities and open married persons to new forms of vulnerability.
I want to move in this way.
I will first briefly discuss the campaign and talk about the moral discourse of the campaign and individual responsibility.
Their view of gender and women, while pointing out how this might entrench gender inequalities.
Then I will provide field data describing and analysing participants accounts of individuals or how they saw individuals marriage,
morality and structures that support infidelity within marriage.
I will mostly make use of data from the rural side while picking up some cases from the middle class couples in the city.
And then in summary, I will show how their views are the reasoning of the rural couples ever reinforced or contradicted public health,
conception of morality, marriage and individuals,
and thus the ways in which it produce disjunction between the programme expectations and actual behaviour,
and then conclude with implications for HIV, sexual morality and responsible behaviour.
A good deal of global HIV prevention practise as being organised is an appeal to a rational actor postulated as the good citizen.
This practise is based on the premise that providing individuals with information about how to avoid
a transmissible disease should lead to behaviour motivated by the desire to preserve one's health.
This market oriented logic of governance relies implicitly and explicitly on the values of self-determination, individualism and free competition.
The model of responsible management of risk in marriage is that a central premise?
Is that central to guide moral action?
Where to be good, healthy or dangerous is communicated through the language of risk or the ability to avoid risk.
In this case, or in the case of the campaign,
extramarital sex is seen as a consequence of an individual's immoral and dangerous behaviour for a healthy marriage.
The management or the governance of risk following Michel for cause ideas becomes a technique
of social control brought about by this market oriented logic of state and civil society,
or the global public health where responsibility and self-regulation are imposed or downloaded on the individual.
I think even when we talk about the role of the state as having the the bio power or the power
to control bodies when they govern risk in in the case of resource poor countries such as Kenya,
then we have to think about this vital power extends to international agencies
that really have the final say on the policies and the practises and programmes,
and that sometimes co-opt the agency of the state so that then the states do not
really have a say sometimes in the ways in which these programmes can be implemented,
driven by this global market logic of making individual actors responsible for their behaviour.
The Fidelity campaign isolates an individual who in the real world is in relationships with others and educates this person on morality.
It also imagines that a household is made up of only two individuals and that marriage
is the most critical and indeed the only site of intervention and social interactions,
while other sites are left out of consideration. So that, for example, in one video advertisement, which I have shown here,
were yet in one video advertisement that shows a woman in the company of female friends in a bar and the idea is important is a place of risk for HIV.
The friends are invisible when the HIV educator on the screen that is placed right in front
of the group of friends isolates only this woman and educates her on the need for fidelity.
Similarly, in another advert that shows a married man in bed with a woman,
the HIV educator only engages the man to consider the financial, social and emotional costs of an extramarital sexual relationship.
You remember the first video that I showed on the woman that is in bed with another man, so this woman is not important to this relationship.
It is just a month because because it because we are the programme or the campaign concentrates on.
In your person? Yeah. And disregards that this person is in relationship with others.
So the woman is left still covered under the blanket when the education is
given to the man as though this woman is not important to this relationship.
Yeah. Even to the relationship between this woman and this man and the wife who is shown at home waiting for the husband,
his female partner therefore remains hot under the blankets during this conversation,
and the man, now embarrassed at his own irresponsible, irrational behaviour, walks out of the room to go back to his wife and children.
Yet what I find is that inadvertently, this in fact might suggest and lead people to deny risky behaviour so that in fact,
a man who adequately provides for his family will not conceive of his relationship is risky.
Yeah, because the idea then is shown in the campaign is that the man needs to go back home and provide for the family.
So inadvertently or implicitly, it means that it is OK. Then as long as you provide for your family is sort of like then glorifies extramarital sex.
If you're able to fulfil your male provision, laws or headship, or yeah,
or provide that role at home through this conception of marriage, an individual whose practises,
characteristics and attributes are abstracted from context and wider social relations,
Public Health structured a script for social interaction and produced a framework for individual action.
It drew on an entrenched colonial and religious Christian religious discourses on a universal morality
that men and women should value a monogamous marriage and fidelity as morally good and healthy.
The moral discourse of responsibility heads devalues married persons who fail to protect themselves and situate them is morally inferior.
