“Battlefields of Opposition” – Constructing HIV/AIDS

1. “Battlefields of Opposition” – Constructing HIV/AIDS Diversity Literacy Week 6 / Lecture 1 Prepared by Claire Kelly

2. Competing constructions of HIV/AIDS in SA (Posel) Prepared by Claire Kelly • “symbolic politics of the new South Africa” (p. 18) • “metaphorical significance” (p.18) • “far more than a matter of public health, having wide ranging political and symbolic repercussionsthat cut to the very meaning of South Africa’s ‘liberation’…” (p. 18) • “the stakes were far higher than the nation’s physical health: it’s ethical well being, and the integrity of it’s social and political body, were similarly at risk” (p. 22) • “political struggles over the very nature of AIDS” (p.14)

3. Construction of HIV/Aids in SA Prepared by Claire Kelly • Insert: pictures from Zapiro, South Africa’s leading cartoonist who’s images capture the public discourse on HIV/Aids in South Africa • http://www.zapiro.com/cartoon/123054-040215st • http://www.zapiro.com/cartoon/134492-050928indep • http://www.zapiro.com/cartoon/122965-090521tt • http://www.zapiro.com/cartoon/134579-050508st • http://www.zapiro.com/cartoon/123097-010405mg

4. Competing constructions of HIV/AIDS in SA (Posel) Prepared by Claire Kelly • “scientific orthodox”(TAC, UN) • HI virus causes AIDS • HI virus spread mostly through heterosexual sex in Africa • Treatment of with ARV’s & education programmes to change sex behaviours • “dissident”(Mbeki) • Scientific orthodox as expression of West’s scientific imperialism > pathologisation & sexualisation of black African bodies • “…displaced sex from the foreground of the discussion” (p. 23) • “The problem became centrally a matter of Africa’s ‘level of development’, rather than a racial, cultural or moral one… rather than any judgment on African ‘values’, ‘ways of life’, or personhood that might reiterate racist stereotypes of the black African. ” (p. 23)

5. “Battlefield of oppositions” (Njambi, 2004, p. 283) “to enter the[ HIV/AIDS] discourse is to immediately be drawn into a battlefield filled with conceptual oppositions already in place” (paraphrasing Njambi, 2004, p. 283) “epidemic of significations” (Posel, p. 18, citing Treichler, 1999, p.1) Prepared by Claire Kelly

6. Competing “scientific” discourses (Patton) Prepared by Claire Kelly • Immunology • AIDS • “social & environmental causes” • Enhanced ability to cope with opportunistic infection • Virology • HIV • “sexually transmittable pathogen” • Halt progression on the virus • “…why particular forms of scientific enquiry gain control of the metaphors that provide larger cultural explanations of a range of phenomena metaphorized onto the body” (p. 59)

7. “Behaviourist-orientated traditional model” (Patton, p.71) ` “Experts” (pure science) Information & counselling Translation Population (popular understanding) Prepared by Claire Kelly Ignorance or attitudinal or group deficiency Unhealthy individual behaviour Behaviour change “Hard to reach” = “failure of moral and conceptual skills”

8. “Behaviourist-orientated traditional model” (Patton, p.71) Prepared by Claire Kelly “masks way medical research reconstructs neocolonial relationships” “obscures ways in which pressure to adopt organisational schema of science as representative of lived experience reinscribes hierarchies of social difference” “reads as progress the destruction of vernaculars and the adoption of scientific language” e.g. “slim disease” “Dismissive of indigenous ways of knowing” (Chilisa, p. 659)

9. Disciplinary power Prepared by Claire Kelly “modern form of power which for Foucault, is productive rather than repressive, in the sense of ‘bringing things into being’, producing both knowledge (i.e. the discipline of [psychology], as a way of knowing the world), andsubjective effects (e.g. individuality, the soul, personal psychology etc.)”(Hook, 2004, p. 213) “Disciplinary power is related to techniques, procedures and assessments that measure, monitor, and treat subjects as to normalise deviant ones further” (Hook, 2004, p. 213)

10. Extra references Wairim~uNgaruiyaNjambi (2004) Dualisms and female bodies in representations of African female circumcision: A feminist critique. Feminist Theory 5 (3), p. 281 – 303 Hook, D. (2004) Foucault, disciplinary power and the critical pre-history of psychology. In D. Hook, P.Kiguwa, N. Mkhize & A. Collins (Eds) Critical psychology. Cape Town: UCT Press