HIV/AIDS and Neoliberalism
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Something
is going wrong with gay men's ability to self-manage HIV/AIDS in New
Zealand. Is it our neoliberal government orthodoxy?
Unlike
the United Kingdom, and to the best of our knowledge, New Zealand
doesn't have the sort of large-scale 'chemsex' parties that exist there,
although P/crystal methamphetamine and bareback DVDs may be related to
the recent increase in HIV exposure in New Zealand- the largest to
date.
But
apart from the more immediate causes, there's the question why this is
occurring. Neoliberalism has been New Zealand's political orthodoxy for
the last thirty two years. Inaugurated by Roger Douglas during the
Lange/Palmer/Moore Labour governments of the eighties, it involved asset
sales, deregulation of financial markets, reduced central government
expenditure, budgetary constraint for remaining government service
providers, anti-union legislation, reduced funding for community welfare
organisations, and retrenchment or closure of service scope or scale.
Apart from comprehensive anti-bullying legislation, pakeha gay men now experience more or less full formal equality in our daily lives. Unfortunately, this has been accompanied by the intensification of our working lives, which means that single pakeha gay men don't experience as full a sense of community in the rest of our lives outside pubs, saunas and overseas travels. We don't have as much leisure time and as a result, New Zealand gay male communities are 'thinner' than those overseas.
Apart from comprehensive anti-bullying legislation, pakeha gay men now experience more or less full formal equality in our daily lives. Unfortunately, this has been accompanied by the intensification of our working lives, which means that single pakeha gay men don't experience as full a sense of community in the rest of our lives outside pubs, saunas and overseas travels. We don't have as much leisure time and as a result, New Zealand gay male communities are 'thinner' than those overseas.
As Matthew Todd also noted in his recent book Straight Jacket, albeit
describing the British situation, one problem that gay men face is
residual discrimination from our pasts, which still affects our daily
lives. It's not so bad if we had or have supportive families,
educational environments, employment circumstances or peer support
groups.
However, if one is older than their mid-twenties or early thirties, that context didn't exist for us, and so we end up dealing with the psychological impact of our antigay pasts, which may work itself out in substance abuse, associated sexual risktaking and other dysfunctional interpersonal behaviour. We didn't have normal adolescences in which we came out to our parents, found a boyfriend and could be open about our relationships, which meant that we were unable to develop interpersonal skills amidst an atmosphere of concealment and secrecy.
To be sure, from what I've heard from Inside Out, things are not that good for LGBT youth today- not all of them come out into supportive domestic environments and some experience homelessness and educational disruption as a result, and some self-harm, undertake substance abuse, or kill themselves. It is truly a miracle that New Zealand's LGBT youth groups operate so effectively, given the limited extent of their resources.
As well as that, we do need to pass comprehensive anti-bullying legislation akin to that under draft in Canada at the moment, which may also assist diminished risktaking behaviour amongst young pakeha gay men. As well as that, we need to do far more about the other end of the lifespan. Where are the dedicated support networks for older gay men? Where is the specific research focus on their lives and relationships? Older gay and bisexual men do have unsafe sex and become HIV+. Why aren't we talking about this as well? Where's the senior equivalent of Rainbow Youth and Inside Out?
However, if one is older than their mid-twenties or early thirties, that context didn't exist for us, and so we end up dealing with the psychological impact of our antigay pasts, which may work itself out in substance abuse, associated sexual risktaking and other dysfunctional interpersonal behaviour. We didn't have normal adolescences in which we came out to our parents, found a boyfriend and could be open about our relationships, which meant that we were unable to develop interpersonal skills amidst an atmosphere of concealment and secrecy.
To be sure, from what I've heard from Inside Out, things are not that good for LGBT youth today- not all of them come out into supportive domestic environments and some experience homelessness and educational disruption as a result, and some self-harm, undertake substance abuse, or kill themselves. It is truly a miracle that New Zealand's LGBT youth groups operate so effectively, given the limited extent of their resources.
As well as that, we do need to pass comprehensive anti-bullying legislation akin to that under draft in Canada at the moment, which may also assist diminished risktaking behaviour amongst young pakeha gay men. As well as that, we need to do far more about the other end of the lifespan. Where are the dedicated support networks for older gay men? Where is the specific research focus on their lives and relationships? Older gay and bisexual men do have unsafe sex and become HIV+. Why aren't we talking about this as well? Where's the senior equivalent of Rainbow Youth and Inside Out?
I
have limited the above discussion to pakeha gay men because the lives
of takatapui and whakawahine are tougher. It can be protective if
someone grows up within a supportive whanau, with kaumatua and kuia
around to provide additional support and nurturance.
Unfortunately, institutional racism has attacked positive and prosocial Maori institutions and disrupted this intergenerational network, with destructive consequences on Maori health, life expectancy and welfare. There is an assertive Maori public sphere and bipartisan commitment to iwi settlements under the Treaty of Waitangi, but not all Maori benefit from this equally. Urban Maori are particularly isolated from their kinship networks of origin. Resultantly, we face tragedies like the murders of Stan Waipouri and Ihaia Sanders-Gilman. Institutional racism and neoliberal economics have withdrawn health and social services from small towns, leading to unemployment, risktaking masculinities and emulation of criminal underclass black US subcultures.
