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| The Secret
ISBN: 9780826516848
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Vanderbilt University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: HIV infections; Husbands; Marital conflict; Adultery; Marriage;
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2010
For many women around the world, their greatest risk of HIV infection comes from having sex with the very person with whom they are supposed to have sex: their spouse. The Secret situates marital HIV risk within a broader exploration of marital and extramarital sexuality in five diverse settings: Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, and Papua New Guinea. In these settings, the authors write, men's extramarital sex is an officially secret but actually widespread (and widely acknowledged) social practice, rather than something men do because their bodies demand it and women can't stop them.
Drawing on research conducted as part of an innovative comparative ethnographic study, and modeling a novel approach to collaborative anthropological scholarship, the authors show men's extramarital sex to be a fundamental aspect of gendered social organization. Through theoretically sophisticated yet lucid writing and vivid ethnographic description, drawing on rich data from the marital case studies conducted by research teams in each country, they trace how extramarital opportunity structures, sexual geographies, and concerns about social risk facilitate men's participation in extramarital sex. Also documented throughout is the collision between traditional ways and the new practices of romantic companionate marriage.
Jennifer S. Hirsch , Associate Professor of Sociomedical Sciences in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, is the author of A Courtship after Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families and co-editor of two recent volumes on the comparative anthropology of love.
Holly Wardlow , Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, is the author of Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society.
Daniel Jordan Smith , Associate Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University, is the author of A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria.
Harriet Phinney is a lecturer at Seattle University.
Shanti Parikh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis.
Constance A. Nathanson , Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences and Professor of Population and Family Health in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, is the author of Disease Prevention as Social Change and Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women's Adolescence. |
