Facing the AIDS epidemic with a sexual and reproductive rights approach [editorial]

The initial approaches to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s were based on an essentially biomedical conception thus dissociating the disease from social relations. In the 1990s new approaches placed the health and illness process within the context of social cultural political and economic systems allowing this issue to become central to the struggle for human rights of people living with HIV. Hence this epidemic offers the opportunity for in-depth reflections and networking in struggles for citizenship and social change. In the last two decades the womens movement and especially the feminist one has worked in this field with educational actions and also by producing knowledge. They seek to understand the meaning and above all the impact of the AIDS epidemic on women particularly those who live in poverty. Resulting from these experiences feminist analyses bring forward new perceptions about the exercise of human rights in the framework of the AIDS. (authors)