Neoliberalism atomises community identification, adherence and participation, not only amongst LGBT communities, but also low-income Maori and Pasifika youth. And, also unfortunately, it means that most violence becomes horizontal and directed against perceived 'threats' to dysfunctional masculinities, from assertive women and takatapui. We need to ask ourselves why these high profile antigay murder cases were commited against takatapui tane and not pakeha gay men. In the context of their daily lives, the destructive effects of institutional racism, poverty, homophobia, unemployment and social and medical service withdrawal are particularly devastating.
Unfortunately, institutional racism has attacked positive and prosocial Maori institutions and disrupted this intergenerational network, with destructive consequences on Maori health, life expectancy and welfare. There is an assertive Maori public sphere and bipartisan commitment to iwi settlements under the Treaty of Waitangi, but not all Maori benefit from this equally. Urban Maori are particularly isolated from their kinship networks of origin. Resultantly, we face tragedies like the murders of Stan Waipouri and Ihaia Sanders-Gilman. Institutional racism and neoliberal economics have withdrawn health and social services from small towns, leading to unemployment, risktaking masculinities and emulation of criminal underclass black US subcultures.
Neoliberalism atomises community identification, adherence and participation, not only amongst LGBT communities, but also low-income Maori and Pasifika youth. And, also unfortunately, it means that most violence becomes horizontal and directed against perceived 'threats' to dysfunctional masculinities, from assertive women and takatapui. We need to ask ourselves why these high profile antigay murder cases were commited against takatapui tane and not pakeha gay men. In the context of their daily lives, the destructive effects of institutional racism, poverty, homophobia, unemployment and social and medical service withdrawal are particularly devastating.
As
for pakeha gay men, we are also experiencing some degree of adverse
environmental conditions in our daily lives. We work harder, are
encouraged to form monogamous relationships, but there is no
compensatory focus on how residual homophobia affects our occupational
lives in the context of recruitment, hiring, performance appraisal,
promotion, disciplinary sanctions, and redundancy. And what about class
divergences? Do working class gay men experience this differently if
they are unskilled, have manual skills or work in the rural sector?
Don't ask the New Zealand Ministry of Health. It is not willing to adequately fund research into the lived environment and interpersonal relationships of gay men which could help to track this complexity within our everyday lives and assist HIV and STI prevention. Or adequately fund the New Zealand AIDS Foundation to develop services based on this unfunded absence of evidence-based research to enable us to meet this need, which means that our national HIV/AIDS prevention, research and service enablement organisation is now in debt to the sum of $NZ 500,000 for precisely that reason. Combine this to the increased costs of housing, casualised employment and anti-union legislation, and intensified commitment to paid work, and unpaid work or volunteering suffers.
This isn't limited to LGBT organisations, either- other voluntary groups are experiencing similar stressors and New Zealand's ethos of active and responsible citizenship is being whittled down to a reductive obsession with consumerism.
Don't ask the New Zealand Ministry of Health. It is not willing to adequately fund research into the lived environment and interpersonal relationships of gay men which could help to track this complexity within our everyday lives and assist HIV and STI prevention. Or adequately fund the New Zealand AIDS Foundation to develop services based on this unfunded absence of evidence-based research to enable us to meet this need, which means that our national HIV/AIDS prevention, research and service enablement organisation is now in debt to the sum of $NZ 500,000 for precisely that reason. Combine this to the increased costs of housing, casualised employment and anti-union legislation, and intensified commitment to paid work, and unpaid work or volunteering suffers.
This isn't limited to LGBT organisations, either- other voluntary groups are experiencing similar stressors and New Zealand's ethos of active and responsible citizenship is being whittled down to a reductive obsession with consumerism.
To
be sure, this isn't unambiguous. The same stresses and strains have
engulfed the New Zealand Christian Right as conservative and liberal
churches alike empty out, and as a consequence, it is visibly dying on
its feet. The Conservative Party has already self-destructed and its
other surviving lobby groups are more focused on anti-euthanasia
politics than opposing LGBT rights these days, as the abject failure of
Family First's derivative attack on transgender children's health,
safety and privacy demonstrates. However, while neoliberalism is
dissolving conservative Christian pressure groups, it is doing the same
to our community welfare organisations at the same time.
And then, unfortunately, there are also fundamentalist marxists. Apparently, they are unable to deal with anything other than class in the context of neoliberalism, and argue that any focus on indigeous ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity, or women, is 'identity politics,' which is allegedly a politics of neoliberalised 'recognition' pitted 'against' the 'core' premise of class struggle.
Sorry, but I do not believe that LGBT politics can or should be equated with 'identity politics' in this context. Neoliberalism is a hegemonic political strategy and that means that it has a corrosive effect on all communities of interest. In this article, I've focused primarily on New Zealand LGBT communities, but similar criticisms could be voiced in the context of feminism, Maori nationalist and disability politics. Neoliberalism operates against a range of constituencies of interest, not solely the New Zealand working class, even if that is an integral part of any resistance and solution.
As
2017 is an election year, I will close with this. New Zealand cannot
afford another three years of destructive, hardline neoliberal politics
presided over by an almost unaccountable Key administration. It's time
for a change.
Recommended:
Matthew Todd: Straight Talking: How to be Happy and Gay: Bantam: London: 2016
Lisa Duggan: The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy: Boston: Beacon Press: 2003.
Alexandra Chasin: Selling Out: The Lesbian and Gay Community Goes to Market: London: Palgrave: 2001.
New Zealand AIDS Foundation: http://www.nzaf.org.nz