TY - JOUR
T1 - (Re)reading the political conflict over HIV in South Africa (1999-2008): A new materialist analysis
AU - Pienaar, Kiran
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - This article recasts a critical moment in the history of HIV/AIDS in South Africa: the struggle over the science of HIV that emerged under former South African President Mbeki (1999-2008). It compares how the Mbeki administration and prominent South African AIDS organisation, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) responded to the dominant scientific model of HIV/AIDS. Contrary to existing research, which presents the government and TAC s positions as polarised, this article draws attention to some important commonalities in their understandings of HIV. I argue that both parties were doing the boundary-work of science (Gieryn, 1995, p. 404): tussling over the demarcation between science and non-science in order to assert the truth about HIV/AIDS. In so doing, they constitute HIV as a biologically self-evident disease possessed of intrinsic attributes. The article draws on science studies and new materialist scholarship to query this conventional view and its presumption that disease is a static object that precedes political processes and practices. It argues instead that disease is made through politics and it traces some significant political practices that have contributed to making HIV/AIDS in South Africa in specific, sometimes damaging ways.
AB - This article recasts a critical moment in the history of HIV/AIDS in South Africa: the struggle over the science of HIV that emerged under former South African President Mbeki (1999-2008). It compares how the Mbeki administration and prominent South African AIDS organisation, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) responded to the dominant scientific model of HIV/AIDS. Contrary to existing research, which presents the government and TAC s positions as polarised, this article draws attention to some important commonalities in their understandings of HIV. I argue that both parties were doing the boundary-work of science (Gieryn, 1995, p. 404): tussling over the demarcation between science and non-science in order to assert the truth about HIV/AIDS. In so doing, they constitute HIV as a biologically self-evident disease possessed of intrinsic attributes. The article draws on science studies and new materialist scholarship to query this conventional view and its presumption that disease is a static object that precedes political processes and practices. It argues instead that disease is made through politics and it traces some significant political practices that have contributed to making HIV/AIDS in South Africa in specific, sometimes damaging ways.
UR - http://www.palgrave-journals.com/sth/journal/v12/n2/pdf/sth20141a.pdf
U2 - 10.1057/sth.2014.1
DO - 10.1057/sth.2014.1
M3 - Article
VL - 12
SP - 179
EP - 196
JO - Social Theory & Health
JF - Social Theory & Health
SN - 1477-8211
IS - 2
ER -