Sexual violence in the Congo

In class today, we viewed the first 30 minutes of The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, a 76-minute documentary that debuted earlier this year. See my blog post from last semester for links to more information about the film and the filmmaker, Lisa Jackson.

As I noted in class, this film is important because it pulls together several themes of the course and connects us in a personal way to the suffering of rape victims in the DRC. It also draws attention to the ongoing conflict in the DRC, which has only begun to catch the attention of the mainstream media in the U.S. during the last few weeks.

I invite you to share your thoughts on the excerpt of the film we viewed today. How did you react to the stories of the men and women featured in the film? What differences and similarities did you observe between the people in the film and the filmmaker or other victims of sexual violence in the U.S.? What responsibility, if any, do you feel for the situation in the DRC? Do you think about your cell phone differently now? Do you think most Americans know enough about the war in the Congo or its causes and consequences? How does the film relate to our earlier discussion of structural violence and global health? Other thoughts?

Missing masturbation slides

If you were in class today, you know I wasn’t having a good technology day. Among other things, I was missing a batch of slides about masturbation. You can now see those slides here. The slides don’t capture everything I would have said in lecture, but you’ll get the idea.

ANT 2301 – Masturbation
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: masturbation sexuality)

South Africa: How Safe is Traditional Circumcision?

maleIn South Africa, a debate about the practice of male circumcision provides a thought-provoking addendum to this week’s assigned reading. In certain groups, such as the Xhosa, South African men around 18 years of age enter into a month of seclusion with other members of their age group for an initiation consisting of traditional method circumcision and the imparting of teachings. Participation is prevalent among both rural and urban dwellers as this is the critical step in being considered a man and readied for marriage. Although defended for cultural significance, male circumcision practices are contested publicly for health concerns such as irreparable damage to the penis, infections leading to death, and the transmission of HIV via the cutting instrument.

Insightful participants’ points of view are on-line as are photos. One Xhosa man writes: “The option of staying uncircumcised is impractical if you live among Xhosas because they won’t take you seriously. Even in his book Long Walk To Freedom, Nelson Mandela comments on how a Xhosa man who has not been circumcised is a paradox, because he is still viewed as a boy.”

In recent articles, Lousie Vincent reports:

“Ritual male circumcision is among the most secretive and sacred of rites practiced by the Xhosa of South Africa. Recently, the alarming rate of death and injury among initiates has led to the spotlight of media attention and government regulation being focused on traditional circumcision. While many of the physical components of the ritual have been little altered by the centuries, its cultural and social meanings have not remained unchanged…”
Vincent, L. “‘Boys will be boys’: traditional Xhosa male circumcision, HIV and sexual socialisation in contemporary South Africa.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 10.5 (June 2008): 431-446.

“Since 1995 more than 6,000 boys have been admitted to Eastern Cape hospitals, more than 300 have died and 76 have had their genitalia amputated due to botched circumcisions. The state has responded by putting in place a variety of mechanisms to regulate the practice, most recently in the form of the 2005 Children’s Bill which gives male children the right to refuse circumcision and makes those who circumcise a child against his will guilty of an offense punishable by imprisonment. Attempts by the state to regulate traditional practices have been met with outrage and resistance in some quarters.

Rituals are commonly identified as mechanisms contributing to social order in all societies, maintaining the organization of groups into hierarchies, specifying the performance of roles linked to factors such as age and gender, renewing group unity and a means for the transmission of values across generations. But in a society so deeply penetrated by colonialism, apartheid and industrialization, as South Africa is, what role do these rites play in the contemporary context?…”
Vincent, L. “Cutting Tradition: the Political Regulation of Traditional Circumcision Rites in South Africa’s Liberal Democratic Order.” Journal of Southern African Studies 34.1 (Mar. 2008): 77-91.

Notably, other southern African tribes do not have a tradition of male circumcision at any time in the life cycle. And it is recently announced that male circumcision may reduce the transfer of HIV from women to men by 60%, an important finding for a global area with extremely high infection rates.
Discussion: Considering the particpants’ and scholar’s comments, what is your take on this issue? How should one (or the state) balance concerns for human welfare with respect for critical traditional practices? What if you were the parent of a boy of Xhosa heritage, how would you decide whether to go through with this ritual?

Gender, race, and skin color

In class yesterday, we took a short detour into a discussion about the intersection of gender, race, and skin color in the United States. One student in particular raised the issue of how skin color differences matter for African American men and women in the United States. Apparently others wanted to chime in: Two anonymous students have posted comments about skin color and gender in response to another blog post.

If you have something else to add, please join the discussion.

