A New Look At Thai Aids: Perspectives From The Margin

For eighteen years, Thailand's HIV/AIDS was routinely depicted as the worlds' fastest moving AIDS epidemic up until the early 2000s when the bulk of scholarly and medical literature portrayed it as being largely under control, and thus Thai anti-AIDS efforts over the decade of the 1990s as a success story. The author takes a critical look at the development of AIDS and at the analyses, which were generated over this period, of its nature, and comes to the conclusion that the "problem" of Thai AIDS has been constructed so as to legitimate specific forms of gender and class-based interventions. He argues that perceptions of the Thai AIDS epidemic are influenced by a class-based paternalism and a western middle-class morality, and that many of the "health" interventions this has engendered are in essence little more than attempts in the exercise of power through covert measures of class control in the guise of behavioural surveillance, and through attempts to redraw the moral boundaries of Thai society in the guise of behavioural modification programs. The book offers a sustained and powerful criticism of the normative modeling of the Thais AIDS epidemic in order to elicit new and more effective points of intervention. It speaks not only to the Thai AIDS epidemic but also to AIDS epidemics throughout Buddhist Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Workers in the Thai AIDS sphere are just coming to the realization that the Thai AIDS epidemic is not, in fact, under control, and that there is a massive subterranean AIDS epidemic amongst middle-class youth, an issue addressed directly by this work. The only study based on original research in Northern Thailand and drawing on the breadth of indigenous Thai language (and some Khmer language) materials, this is a timely publication that will find interest with scholars and professionals working in wide variety of fields.