Upcoming
Tuesday, April 15
Social Medicine Commons Forum
What's in a Condom? HIV and Sexual Politics in Japan
Presenter:
Elizabeth Miller, Massachusetts General Hospital
Tosteson Medical Education Center
Room 227
Harvard Medical School
12:30-1:45 p.m.
Miller, a medical anthropologist and pediatrician, conducted fieldwork in the early nineties on the social dimensions of HIV in Japan. Her ethnographic research included working as an AIDS hotline counselor and bar hostess, and interviewing Southeast Asian women who had been trafficked into Japan's sex industry, health bureaucrats, doctors, activists, and various participants in the entertainment industry.
In this talk, she will review the early history of HIV in Japan, with a critical focus on "foreign women" as the official explanation for HIV disease in Japan. She will discuss the trafficking of women from other countries into Japan's sex industry and the ways in which such violence against women has been erased in official approaches to the spread of HIV in Japan.