Redressing Sanuk: "Asian AIDS" and the practices of women's resistance

This chapter discusses the rhetorics in the First World media about 'Asian AIDS' in general and 'AIDS in Thailand' in particular. It focuses the episodic nature of the rhetoric, characteristic of what Homi Bhabha calls the 'ambivalent colonial impulse', void of any simple, unified sense of racial, sexual, or economic superiority. The chapter attempts to enact an imaginary dialogue that takes place in the sphere of 'postcolonial theory' and 'subaltern studies'. It describes the critical response to the pandemic by Asian women and their feminist allies in other developing countries and in the First World, focusing on how women organize to combat the epidemic and the structural conditions that are connected to it. Finally, the chapter concludes with some theoretical remarks about the question of the political meaning of 'Third World women' in Western feminist scholarship and intervention in the moment of a devastating pandemic.