Ambivalent embodiment and HIV treatment in South Africa

This chapter draws on long-term multi-sited ethnographic research on women's embodiment of HIV and antiretroviral treatment (ARVs), and the role that this embodiment played in shaping women's perception of and engagement with the South African state. Drawing on ethnographic research methods, feminist new materialism, performativity and actor network theory, this chapter explores how both HIV and ARVs, as ‘things with social lives’, intra-act with each other and with women’s bodies. This chapter reflectts on a set of emergent struggles around the embodiment of medicine that move beyond the framing of HIV as the ‘problem’ and ARVs as the ‘technofix’. Not only do ARVs extend life but they also introduce risk and uncertainty. These (side) effects interact in different ways within unique bodies that, in line with post-colonial critiques of feminist new materialism, need to be situated in a context of profound socio-economic inequality. Building on long-term ethnographic research, this chapter explores how HIV medicines have precipitated a dynamic set of struggles that call attention to the world ‘inside’ the body (as embodiment) and, simultaneously outside the body (as forms of oppression in specific socioeconomic contexts). Through close engagement with activists, the chapter argues that despite being involved in the struggle for medicines only decade earlier, the gains of this struggles’ success are increasingly ambivalent.