Desire, romance, and regulation: Adolescent sexuality in Uganda's time of AIDS

This is an ethnographic study of adolescent sexuality in Bulubandi village in eastern Uganda. I examine the development and cultural construction of adolescent sexuality. Specifically, I detail the process of learning about sex and the subjectivity of experiencing and imagining courtship and romance, and examine the historical continuities and departures of contemporary meanings. At the center of this study are the lives of young people and their families as they confront the tension between intergenerational silences and the proliferation of national conversations and images of sexuality. While Uganda's omnipresent AIDS industry legitimized public conversations about sexuality, the stage expanded to include popular culture, the mass media, advice literature, and local regulatory institutions. I argue that changing family structures, access to education, commercialization of leisure, increasing global cultural flows, and AIDS education campaigns form important backdrops against which adolescent sexuality must be understood. This project thus represents a departure from previous research on African sexuality and AIDS, which has focused primarily on the relationship between risk and HIV transmission, decision-making models, and vulnerability. I argue that studies of sexuality in Africa have grossly neglected the emotional and subjective sides. In this study I move beyond paradigms of risk and engage with anthropological approaches to gender, romance, and globalization, in order to examine how concerned adults and sexually curious youth maneuver around each other during a time when anxiety surrounding adolescent sexuality is heightened by the AIDS epidemic. I examine love letters as cultural productions that young people create to express and negotiate their sexual identity and romantic subjectivities. Through analysis of various sets of narratives produced by differently positioned players, this project offers a deeper understanding of how adolescent sexuality is understood and regulated by interested stakeholders. Finally, I analyze the ways in which young people's sexual relationships are constrained and enabled by gender, class, and age, and educational attainment.