Update: A recent episode of the NPR program, News & Notes, featured an in-depth discussion of the links between skin color, race, and beauty: “Mixed Race, Pretty Face?”

Sex and evolution: companion web site

In class today we watched Why Sex?, a film from the seven-part PBS series on evolution. PBS has produced a companion website where you can review some of the key lessons of the film and explore more about the relationship between sex and evolution.

In particular, I encourage you to read Matt Ridley’s essay, The Advantages of Sex. How do Ridley’s arguments relate to assigned readings from last week?

You can also search the Evolution Library at the PBS site to find excerpts from the film, including segments on the Red Queen, songbird infidelity, sweaty t-shirts and human mate choice, and chimpanzee and bonobo sex.

What did you understand to be the key lessons of the film? Are there particular points that you found interesting, compelling, or overstated?

Sexual violence in the Congo

The Greatest SilenceIn class today, we screened the first half hour of The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, a new documentary that debuted on HBO earlier this week. The film and filmmaker, Lisa Jackson, were also featured in a story on NPR this week, in the Washington Post last week, and in the New York Times last fall before the film was shown at the Sundance festival in January.

It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t watch the full 76 minutes, but I encourage you to catch it on HBO or grab the DVD when it comes out. As I suggested in class, the film is valuable not only because it puts a human face on the suffering and survival of Congolese women but also because it connects us to their story. First, because Jackson weaves in her own story of having experienced gang rape, it allows us to see the common inhumanity of sexual violence across radically different cultural and political contexts. Second, the film draws out the linkages between our society and a forgotten war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As Jackson said in a hearing before the U.S. Senate, referring to foreign extraction of coltan from the DRC, “Everyone in this room should consider the fact that there is the blood of Congolese women on their laptop computers and on their cellphones.”

What are your reactions to this film?

See the world differently

Worldmapper: HIV PrevalenceA few students have asked for more information about the maps I showed in class to visualize the global distribution of sexually transmitted infections, poverty, and violence. The maps, like this one showing HIV prevalence, come from worldmapper.org, a project of researchers at the University of Sheffield and the University of Michigan. See the full index of available maps here.

You can also read more about the Worldmapper project in a recent article from PLoS Medicine, an open-source, peer-reviewed journal.

Food insecurity, structural violence, and HIV

In class today, I discussed a study published in 2007 on the links between food insufficiency, sexual behavior, and HIV transmission in Botswana and Swaziland. I cited the links between undernutrition, food insecurity, and HIV as an example of how structural violence constrains and influences individual behavior and well being.

If you’d like to learn more about this study, check out this interview with Sheri Weiser, M.D., lead author on the study and assistant adjunct professor of medicine at UC-San Francisco.

How, if at all, does this study—or our discussion in class—change your thinking about the causes of the AIDS epidemic? What other factors do you think need to be addressed? How useful do you find the concept of structural violence for making sense of global inequalities in health?

“Polyamory” and the Internet

Last week we learned that polygamy, or plural marriage, exists in many societies around the world. This week we discussed how changes in technology alter the experience and expression of sexuality. Those two themes come together in a recent commentary from Wired, which suggests that polyamorous relationships are on the rise in America, in part due to social networking outlets on the Internet that offer new ways of interacting with similarly minded people. From the Wired piece:

While having multiple committed partners is not a new concept, many polyamorists have told me they felt lost, guilty, alone or freakish until they came across the word polyamory on the internet and for the first time had a context for the way they felt about love.

“You can argue that before the internet, the poly community didn’t exist,” says Franklin Veaux, author of What, Like, Two Girlfriends?, a respected polyamory FAQ. “There’s no question that the rise of the internet and the rise of polyamory coincided, although poly does predate the net by 6,000 years or so.”

Polyamory may not be a new practice, but the concept is probably new to most Americans, and relatively few research papers have been published on the subject. What do you see as the benefits and difficulties of a polyamorous lifestyle? If you could have two partners consent to such an arrangement, would you be interested? What moral or ethical issues does polyamory raise for you?

Hand job humor and gender

Two weeks ago the Voices of American Sexuality blog drew attention to a YouTube video that makes light of a hand job. As they say, “hand jobs are funny.” But notice how this particular joke plays on our expectations about gender.

The set up for the joke is funny in part because it contradicts gender stereotypes. The man is fretful and talkative; the woman is gruff and insensitive. The punch line finally releases the tension (so to speak) by appealing to traditional stereotypes. No matter what else is on a man’s mind, it suggests, he’s always ready to be . . . distracted.

Think about it: would this joke have been funny at all if the woman couldn’t sleep and the man offered a helping hand?

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