Health Citizenship

Chapter 5 traces changing citizenship practices as they are embodied by HIV-positive women in South Africa, and as they coalesce around emergent political concerns that fan out from the historic assertion of the right to life linked to HIV medicine. The chapter explores multiple dimensions of South African citizens’ imaginaries as they ‘saw’ and ‘spoke’ to the state; these imaginaries reflect on and develop the set of ‘new generation struggles’ that are detailed in the previous chapter and that, I argue, reflect South Africa’s shifting medical and political landscapes in the wake of the antiretroviral rollout.