The focus on making individual men responsible or rational actors.
In fact, that's attribute infidelity to an innate pleasure seeking behaviour of men and unintentionally.
In fact, then it does reinforce the masculine norms that promote extramarital sex.
By portraying it as an innate pleasure seeking behaviour of men.
And how does the campaign frame men and women? It was also apparent that the campaign represented married women as victors or as well
as as transmitters of the disease to their partners or as victims of their husbands,
while on the one hand, the campaign's intent was to draw attention to women's vulnerability as victims of the husband.
On the other blamed women and accused them of transmitting the virus to their partners.
Moreover, its associated victimhood with Good Wife and economic disadvantage and the vector image with the wife or liar as such, in one video,
if you remember the video that I showed you on the man and the woman sleeping in one
room and the man leaves to quickly leave to go to his destitute wife and children?
In that video, the victim is the poor good wife who sits at home waiting for her provider husband,
who may infect her with HIV because he had an extramarital sexual affair.
In a different video in a box setting, the bad wife is depicted as a liar, and in fact, the HIV educator calls you liar.
You lied to your husband that you are going to meet with your female women's group.
But you went to the bar, and the campaign automatically assumes that while at the bar,
the woman will have sex with another man and take the virus home to the to their partner.
Indeed, the above video also does suggest that bar bars are permissible for men and perhaps and married women.
If you think and you see the video because this woman is isolated from her friends, she's therefore the married woman and the others are unmarried.
So the campaign doesn't thus portray the image that bars are permissible for men and perhaps unmarried women,
while the same clause is not permissible for women.
By so doing, it does draw on in support discourses that draw boundaries of gender and space, and that might exacerbate HIV risks.
And I was sure that in a short while at the same time by presenting the victor by.
Versus the victim, Good Wife images and representations of male provider.
The campaign does stigmatise the bad wife of female sexual behaviour.
Why would wife images might in fact make it difficult for women to negotiate safe sex?
Because doing so makes them look like they are bad women to solve women's vulnerability in marriage and women and
the vulnerable women are represented as women whose husbands spent time in bars and neglected their wives needs.
The campaign dismissed these husbands as drunkards and scripted infidelity for women
and educated them on the need for condom use in order to protect their families.
By so doing, it employed a paternalistic assumption that women never enter into extramarital relationships voluntarily,
but only as a result of being pushed by their husband's behaviour.
Implicitly, it portrayed some sort of revenge infidelity as a form of social empowerment for women whose husbands no longer meet their needs at home.
By promoting women's infidelity and dismissing the circumstances of the drunken husband,
the campaign contradicted its very mission of saving the marriage institution and solving gender inequalities.
Yet, as I found with research participants accounts public Howard's construction of responsibility, morality,
gender and sexual behaviour is located in individual subjects such and easily with the idea of sex and gender as relational matters.
It's sad and easily with views on extramarital sex and with the idea of individual and marriage as embedded in larger networks of
sociability that are implicated in producing and reproducing gender inequalities that mediate the sexual HIV risk within marriages.
That rational HIV prevention model also conflicted with forms of moral reasoning
and conceptions of risk that were constructed by participants socio context.
Now I want to talk about the participants social context by providing one village on one of the couples I interviewed,
and I do interview couples separately. I am a culprit.
See, in this person did so this.
So this vignette is from Moses and his wife mother.
I am a culprit. She wants to see his wife asks me to practise what I preach as a peer educator.
But the moment I hold the condom in my hands, read it. I lose my erection immediately.
Moses was a HIV educator for a US aid supported health programme in a private hospital in rural, and he, his wife,
mother and two teenage boys lived in a petri local residents with Moses, his mother in law, and his two married brothers.
They had a one acre piece of land that Moses inherited from his parents and on which they grew tea,
coffee and few food crops and kept some cows and chicken.
Mother did the household chores, worked on their farm and laboured in wealthier rural households to increase their family income.
Moses, like most men in the community, did not perform household chores because it would be embarrassing for a man to do that.
He also really worked on the farm. Instead, he operated a motorcycle taxi and worked as a peer educator to supplement income from the cash crop.
