From “Rights” to “Ritual”: AIDS Activism in South Africa

Abstract

In this article, I investigate how the moral politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa is contributing toward new forms of citizenship that are concerned with both rights‐based struggles and with creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness and stigmatization of individual HIV/AIDS sufferers. I argue that it is precisely the extremity of the “near death” experiences of full‐blown AIDS, and the profound stigma and “social death” associated with the later stages of the disease, that produce the conditions for HIV/AIDS survivors' commitment to “new life” and social activism. It is the activist mediation and retelling of these traumatic experiences that facilitates HIV/AIDS activist commitment and grassroots mobilization. It is also the profound negativity of stigma and social death that animates the activist's construction of a new positive HIV‐positive identity and understanding of what it means to be a citizen–activist and member of a social movement.