In some parts of South Africa, more than one in three people are HIV positive. Love in the Time of AIDS explores transformations in notions of gender and intimacy to try to understand the roots of this virulent epidemic. By living in an informal settlement and collecting love letters, cell phone text messages, oral histories, and archival materials, Mark Hunter details the everyday social inequalities that have resulted in untimely deaths. Hunter shows how first apartheid and then chronic unemployment have become entangled with ideas about femininity, masculinity, love, and sex and have created an economy of exchange that perpetuates the transmission of HIV/AIDS. This sobering ethnography challenges conventional understandings of HIV/AIDS in South Africa.

The facts of life have never been more complicated for gay men. While the threat of AIDS has been diminished by new treatments and longer life expectancy, HIV remains a serious and intractable foe. In this affirming guide, therapist Michael Mancilla, himself HIV-positive, helps fellow gay men, both single and partnered, pursue the happy and fulfilling love life they deserve. Readers will find advice on everything from meeting Mr. Right and talking about HIV status to building the long-term relationships that many never expected to have. Candid first-hand accounts reveal how others in the community are negotiating safer sex, overcoming legal and financial hurdles to plan for the future, learning to accept care as well as give it, and crafting the kinds of intimate relationships they want, whether that means casual sex, dating, or permanent commitment. Smart, honest, and insightful, this book is written from the heart.

In this timely, insightful, and darkly funny investigation, the acclaimed author of Against Love asks: what does living in dystopic times do to our ability to love each other and the world? COVID-19 has produced new taxonomies of love, intimacy, and vulnerability. Will its cultural afterlife be as lasting as that of HIV, which reshaped consciousness about sex and love even after AIDS itself had been beaten back by medical science? Will COVID end up making us more relationally conservative, as some think HIV did within gay culture? Will it send us fleeing into emotional silos or coupled cocoons, despite the fact that, pre-COVID, domestic coupledom had been steadily losing fans? Just as COVID revealed our nation to itself, so did it hold a mirror up to our relationships. In Love in the Time of Contagion, Laura Kipnis weaves (often hilariously) her own (ambivalent) coupled lockdown experiences together with those of others and sets them against a larger backdrop: the politics of the virus, economic disparities, changing gender relations, and the ongoing institutional crack-ups prompted by #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, mapping their effects on the everyday routines and occasional solaces of love and sex.

The crisis created by HIV/AIDS in health services, medical science and the everyday lives of families and communities is well known. Yet despite growing awareness, the pandemic continues; and research shows that the proportion of women among those newly infected is growing everywhere in the world. Young women now account for two-thirds of new infections among people between 15 and 24. What is becoming ever clearer is that where women's social, economic and cultural status is low, they are more likely to become infected with HIV and pass the virus on to others. Vividly recounting the stories of women in many countries, this book shows how the AIDS crisis makes improving the status of women not only a matter of theology and ethics but of health and survival. That in turn challenges churches, which often justify and even collude with forces that subordinate women, to change attitudes and visions and to undertake creative new initiatives in their ministries of healing and hope.

How do modern women in developing countries experience sexuality and love? Drawing on a rich array of interview, ethnographic, and survey data from her native country of Kenya, Sanyu A. Mojola examines how young African women, who suffer disproportionate rates of HIV infection compared to young African men, navigate their relationships, schooling, employment, and finances in the context of economic inequality and a devastating HIV epidemic. Writing from a unique outsider-insider perspective, Mojola argues that the entanglement of love, money, and the transformation of girls into Òconsuming womenÓ lies at the heart of womenÕs coming-of-age and health crises. At once engaging and compassionate, this text is an incisive analysis of gender, sexuality, and health in Africa.

Jessica Glaspie takes us on a wild ride of emotional adventures in this novel. Best known for her HIV advocacy efforts, she journeys through the shock of testing positive for HIV at the tender age of 22. This story recollects what life was like before, during, and after her diagnosis. Follow Jessica as she takes us to depths she has never gone before, proving that she is more than her HIV status. This memoir discusses issues such as the importance of mental health, coping with grief, and the positive impacts of self-love and self-care. Utilizing her journals from 2007 to the present-day, she surfaces real, raw emotions, giving a unique perspective about life and love with HIV.

The JAWS HIV/AIDS readers aim to instil the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that will enable our children to conquer the pandemic that is sweeping through our world.