Contraceptives are killing us through the women´: Interrogating difference in local constructions of the AIDS pandemic in South Africa
2010
Abstract
In this paper I will interrogate a local model of AIDS as to the ways in which it has mobilized constructs of difference - of male/female and ´traditional healing´/biomedicine - to articulate and act upon anxieties over transformations of gendered authority structures and cultural identity in the post-apartheid, neo-liberal context. One of the suggestions of this paper is that local perceptions of ´AIDS prevention´ following from the model and centring on controlling women’s engagement with biomedical technologies, have provided an arena in which contestations over women’s increasing autonomy and (re)productions of a ´Venda medical tradition´ have taken place in the same language of embodied signs and disease etiologies.