Paper short abstract:

Based on twelve months' ethnographic research in Khayelitsha, South Africa, the paper outlines the recent biomedical and political shifts in the country and considers them in light of an emergent biopolitical landscape that brings embodied inequality into focus.

Paper long abstract:

This paper articulates a set of 'new generation struggles' that emerged in the wake of the historic struggle for antiretroviral (ARV) treatment in South Africa. It proposes that biomedical technologies like ARVs are more than their material form and reflect a broader politics of life: they assemble potent economic coalitions, political alliances, particular ways of thinking about disease and about health, modes of clinical care and practices of interaction between health care practitioners and patients. The shifting biopolitical landscape in South Africa and globally, means that my research found that ARVs can no longer be framed as a 'technology of life', nor as the 'technofix' to the problem of HIV and potential death. I draw on the notion of performativity to explore how individuals embody, reproduce and subvert discourse in different times and spaces through particular sets of strategies and tactics to address embodied precarity. In particular, I use using the concept of post-humanist performativity and integrate the conceptual approach of actor networks with performativity, through the concept of intra-action. I propose that, in understanding HIV and ARVs and non-human actants that travel complex pathways into and within women's bodies, we can also start to view some of the more nuanced dynamics that women negotiate in their everyday lives, through their social and economic relationships, and beyond categorisations that frame HIV as a problem (and proxy for women's vulnerability) with ARVs (and women's activism as a proxy for power) cast as the solution.