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Shanti A. Parikh is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology
at Washington University in St. Louis where she holds a
joint position in African and Afro-American Studies and
an affiliation with the Medicine and Society Program. Her
research and teaching focus on the intersection of sex,
gender, and power, and the political economy of sexual and
reproductive health. She has employed ethnographic and historical
methods to investigate various aspects of sexuality, HIV/AIDS
and globalization in Uganda, specifically the ways in which
competing notions of sexual propriety, morality, love, and
gender intersect, diverge, and conflict as various players
attempt to define what it means to be a healthy modern sexual
citizen.
Professor Parikh received her PhD from the Department of
Anthropology at Yale University (December 2000). She is
currently working on a manuscript, Regulating Romance:
Youth Sexuality, Power, and Globalization in Uganda's Time
of AIDS, which considers how state, civil, and development
apparatuses have affected cultural transformations surrounding
youth sexuality through intervening in HIV/AIDS programs,
gender relations, legal ideas and practices, and beliefs
about sexual risk and pleasure. Her New Century Scholar
project on the age of consent builds on this research.
In 2004, Dr. Parikh began research for a 3-year NIH project
to study married women's risk for HIV transmission, infidelity,
and changing notions of companionate marriage and love in
Uganda; her collaborators are working in four other countries.
She is a consultant for the School of Public Health at St.
Louis University on a cancer communications research and
education project targeting lower asset African Americans.
In addition to research, Dr. Parikh has served as a consultant
for evaluating and developing policies surrounding sexual
abuse, designing HIV/AIDS and sexual health programs, and
training development workers in participatory methods. She
serves on the Board of Directors for Planned Parenthood
St. Louis Region and has given a number of keynote addresses
on HIV/AIDS and gender in Africa.
Selected Publications:
Parikh, Shanti (In press, 2004) From Auntie to Disco: The
Bifurcation of Risk and Pleasure in Sources of Sexuality
Education in Uganda. In The Moral Object of Sex: Science,
Development, and Sexuality in Global Perspective. V.
Adams and S. Pigg (eds). Durham: Duke University Press.
Parikh, Shanti (2004) Sugar Daddies and Sexual Citizenship
in Uganda: Rethinking 3rd Wave Feminism. Black Renaissance/
Renaissance Noire, vol. 5(2):75-99.
Parikh, Shanti (2003) 'Don't tell your sister or anyone
that you love me': Considering the Effects of Adult Regulation
on Adolescent Sexual Subjectivities in Uganda's Time of
AIDS. In Gender, Sexuality and HIV/AIDS: Research and
Intervention in Africa, Britt Pinkowsky Tersbøl
(ed). Institute of Public Health, University of Copenhagen
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Bargaining with Female Sexuality: Assessing the Age
of Consent as a Feminist Strategy in Uganda
This research project provides a multi-level analysis of
the recent women's movement in Uganda to combat widespread
sexual abuse of young females by increasing and enforcing
the age of sexual consent (officially, called the Defilement
Law). Bargaining with Female Sexuality develops a theoretically-driven
framework to explore the complex process through which the
Defilement Law becomes deployed in local communities in
ways that were unforeseen by the law's advocates and are
contrary to their intended goals. Whereas women reformers
intended to curb the alarming rates of HIV/AIDS and unplanned
pregnancy among young females by prosecuting sugar daddies
and pedophiles, preliminary research in one court jurisdiction
reveals that the average age of male charged with defilement
is 21.5 years old and many are consensual boyfriends of
pregnant schoolgirls.
A critical feminist analysis suggests that this misappropriation
of the law reasserts patriarchal control over female sexuality
and reestablishes generational and class hierarchies among
men. Hence, when refracted through local understandings
and power hierarchies, the law draws its strength from and
strengthens historical ideas about fathers' rights over
access to daughters' sexuality, further silencing the young
female subject and curtailing her sexual autonomy. This
calls into question the extent to which the universalist/feminist
discourse of human rights is complicated by class-based
agendas and by competing notions of childhood, female sexual
propriety, and male sexual privilege.
The sliding conceptual framework for this project moves
between the globalization of human rights discourse through
international networks, Ugandan feminists use of children's
rights to challenge male sexual privilege, public and media
debates about female sexuality and the age of consent, and
local uses of the Defilement Law. Through ethnographic investigation
and narrative analysis of local defilement cases and the
contexts surrounding them, this project will explore the
cultural, political and economic landscapes through which
the law becomes used to secure male rights over the sexuality
of young females rather than to protect girls from sexual
predators.
Research for this project will be conducted in collaboration
with three Uganda-based organizations and scholars involved
in children's and women's rights. The proposed methodology
for exploring the extent to which Uganda's anti-sexual abuse
campaigns have produced desired results of young female's
empowerment will contribute to developing a cross-cultural
interpretative framework for examining the interplay between
global notions of human rights and local conceptions, occurrences,
and handling of sexual abuse. Furthermore, it is intended
that the findings be applicable to designing, evaluating,
and modifying culturally appropriate anti-sexual abuse policies,
programs and campaigns in other parts of the world.
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Assistant
Professor, Anthropology Department
