Description: Rooted in the lives and experiences of women living with HIV and AIDS in Tanzania, Risky Marriage: HIV and Intimate Relationships in Tanzania uses qualitative fieldwork with HIV positive women to ask why marriage is an HIV risk factor. Beginning with women's experience as a he...
Review Quotes:
"Melissa Browning's account of risky marriages is a subtle and accessible theological and ethical discussion of marriage as a central institution and the challenges it faces in an HIV/AIDS world in Tanzania. The discussion is animated by a critical dialogue on themes like gender, the body, sexuality, culture, economy, violence, power, and religion that have contributed to making marriage risky for women, yet offers prospects for egalitarian and ethical relationships if depatriachalized. This book offers a wonderful balance between theology, ethics, and pastoral insights that must probe sexual ethics at time of stress and engage in practices that would promote human flourishing." --Elias K. Bongmba, Rice University
"Melissa Browning encourages 'faithful listening' to women as she advocates for a safer space within marriage for both women and men who are dealing with the glaring reality of HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. This book also addresses other realities in their struggle, such as the vulnerability of women and girls to HIV; real experiences of women living with HIV and AIDS; and the challenges attributed to cultural and religious expectations linked to sex and marriage. Based on relevant theories, Risky Marriage: HIV and Intimate Relationships in Tanzania examines the history of Africa and calls for collective responsibility towards re-imagining, re-framing and re-thinking perspectives for a more realistic response to HIV and AIDS, coming from a Christian perspective." --Mary Getui, Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Nairobi "Insisting that marriage must be recreated as a safe space for women, Melissa Browning employs an interdisciplinary, multi-vocal and intercultural space for HIV+ Tanzanian married women to tell their stories. In doing so, her book centralizes HIV+ women's bodies as authoritative texts for re-imagining marriage and finding effective ways of HIV prevention. This book proposes that listening to the stories of married women living with HIV can assist the Christian Church to shift its focus from narrow sexual-based ethics towards developing a theo-ethical framework of social-justice based ethics in the engagement with the epidemic." --Musa W. Dube, Emory University