Endangered relations: negotiating sex and AIDS in Thailand

"This book is about disease and culture. HIV and AIDS are having profound impacts on contemporary life in Thailand, raising complex issues with far reaching implications for Thai people and the broader global context. 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 manoeuvres to control the threat of HIV infection mesh with local understandings of identity and sexuality, setting 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 AIDS in Thailand. Endangered Relations offers a unique perspective on the complicated ways that disease in negotiated in cultural, political and human terms."