After attending to his day's work, Moses went to the loo,
to the local market and to bars in the evening to meet with his friends, as is common practise with many men in this community.
He referred to the markets in the bars as a market of bananas, referring to women where men went to pick bananas of their choice.
He frequently came back home late at night. Moses tested HIV positive in 2010.
His wife at the time of the interview was negative. There was therefore a discordant couple in public health language.
Moses was convinced that he had contracted HIV through extramarital sex, particularly through a woman he had kept as an outside wife.
When that when he left sorry, Moses was convinced that he had contracted HIV through extramarital sex,
particularly through a woman he had kept as an outside wife when he left home for about three years to seek employment.
He returned home to mother in 2009, when he started falling ill.
Though he was remorseful for bringing HIV into his. He continued to have extramarital affairs, citing a different reason.
He was not able to consistently use condoms with his wife.
In fact, at the time of the interview, he was in another relationship with the HIV positive woman he had met during his work is a peer educator.
Mother was suspicious of her husband's sexual behaviour, though she noted he had improved after learning of his HIV positive studies.
Her greatest challenge was convincing him to use condoms. This had on many occasions resulted in quarrels and brought tension between the two.
But she stayed on, citing her marriage vows in church and her children's welfare, as the narrative suggests.
Marriage is a structural context of opportunity for husbands and wives to behave in ways that validate their identities as male and female.
To be married is to enter a space that defines who does what.
Depending on one's sex,
and that each partner is expected to conform to the socially constructed norms and the division of marital labour in order to sustain a marriage.
This division and specialisation of marital labour.
Another one who does want where was more prominent in the rural area than amongst the middle class in the city.
Due to evolving and shifting gender norms amongst the middle class where you would find that some husbands could engage in some household tasks.
Thus, for instance,
in the rural community where most women like mother performed household tasks and labour on their farm and in other people's farms around their homes,
men could more easily engage in non-farm income activities such as motorcycle taxis and setting up shops and bars in the local markets.
These men from activities allowed men easier access to spaces outside the home.
Often, public and sexualised spaces such as bars, beds in the rural area and clubs, including many nightclubs within the city,
and that these places were associated with the likelihood of multiple partners and sexual encounters.
Notably, as the country continues to embrace a liberal market economy complemented by an increasing class of consumers and the
lining of sexual pleasure and desire spaces that provide a variety of sexual services largely targeting men have
mushroomed mostly in Arab men who can afford can choose from a range of lodgings in nightclubs and massage parlours and
strip clubs that were all implicated in Mutai patterning of important men's access to public and sexualised spaces,
and the ability to leave their homes more easily with than their wives intersected with their
relative economic advantage and a discourse of masculine norms that promoted extramarital sexuality,
a discourse of sexual prowess amongst the men and a discourse of control over women.
And this was very common when both men and women were telling me about men being
naturally polygamous and very many local idioms that support multiple partners.
And one of the very common ones is that a cock does not have one hen.
Yeah.
So that then to show that you have the ability and you are a person that is very virile is a man, then you have to have many, many hens as a cock.
This also intersected with a discourse often in peer networks, in MMA,
in markets and bars and clubs that encouraged multiple and emasculated or ridiculed men who did not engage in extramarital affairs.
Thus, extramarital sex was an important component for social acceptance into the male club and a condition for achieving successful masculinity.
And I think there's been a lot of literature around masculinity and then an HIV infection.
At the same time,
the structure of economic opportunities in post-colonial Kenya is one in which married men can more easily migrate for labour than women.
Yet this migration may place men in situations where they are likely to engage in extramarital affairs.
Moses, for example, emphasised that he had another woman as any man would when you migrated, and that is.
And cooked and cleaned for him. His ascension speaks not only to the social expectation about the division of
labour between men and women and to the expected motive for partnering with men.
But more importantly, I think it speaks to a larger structural issue that due to the persistent sexual division of labour of marital labour,
migration places men in settings where they may seek female partners well
outside wives is Moses called his partner to perform household tasks for them?
That is, to cook clean and to offer the comfort that you may have enjoyed back at home.
That's Moses is cohabiting relationship with his outside wife.
