Women's Health in Canada: Critical Perspectives on Theory and Policy

“As the pandemic enters its third decade, making useful sense of how to address women’s experiences of HIV/AIDS remains a challenging task.” - Meredith Raimondo

Ed: Marina Morrow

This week’s readings were particularly useful. They helped bring together a lot of concepts that have come up over the course of the readings and put them into a Canadian context. They highlighted the interconnectedness of different elements of both the disease and debates surrounding it. This is particularly true in terms of understandings of gender, which was discussed in the introduction; the role poverty plays in conceptualizations of health in Canada in the Reid chapter and the impact of HIV/AIDS on women in the chapter by Meredith Raimondo.

The introduction of the text addresses the debates around the concepts of gender and sex as social and biological terms. An interesting point made in the reading is the fact that gender refers not only to men and women but also to the relationship between them. Added to that is the placement of transgendered, transsexual and others that exist beyond the binaries of male/female. Women’s health is Canada is not as simple as one might think.

The reading focused on women and HIV/AIDS was especially beneficial. As the quotation above hints at, addressing women’s experiences in the AIDS pandemic is what’s being talked about at this point. The debate is only beginning now in terms of the disease as it relates specifically to women. This means that addressing forms of gendered treatment and prevention may still be overlooked. The same tension I talked about in my earlier posts regarding theory and practice in dealing with HIV/AIDS appears in Raimondo’s discussion of women and the disease.

This reading also supplies some of the statistics to back up what I’ve been inferring about women and HIV/AIDS since the beginning: that women are at risk of HIV/AIDS at an increasing rate. According to the reading there was a 48 percent increase in the number of Canadian women living with HIV from 1996 to 1999 and those numbers have continued to rise (386). The percentage of women among newly reported diagnoses also grew steadily from 2001 to 2003 (386).

The final idea that was introduced in this reading and that I expect to follow up on during my research is the concept of vulnerability. Vulnerability, in the context of women’s health and HIV/AIDS, is based on the idea that the social implications of being female make women uniquely vulnerable to contracting HIV/AIDS. It is essentially a concept of vulnerability as it stems from social factors, it “…emphasizes the social factors shaping the AIDS pandemic,” (390). Raimondo also notes that ethinicity, race, class and age are also important distinctions that shape rates of HIV infection in women.

This highlights an important point that was brought up a number of times in the course of these readings, which is the fact that gender is intertwined with other factors that all work in conjunction to impact women’s health. Raimondo writes that “while genders is clearly a factor in social vulnerability, it is not the only, or in some cases, the most important factor,” (392). She adds, “An attention to vulnerability requires attention to the complex contexts of women’s lives,” (392), this is an important point to make and one that I have tried to remain aware of in the context of this course.

Women, including black women, have specific circumstances in which they live their lives and taking those into account are necessary when trying to understand how a disease like HIV/AIDS impacts them as a group. Life is complex as is this disease, which means while doing research as it relates to women and HIV/AIDS, it is important to always be sensitive to those realities. The challenge of this project will be to keep these in mind throughout the process because it is very easy to oversimplify and gloss over things for the sake of getting to the heart of the story.