(Re)reading the political conflict over HIV in South Africa (1999–2008): A new materialist analysis

Abstract

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.