BETWEEN BEDROOMS AND BALLOTS: THE POLITICS OF HIV'S ...

and those who must follow them; between the governments and donors who hold the pursestrings
and the associations that must kowtow in order to dip inside; and between a namorado
(boyfriend), amante (lover) or marido (husband) who refuses to condomize and the mulher
(woman) who has little choice but to acquiesce. Finally, the politics of it all includes such
activities as opening the purse for some of the associations while drawing it tightly closed for
others, the corruption that saturates the public sector, sexual relationships that are just as political
in their prevention of mobilization and free choice as is an overt contestation of the state, and the
use of brokers in the AIDS domain to ensure that although government fails to provide adequate
resources for basic daily survival (particularly past a life expectancy of 40 years), no one really
protests ‘too much.’ I argue that all of these play into the manner by which democracy is
unfolding within the country because they concern power relationships, contestation and the
evolution from subjects to citizens with their process of pulling a traditionally private topic into
the public realm.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic is in part a product of the history of these three variables of sex,
power and politics, and it highlights the difficulty in building a public realm in a new democracy;
how might we accomplish this despite the prevalence of gendered power relations, the desire for
adherents in a society that has long placed great emphasis on procreation, and patron-clientelism
as a means of survival? To answer this, we must turn to the space between bedrooms and ballots
for it houses HIV, a topic which dips its toes into both the arenas of the private realm (bedroom)
and the overtly political realm (voting behavior), and, for some, influences a range of activity in
between these two points. There are thus four theoretical topics found in various bodies of
political literature that situate this: the evolution and overlap of the private, public and political
spheres; patriarchy as an informal institution that permeates society and sustains gender roles;
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