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Claiming rights, making citizens: HIV and the performativity of biological citizenship

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Abstract

This article critically analyses biological citizenship in terms of how it instates an ideal human subject drawn expressly from Western liberal discourse. Through an analysis of health promotion booklets directed at people living with HIV in South Africa, it reveals how regimes of biological citizenship valorise individual responsibility, agency and rationality, all attributes of the human imagined by liberal humanism. Drawing on insights from posthumanist scholarship, I argue that perceived failure to perform these attributes can operate to disqualify certain marginalised HIV-positive subjects from full citizenship. Far from immaterial, attributions of citizenship have material implications for access to human rights, including the right to life-saving treatment. Importantly, they also shape HIV/AIDS, producing two qualitatively different ontologies of disease: (i) a chronic, manageable illness for those who qualify as citizens; and (ii) a life-threatening, debilitating one for those denied full citizenship and who therefore cannot access the rights and rewards attendant on it.

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Notes

  1. Although it is possible to contrast these texts with ‘actual discourses’ on HIV, I suggest that these are examples of the ‘actual discourses’ used to promote HIV treatment literacy in South Africa. They do not exist separately from other discourses but are part of the broader material-discursive field through which HIV, and those affected by it, are constituted.

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Suzanne Fraser and Steven Angelides for their astute comments on an earlier version of this piece. She would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. The research on which the article is based was funded by a Monash University International Postgraduate Research Scholarship.

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  1. National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University, Suite 6, 19–35 Gertrude St., Fitzroy, 3065, Victoria, Australia

    Kiran Pienaar

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Pienaar, K. Claiming rights, making citizens: HIV and the performativity of biological citizenship. Soc Theory Health 14, 149–168 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2015.26

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