Major changes in the nature and dynamics of the AIDS epidemic over the last few years are reflected in changing epidemiological trends as well as in the progress made in biomedical research and treatment. AIDS in Europe brings together papers from leading social science researchers to look at the opportunities and challenges these changes bring and the different ways in which they are being responded to in both western and eastern Europe. Papers are organised under three headings:
*new challenges for HIV prevention
*care of people living with HIV/AIDS in a new therapeutic context
*AIDS public policies: from specialisation to normalisation
AIDS in Europe provides a comprehensive overview of current social and behavioural research on HIV and AIDS for all health professionals.

Major changes in the nature and dynamics of the AIDS epidemic over the last few years are reflected in changing epidemiological trends as well as in the progress made in biomedical research and treatment. AIDS in Europe brings together papers from leading social science researchers to look at the opportunities and challenges these changes bring and the different ways in which they are being responded to in both western and eastern Europe. Papers are organised under three headings:
*new challenges for HIV prevention
*care of people living with HIV/AIDS in a new therapeutic context
*AIDS public policies: from specialisation to normalisation
AIDS in Europe provides a comprehensive overview of current social and behavioural research on HIV and AIDS for all health professionals.

Mema's house is in the poor quarter Nezahualcoyotl, a crowded urban space on the outskirts of Mexico City where people survive with the help of family, neighbours, and friends. This house is a sanctuary for a group of young homosexual men who meet to chat, flirt, listen to music, and smoke marijuana. Among the group are sex workers and transvestites with high heels, short skirts, heavy make-up, and voluminous hairstyles; and their partners, young, bisexual men, wearing T-shirts and worn jeans, short hair, and maybe a moustache. Mema, an AIDS educator and the leader of this gang of homosexual men, invited Annick Prieur, a European sociologist, to meet the community and conduct her fieldwork at his house. Prieur lived there for six months between 1988 and 1991, and she has kept in touch for more than eight years. As Prieur follows the transvestites in their daily activities - at their work as prostitutes or as hairdressers, at night having fun in the streets and in discos, on visits with their families and even in prisons, a story unfolds of love, violence, and deceit. Prieur analyzes the complicated relations between the effeminate homosexuals, most of them transvestites, and their partners, the masculine-looking bisexual men, asking why these particular gender constructions exist in the Mexican working classes, and how they can be so widespread in a male-dominated society, the very society from which the term "machismo" stems. Weaving empirical research with theory, Prieur presents new analytical angles on several concepts: family, class, domination, the role of the body, and the production of differences among men.

Challenging the stereotypical images of the dominating male and the subservient woman, "Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas" addresses the variety of representations of gender in Latin American culture. Ranging across homosexuality, prostitution, football, politics and ethnic relations, this fascinating study analyzes the many potent images of gender, from Maradona, the child trickster of Argentinian football, to La Malinche, mistress of a conquistador and traitor to her nation.
Based on social anthropological fieldwork, the essays in "Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas" present rich ethnographic material drawn from a variety of locations in Latin America, from Mexico City to the highlands of Ecuador. Paying particular attention to the cultural and symbolic meanings of gender research in the region, together the essays reveal the central role of gender differences in the making of ethnic, national, political and economic divisions.