Defining Agency and Vulnerability: PEPFAR and the Role of Women in HIV/AIDS Prevention

Abstract

Are the responsibilities of women and men in public policies addressing HIV/AIDS represented differently in policy language? Could these distinctions correlate with different outcomes for female beneficiaries of HIV/AIDS policy programs? Using interpretive policy analysis, this paper examines gendered responsibility narratives in public policy. We performed a mixed methods analysis of the publicly available documents from the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), to determine differences in description of responsibility language around HIV according to gendered categories. We found that gendered responsibility narratives are pervasive across the body of PEPFAR documents and that two discourses concerning women's responsibility-women as problems and women as vulnerable-and two dominant discourses about male roles-men as violent aggressors and men as absentee-dominate the policy narratives. Our intent in this analysis is to deepen understanding of the role of gendered narratives as fostering differences in meaning that may or may not contribute to disparities in HIV/AIDS policy outcomes.