Governmentality, subjectivity and AIDS

Abstract

Our aim in this article is to examine the South African state's discursive deployment of the African renaissance discourse to prompt a particular kind of HIV positive subjectivity, during the years 1996-2003. We interrogate this connection along two axes. First, the article offers an analysis of the state's nudging of a new African subjectivity. Second, we examine the state's representation of a new African HIV positive subjectivity. In this way, the representation of a new African subjectivity -and subsequently a new HIV positive subjectivity -and the realization of the African renaissance discourse of a reconstructed Africa were mutually supporting. A critical analysis of the state and the treatment lobby group's representational practices implicates both in prompting the formation of an HIV positive subject who is rational, dignified and free.