Exactly. Then mirrored his marriage back home.
On the other hand, I did find that middle class men emphasised more the need to mark male presence or to mark their territory,
often constructed as a man's conquest of women through having sex with men,
also with women when they migrated or travelled for work outside of the city.
And there's a difference between the rural and the middle class men was clearly as I interviewed
the middle class men was because they had the money to be able to take their clothes to laundry,
you know, and and they could also buy sex, you know, without having to have a living outside wife.
Yeah. And for the rural men, because they didn't have the money or the economic advantage to be able to do that,
then you have somebody who stays with you at home and does those things for you.
Does your laundry cleans for you? Yeah, but the middle class men can take their clothes to the laundry or if they're still living within the country,
they are able to travel back home every so often on the weekends and bring their own trays to their wives.
And it is wash and carry food for the week, you know, back to their places of work and dinner the following weekend when they come home.
So for them, it was really like a form of conquest to have sex with the women in the places where they migrated to,
rather than to have an outside wife and somebody who would be performing these domestic chores for the father.
Gender ideology that limits women to domestic spaces give rise to gendered leisure time that facilitated men's movement outside their homes.
However, because the middle class women were informal employment and had live in domestic workers who lessened their domestic responsibility,
this allowed them more free time and mobility than the rural women.
As such, while mother in the rural area went back to her domestic responsibilities after her day's work on the farm, Moses,
her husband, spent his evening time at the local town market or in the Badlands, which he called the market of bananas.
But this was not unusual amongst the middle class,
also because they did also spend part of their evenings in the weekends outside where their homes and in spaces,
in public spaces and sexualised spaces. This common phenomenon amongst the men was referred to as Kumar, or to come out very visibly.
The social sexual topography of particularly rural markets changed as married
women hurried back home in the evenings from the markets and the other daily work.
One week, while men did the coming out of homes to the market bars nightclubs until returning home much later in the evenings to eat and sleep,
some men came back home drunk. There were reports of violence between spouses regarding this male behaviour.
This persistent behaviour of coming out depicted a resistance to the idea of domestication,
where men would be assumed to be performing household chores if they stayed home in the evenings with their wives.
So to demonstrate their masculine identity and to show that they are not like women who did domestic chores,
then the coming out becomes very, very important.
In recent times, some rural marginalised men had begun coming out during the day because they were not engaged in any productive work.
This depicted a crisis of masculinity as rural men particularly lost their livelihoods and their abilities to provide,
and hence had no access to power structures that would enable them to fulfil their societal expectations to provide.
And we have to think about the shrinking farm sizes in the rural areas.
The effects of the structural adjustments that have continued to bite,
particularly are more marginalised populations and other neo-Liberal global processes
that have affected the prices and cash crop farming and the market prices,
which therefore have pushed people even further deeper down the economic ladder.
And that forces Arab men to remain unproductive during the day, men have small pieces of land that they think that the airwaves can take care of,
and therefore they have to find other things to engage themselves with.
So setting up small kiosks in the market centres that have mushroomed, particularly around coffee and tea factories.
Yeah. Or engaging in motorcycle taxis and where this is not available,
then you find a lot of men are coming out to go to other men's homes to go and drink beer there during the day and things like that.
Some men had adopted coming out to drink and to have sexual partnerships,
and violence is viable options to demonstrate their masculine characteristics for and this is very well demonstrated in their camp.
In one of the videos that I showed you, where public order refers to this man is and dismisses him is is a drunkard,
but then does not care about why this man is. It is a drunk because then they are bent on saving the woman.
Yet this is sexualised spaces that men often came out to, such as the bar.
Why not places where mostly rural women are allowed to visit?
Notably, the colonial construction of the bar in the beer is a male space for access to certain types of women.
Usually, the commercial sex workers or what most is, in fact, the market of bananas that these types of women are allowed in these spaces.
But the same was socially prohibited for respectable married women.
There would be labelled prostitutes and lose their decency.
However, shifting gender norms in the city have lesser prohibitions for married women into these spaces, though even in these spaces,
married women have to manage their reputations by, for example, being in the company of other female friends.
