Digital relics of the saints of affliction: HIV/AIDS, digital images and the neoliberalisation of health humanitarianism in contemporary Vietnam

Abstract

Neoliberal logics and calculations have been incorporated into strategies for global health management as rational, technical, scientific guarantors of the integrity and dignity of The Human. NGOs demonstrate, accrue and trade in virtue to gain support, funding and prestige. They field site-visit teams which conduct audits of local partners, review programme data and collect images and narratives of and from the recipients of aid. These images and narratives are used to assess the performance of their local partners and win new donations and volunteers in their home countries. These powerful images and harrowing stories appear in NGO media, establishing the NGOs' humanitarian credentials. Images of the ill, abandoned and poor are put to work among distant actors as assurances that funds are being efficiently applied and that these efforts are 'doing good'. The practice is commonplace within a contemporary neoliberalised health humanitarian apparatus. This process both requires and produces particular subjects and structure relationships between and among NGOs, their posited receiving publics, donors and constituents. Specific imperilled persons and histories are rendered abstractions, immediately graspable and ostensibly unmediated within a specific grammar of global southern suffering. Digitised they become, in a specific, contemporary way, immortal; never changing, but imminently interchangeable

What is remembered lives: Time and the disruptive animacy of archiving AIDS on Instagram

“…The snapshot was taken in night’s low light. It is typical of @theaidsmemorial images, photographs captured on film and later digitized – a transformation that advances mobility, circulation, and reach (Montoya, 2015: 11). Small gazes directly into the camera, at the photographer, at us.…”

“…As a site it exonerates the state and commemorates minoritized persons in ways that disavow the structures of inequality underlying racial segregation and disparate resource distribution responsible for HIV’s spread (Esparza, 2018). Memorialization marks a way to remember an atrocity and to forget the inequality and injustice that engendered it (Montoya, 2015: 11). The NYC AIDS Memorial certifies the past as completed, thereby masking HIV/AIDS’ material and affective persistence and immediacy in racially and economically marginalized communities (Esparza, 2018).…”

Social science research on HIV in Vietnam: A critical review and future directions

“…Montoya similarly tracks a shift in government policy toward individualising health management through biomedical expertise, but draws attention to how global institutions have shaped Vietnamese efforts to control the epidemic (Montoya 2011, 2012). With global humanitarian aid (mostly from the PEPFAR) as a main source for HIV relief in Vietnam, Montoya describes how neoliberal logics and technologies influence both the ways in which NGOs in Vietnam receive financial funding as well as how the government intervenes in the lives of the population to prevent HIV and treat those living with AIDS.…”