This ethnography charts the lives of mission-educated men in Zambia and their search for meaning in the AIDS pandemic, as well as their responses to prevention and HIV testing. It also suggests how hegemonic masculinities may begin to be re-figured and gender relationships redesigned.

This study places Jean Rhys's fiction for the first time within the context of interrelated perspectives in modern psychoanalysis, to demonstrate how her narratives powerfully enact primitive and dynamic psychological states.