Even if you are in the company of your husband and people do not know who your husband is.
Then, though, we suspect that to be any other partner other than your husband.
And and that is clearly shown also in the video that I showed you where the campaign also assumes that as long as a married woman is in a bar,
then she will automatically engage in a sexual affair and will have sex and will take the virus home to their husband.
This maxim of boundaries or space and gender often meant that married women especially sorry married women, particularly rural women,
needed to seek their husbands permission to go to markets,
particularly in those markets that were farther away from home or to visit their friends and parents as heads of households.
Men did not seek permission and most often did not inform their wives of their whereabouts.
But is surveillance of women through these controlling ideologies and images of Good and Bad Wife was not just the concern of husbands,
it's extended to interpersonal relationships of kin and men key social networks in their communities.
Women who are expected to be, for example, insubordinate relationships with their in-laws.
Even this conflicted with their very own ideas and aspirations of an egalitarian, modern, modern marriage.
And if people, if you read or you miss book on making sense of Western gender discourses,
she does talk a lot about the ways in which relationships in Yoruba.
And I can speak that also for Kenya, organised by chronological chronological age.
As much as I think is one of the critiques of our book, they are also organised by gender relations.
And you find that when you are a woman that is married into a home,
then your subordinate, even to subordinate to the older persons who are in that room.
So that includes your mother in law and your sisters in law, and therefore you are under under the microscope,
observing your behaviour and often reporting that behaviour to your husband.
And that's what I am referring to as the surveillance of women is not just the preserve of their husbands,
but also of their in-laws, particularly in betrayal.
Local residences and so particularly mothers in law wasn't weird and exercised immense power over married women,
especially in rural patriarchal residences where there were frequent interactions with in-laws who surveilled and monitored married women's behaviour.
And this was different than the middle class, who in fact,
were all very happy to be in the opposed to marital neo local residences in the cities because it meant that they were
not under this kind of surveillance that monitored every movement and that would then report back to their husbands.
In addition, wives within a patriarchal residence and other women's networks within the community also
monitored each other's movement and were important for entrenching marital gender norms.
It's very often you see other women, you know, going to visit a fellow married woman to borrow, so you know, to borrow fire.
Yeah, and all will send a child to go and check if she is in.
And that becomes a way of monitoring because the next time women meet, then you have to explain sort of explain where you are.
I sent my child to your house and you are not there now. Where were you at that time?
Now, so all these ways of monitoring and surveilling where these married women women are.
So they all participate in in their own surveillance and monitoring of their behaviour.
And that's for sometimes it becomes a very good reason in terms of facilitating one
gender as extramarital sex or the subtext on limiting and monitoring women's movement in
spaces of access was that they are coming out to spaces outside the home was likely to
compromise their respectability and marriage because they might engage in infidelity.
Yet it also works to ensure that women did not know where their husbands were and what they were doing.
So in other words, then or in this case this past year,
limitation and surveillance of women becomes a facilitating factor for men to engage if they wish.
In other sexual affairs,
because their wives cannot see them because they are limited and surveilled and their movement is very controlled in their homes.
Often, all men talked about. There are difficulties of using condoms,
condoms represented a potential disruption of a man's ability to perform sexually and to address
a potential barrier for some men to demonstrate sexual capacity and achieve the masculine norm.
Moses pointed out this inability to sustain an action when you used a condom with his HIV negative wife, thereby putting at risk of infection.
As a result, he adopted how he opted to have an affair with an HIV positive woman.
He thus declared himself a culprit for being an HIV appointed peer educator but not participating in what he preached.
But women were not just victims of men. Neither did they simply adopt revenge.
Infidelity is implicitly implied in the campaign.
They do not just adopt this revenge infidelity when husbands failed to meet their needs.
They contested infidelity. Middle-Class women talked about researching what their husbands tracking them,
hiring people to track their husband's movement, checking on their phones.
They confronted their husbands. They appealed for support from in-laws they reported to local chiefs.
They publicly shamed a husband who was suspected of having an affair in the market but temporarily left their marital home,
especially if it became physically violent, because sometimes it did.
However, all these were difficult choices to make because they had implications for women's respectability as women, as wives and as mothers.
