‘Respectable Women’ versus ‘Small Houses’: Feminist Negotiations of Sexual Morality, Marriage and the Challenge of HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe

This article investigates the gendered cultural politics around HIV prevention in Zimbabwe through an analysis of feminist narratives of sexuality, marriage and HIV/AIDS. The analysis employs a cross-reading of three texts, including two novels: Whose Daughter, My Child? by Grace Mutandwa (2006) and The Uncertainty of Hope by Valerie Tagwira (2006), and a regular newspaper column ‘Let's Talk About AIDS’ by Beatrice Tonhodzai in the Herald. Written between 2005 and 2006, these texts reflect the social and cultural crisis of AIDS and the social and cultural politics of the Zimbabwe African National Union (Patriotic Front) – ZANU(PF) – government in power at the time. Although all three texts challenge and renegotiate cultural norms of sexuality and marriage in response to the crisis of AIDS, they do so from within a position of ‘married respectability’. This places their critiques in an ambivalent position regarding the institution of marriage and the cultural norms of respectability upholding this institution. I conclude that ‘respectably married women’ can challenge the norms of marriage only by setting themselves apart from ‘un-respectable, non-married women’ – women who are referred to using the term ‘small houses’, compared to the ‘main house’ of the married woman.