Politics in the Making of HIV/AIDS in South Africa

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. The Science of Macroeconomics

   • Kiran Pienaar

   Pages 1-19

3. Disease in Theory and Practice

   • Kiran Pienaar

   Pages 20-34

4. Contesting Science, Making Disease

   • Kiran Pienaar

   Pages 35-66

5. Poverty in the Making of HIV/AIDS

   • Kiran Pienaar

   Pages 67-95

6. Disease as a Politics of the Human

   • Kiran Pienaar

   Pages 96-119

7. Conclusion: Towards an Ontological Politics of Disease

   • Kiran Pienaar

   Pages 120-134

8. Back Matter

   Pages 135-157

   PDF

The HIV epidemic remains one of the most challenging of modern times, despite the enormous promise of anti-retroviral treatment. This timely book takes a critical look at HIV/AIDS in the context of South Africa, the country with the largest HIV epidemic in the world. Drawing on feminist science and technology studies and a close analysis of a range of textual sources, Politics in the Making of HIV/AIDS in South Africa tracks how the disease has been formed and transformed through political struggles. It illuminates the ways these struggles have also generated new selves for those living with HIV. In conducting this enquiry, the book addresses pressing questions about the politics of public health, the ethics of biological citizenship, and agency and the making of neoliberal subjects. It should appeal to scholars and students with interests in the sociology of health and medicine, the body in society, science and technology studies, and public health.

• AIDS
• health
• novel
• politics
• poverty
• social theory
• technology

This book makes an important contribution to understanding the scale and complexity of the HIV epidemic in South Africa by recasting what is now viewed as a notorious conflict between former South African President Mbeki […] and the Treatment Action Campaign […] By drawing on feminist theories of materiality as well as Science and Technology Studies to revisit the two historically opposed approaches, Pienaar provides the reader with a more complex relational (or 'intra-active') and hence dynamic account of the epidemic. This will have relevance for public health analysts and implementers as well as for those in the social sciences looking to devise novel modes of inquiry and intervention in response to current health and medical challenges.' - Marsha Rosengarten, Professor and Director of the Unit of Play, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK; author of HIV Interventions: Biomedicine and the Traffic between Information and Flesh

 

'This book draws on the insights and approaches of feminist science studies to analyse the materialization of HIV/AIDS in South Africa, connecting it to the history of conflicts between government and biomedical explanations of the disease and the policies emerging in response to these conflicts. Pienaar expertly demonstrates how scientific controversies matter and find expression in the experience and lived impacts of the condition known as HIV/AIDS. With its exceptionally lucid explication of feminist science studies approaches and its skilled demonstration of the difference these make to empirical analysis and lived experience, this book will provide an excellent resource for researchers and students who wish to realise the transformative impacts of conceptually innovative work.'- Kane Race, Associate Professor and Director of Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, Australia; author of Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs

• Curtin University, Australia

  Kiran Pienaar

Kiran Pienaar is a Research Associate at the National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University, Australia. Her research interests include the biopolitics of health and illness, addiction, posthumanist theories, and feminist approaches to materiality.

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