So that, for instance,
mothers spoke about her fears of losing her reputation as a Christian wife and the possible loss of her children to support if she left her marriage.
Notably, in the rural area, the institutional practises of the cash crop industries,
both tea and coffee favoured men in income and credit access and create a context of women's dependency on men.
However, it seemed that economic empowerment was the only motivation to leave a marriage.
It was linked to wider considerations of meanings of woman, wife, mother and respectability for both rural and middle class women.
However, some women were complicit in their husband's extramarital affairs to protect their marriages reputation in children.
Some accepted the idea of men as naturally polygamous and adopted silent and many other women adopted practise.
Though I think it is possible to see prayer as a way of also contesting infidelity, complicity was also intertwined with ideas of romance,
intimacy and consumption as contemporary ideas about romantic love and intimacy as foundations of marriage thrive.
They are powerfully intertwined with consumerism and expectations for men to meet consumption needs, particularly amongst the middle class.
Some women expected husbands to spend money on luxury as birthday parties, dinners,
vacations, gifts in addition to household provision as expressions of love and intimacy.
Some women conceptualise their husbands as faithful based on these provide provide a love.
Middle class men did meet their responsibility to provide and spend intimate time with their wives and children on vacations,
parties and dinners is expected of them.
While some kept extramarital affairs contrary to public Howard's paternalistic assumption that women were coerced into extramarital affairs,
participants did suggest that women might also voluntarily enter into these relationships as a result of evolving gender and sexual norms,
and that if this did happen, it was more likely to happen amongst middle class women who had fewer domestic responsibilities,
greater mobility due to their careers and the anonymous nature of the city than the rural area where relationships were more homogeneous.
Where everybody, you know, knew I knew each other,
where women were really constrained by their domestic responsibilities because they
did not have domestic workers and where women just worked around their homes.
Yeah, compared to middle-class women who also travelled, who also worked within the city and therefore had greater level of mobility.
Further, as the consumerist ideology circulates in both rural and urban areas,
there were suggestions that women might also make the vulnerable consideration
of using their sexual their sexuality as a kind of currency to either provide,
provide for their families or to move into or maintain a middle class status.
So that's the story from my partners now. What?
Might my participants see what all these data suggest is that participants drew on a broader concept of social risk?
That explained behaviours that public Howard sees as unhealthy and educated,
irrational and immoral within the individualistic and biomedical conceptualisation of risk.
Such a risk explains how married women and men seen is at risk of HIV pragmatically
rationalise their behaviour within the gendered structure of marriage,
which may be more significant and consequential to their daily lives.
Perhaps more than the biological risk of HIV, that's for example.
Men engaged in extramarital affairs is a key path to masculine status,
so the discourses of men being naturally polygamous, the sexual pro, the control over women.
Yeah, so men engage in extramarital affairs is a path to achieve this masculine status.
They came out of their homes and to public spaces,
to sexualised spaces to avoid emasculation and exclusion by their peers for
creating perceptions of domestication and being subordinated to the airwaves.
Men who migrated may have an outside wife to perform domestic chores for them and for sexual needs, and to conform to culture and male expectations.
Men provided for their families and showed their commitment to their wives by keeping their extramarital affairs secret.
Men did not use condoms because it impeded its pivot or might impede that desire to demonstrate their competence during sexual intercourse.
To these individuals, conforming to expected male is to avoid the social risk of emasculation and exclusion,
make them rational, moral and acceptable men in the society.
Additionally,
women challenged their husbands infidelity became complicit or indeed might engage or engaged in infidelity based on the meanings of wife,
husband, mother, passive consumption, romance and intimacy.
Their decisions were not just individual choices,
but were based on an interpretation and negotiation of the cultural, socio moral and material context.
Contrary to the campaign's representation of gender,
this data also suggests that gender is not an individual level characteristic that can just be easily changed by educating an individual.
Rather,
the influence of masculinity and femininity and the interplay within and between them manifest within relations and interactions amongst couples,
family members and peers to influence behaviours in the youth and in this case, held behaviours and outcomes.
