Popularising purity: Gender, sexuality and nationalism in HIV/AIDS prevention for South Korean youths

  This paper examines how HIV/AIDS gains its social meanings at the intersection of discourses about gender, sexuality and nationalism in Korea. It examines how a major Korean NGO reinforces media and government construction of HIV/AIDS as a national threat, and mobilises ‘purity’ as an indigenous value to resist the global onslaught. This Purity Campaign successfully draws on pre‐existing narratives about Korean society and national development, constituting itself as a site for both the negotiation of meanings around HIV/AIDS as well as the impact of globalisation on Korea. The meaning of purity in the Campaign is expanded to connote a state of moral being beyond mere chastity to reinforce the nation's defence against foreign corruption. Changing gender relations and sexual expressions become targets of purification, with women shouldering a disproportionate burden of blame and responsibility. The Campaign relies heavily on universalising family rhetorics and national essence to popularise purity as the Korean way to build an AIDS‐free society. Although purity becomes a symbol of moral order and national health, AIDS serves as a metaphor of foreign contamination and domestic anxieties. The discussion interweaves texts, interviews and ethnography, and draws on anthropological and cultural studies.