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Affect and the “Really Real”: The Politics of HIV/AIDS Framing in South African Theater

ABSTRACT Funding in South Africa privileges HIV prevention campaigns underpinned by individual behavior change goals, despite over two decades of intervention but little reduction in national HIV prevalence. In response, civil society has begun calling for innovative interventions and ways of speaking about the epidemic. Employing framing theory, I analyze differences in how HIV/AIDS is characterized in public media and interrogate the knowledge politics underpinning a group of artists’ emerging attention to the nexus of affect, intersubjectivity, and epidemics within performance. I suggest this focus challenges but also complements dominant HIV intervention models by destabilizing common content, relations of power, and hierarchies of knowledge that shape normative health discourse and practice. Simultaneously, such performances reveal deep disparities between the neoliberal principles undergirding most global public health ideology, South Africa’s current political economy of HIV intervention, and the dynamic concerns of its HIV-affected constituents.