This also suggests that really that the notions of who an individual is, they are,
or the notions of personhood constructed through networks of social relationships,
which will vary with class and age and geography and other structures that are specific to those contexts.
Similarly, while marriage is a key state in which gender is produced and reproduced,
it is not an isolated set of individuals, but it is embedded in collective networks.
There are implicated in the construction of gender.
Marriage is a structure that is deeply implicated in reproducing and facilitating extramarital sex.
For example, I have highlighted the intersecting factors of marital relations, of segregation,
of spaces of cultural norms, of masculinity and femininity, gendered leisure time and mobility,
economic advantage, cost growth of sexualised spaces, the social construction and learning of sexual pleasure and desire,
amongst others, as important opportunity structures for facilitating extramarital sex.
So that, for instance, when you think about the intersections of these structures that I have pointed out,
spaces of sexual risk may be viewed as material manifestations of gendered economic organisation.
The men spending time in bars are there because they have fewer domestic responsibilities, they have greater mobility,
they have more access to public and sexualised spaces, or they can come out of their homes and go to places without needing permission.
And often times they have greater access to financial resources than their wives does.
It becomes important to understand extramarital sexual behaviour as both produced
by that social structure and a necessary component of the political economy,
rather than immorality or lack of education.
In fact,
ignoring these connexions may marginalised a group of women assumed to be educated and socially and economically empowered the middle class women.
So that, for example, as I say, if you consider the intersections of romance and consumption and provision,
this more affects the middle class women who who.
I think that because their husbands are providing funding holidays and vacations, I give you all these gifts to them into their children.
They conceive of their relationships as very, very faithful.
On the other hand, when I speak to the men, yes, they are happy to provide because it does meet their society expectations to provide.
But at the same time, they also show this their commitment to their wives by keeping their extramarital sex relationship very,
very secret from their wives. So in that sense, what the women are thinking that because my husband's provides for these material needs,
yeah, that I have, then my relationship is very, very faithful.
On the other hand, really, it is not. And what has happened over time is that because the middle class seem to be educated and rational,
yeah, then public health really does not focus on the middle class.
The concentration has been on the poor rural couples or even urban poor couples.
Yeah, those are the ones that lack education. They are the ones that are not economically empowered and therefore do need this so that they can
also achieve and realise a middle class status so that they are able to make rational decisions.
So that confusion really marginalises a group of people that is also very much
at risk of HIV infection because public health sees them is already a rational,
educated group. The premise of the campaign, I think,
has yet to be realised given the reported white practise of extramarital sex and indeed the reality of the campaign by the public.
One of the things that I haven't mentioned is the ways in which the Pongo scandal campaign became the everyday discourse to date in this campaign.
As I say, it began in the two thousand and eleven and now 2009 and eight, and today in a candle is a most commonly used.
The phrase in the local multiple partner in discourse is radio call in programmes, TV stations.
I was speaking about how to make your mom more control, work better, how to deal with and how to deal with your wife.
Is that everything you ask anybody about?
So people appropriated that term and actually made it part of their popular everyday discourse about multiple partners.
And for me, I see that as as part of their rejection of the public message.
So as I have said that given the reported white practise of extramarital sex today and the rejiggering of the campaign,
then the premise of the campaign has yet to be realised.
The disjuncture between the campaign and sexual behaviour of married persons is not because individuals are irresponsible,
immoral or lacked knowledge on HIV, but because they employed other conceptions of risk and morality than those desired by the campaign,
and because their individual behaviour was an attempt to fit into behavioural norms of the agenda.
While it is not deniable that the campaign may discourage some people from engaging in extramarital sex,
the neoliberal market logic of governing HIV through behaviour change model characterises
the dominant morality of modern times that ostensibly avoids questions of local social and
gender structures and questions of welfare provision in favour of changing how people socially
organise themselves through delivery information and imposing individual responsibility.
Yet understandings of how people make choices, how the agency may be constrained even though agency is important.
But how do structures actually constrain or how are they so powerful and forceful?
Sometimes how people define risks and morality,
and that intersectional gendered opportunities that arise to produce and facilitate extramarital
sexuality together make up the scenarios in which risk is constructed and managed?
Thank you.