Endangered Relations

Book excerpt: HIV and AIDS are having a profound impact on contemporary life in Thailand, generating complex issues with far-reaching implications for both the Thai people and on a global level. AIDS has become an increasingly prominent symbol of modernity in Thailand, yet ways of dealing with AIDS and HIV draw on time-honoured understandings of fate and misfortune, disease and contagion, gender and pollution. Endangered Relations provides a crucial analysis of how public health has attempted to control the threat of HIV infection, and how this has combined with local understandings of identity and sexuality; it sets in place a broad range of personal and social responses to the ongoing epidemic. An illuminating study of the way in which Thai social relations, and in particular Thai sexualities, shape the history of HIV and AIDS in Thailand, Endangered Relations offers a unique perspective on the complicated ways that disease is negotiated in cultural, political, and human terms.