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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'Long Live Zackie, Long Live': AIDS Activism, Science and Citizenship after Apartheid
Author:Robins, Steven
Year:2004
Periodical:Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume:30
Issue:3
Period:September
Pages:651-672
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:AIDS
action groups
Health and Nutrition
Politics and Government
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
History and Exploration
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/4133913
Abstract:This article analyses the complex cultural politics of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. It focuses on how AIDS 'dissident' science impacted on policy discourses and how AIDS activists, together with scientists, the media and health professionals, responded. It shows how the HIV/AIDS debate and struggles over access to treatment were framed by historically embedded cultural and political interpretations of AIDS that were a product of South Africa's apartheid and postapartheid history. However, rather than adopting a cultural nationalist response to this historical legacy, activists from the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) deployed a class-based politics that concentrated on access to antiretroviral drugs rather than debates on the complexities of AIDS causation. The article discusses how TAC and its partner organization, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors without Borders), strategically positioned themselves in the struggle for access to AIDS drugs, and how new forms of health citizenship, gendered identities and political subjectivities emerged in the course of these struggles. For example, ideas of bodily autonomy associated with liberal individualist conceptions of citizenship collided with patriarchal cultural ideas and practices that prevent many women from accessing biomedical interventions. The biomedical paradigm that underpinned TAC/MSF campaigns also had to contend with local understandings of misfortune and illness. While TAC's strategies included networking with global civil society organizations, they also involved grassroots mobilization and an engagement with local sociocultural realities. This brand of health activism produced solidarities that straddled local, national and global spaces, resembling what Arjun Appadurai and others describe as 'globalization from below'. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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