Infectious Injustice: The political foundations of the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone

This article identifies the long-term political factors that contributed to the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone, which are largely overlooked by the emerging international focus on building resilient health systems. We argue that the country exhibits critical symptoms of the recurrent crises of a gatekeeper state, including: acute external dependency, patron-client politics, endemic corruption, and weak state capacity. A coterie of actors, both internal and external to Sierra Leone, has severally compromised the health system. This left certain sections of the population acutely at risk from Ebola and highlights the need for political solutions to build stronger, inclusive health systems

Risking It: Young Heterosexual Femininities in South African Context of HIV/AIDS

This article explores gender power relations and the contradictions and confusions associated with sexual identity and normative (hetero-)sexual practices. Theories of `identity¿ and `performativity¿ are used to understand the relationships between young women's sexual identity constructions and sexual practices within the context of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. The discussion focuses on young women's accounts of their feminine identities with respect to issues of intimacy and romantic love; pregnancy, virginity and respect; desire, danger and disease; future marriage and family. It highlights the fragility and ambiguity in the processes of identity construction and performance of heterosexual femininity in an HIV/AIDS environment. Significantly, the dominant discourses of femininity through which these young women made sense of their sexual selves, stood in direct contradiction to their sexual safety. Given this, greater understanding of these identity processes would appear vital to successful strategies in the protection against HIV/AIDS in South Africa

'Friends are the family we choose for ourselves': Young people and families in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The young people at the centre of Buffy the Vampire Slayer present themselves as an alternative family that contrasts with the programme’s conventional families. This device helps to raise awareness about changing family structures in contemporary Western society, particularly with respect to the family’s capacity to facilitate the development of young people. The series implies that the stability associated with the nuclear family is often illusory and/or achieved at the price of young people’s freedom and agency. The alternative structure, by contrast, answers the call for the ‘democratisation’ of the family (Giddens, 1999) and is coded positively in spite of many weaknesses