60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

a luta continua! – south african hiv activism, embodiment and state politics 241
HIV and politics – urgency and negligence
What is the context of HIV and state politics in a general sense?
Countless narratives of AIDS testify that there is no doubt that AIDS
is about very intimate suff ering (Fassin 2007). How can it at the same
time be argued to be about politics, even mass violence, as activists
claim? HIV, after all, is a tiny biological entity, a virus, and the infection
happens in the natural processes in the body. It could be added
that HIV touches upon the most intimate and anxiety-evoking arenas
of public life, sexualities, which further opens a space for silence and
hesitation (Richey 2008). It clearly diff ers from more obvious cases of
mass violence (see Kössler in this volume).
Alex de Waal (2006: 179) suggests that the HIV epidemic is like climate
change: it does not arrive with a visible drama like other disasters,
and therefore it can be made to be invisible in the political realm.
Our reading of the discourses of the AIDS epidemic in Africa is that it
has a peculiar discursive existence: it is silenced and privatised on the
one hand, and politicised and exposed as few illnesses before on the
other (see also Jungar and Oinas 2008). On a discursive level, AIDS
emerged from the very beginning in the early 1980s as an illness loaded
with political imagery, from a gay disease to an African catastrophe,
evoking old colonial images of a Dark Continent (Patton 1997).
At the same time it evoked biomedical sentiments and interventions,
and traditionally medicalization tends to de-politicise (Oinas 2001).
Thus, the context of HIV policies is a paradox: silence, negligence and
political apathy have been and still are features of the discursive landscape
(de Waal 2006); but at the same time there is an unprecedented
media alarm, both constructive and scandalising. Further, among policy
makers globally there has been a consensus about a growing urgency,
as well as an increasing will to act, during the 2000s. The HIV/AIDS
epidemic is seen as a major threat to African societies, aff ecting a wide
range of areas from gender relations to economic and political development.
High-ranking politicians across the globe state that HIV is a high
global priority. All recent US presidents have used the alarm around the
HIV epidemic in Africa when they have wished to demonstrate good
will and their global responsibility. In 2000 the UN Security Council
for the fi rst time held a special session on a health issue – the HIV/
AIDS pandemic. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and
Malaria was established in 2002 as one of the largest fi nancial eff orts to
battle against a set of three single illnesses.
Yet, once again, despite the acknowledged urgency, critics maintain
that little of the talk has been translated into radical re-oriented po-