Beyond Agency and Victimization : Re-reading Women’s Embodied Experiences.

Abstract

We explore a range of projections that, we argue, are increasingly characterising much applied research on and popular representations of HIV/AIDS, gender and embodiment in Africa. Showing how the image of the victim is being challenged by a growing emphasis on agency, we identify continuities between these approaches. It is argued that both the insistence on victimisation and the celebration of agency naturalise neo-liberal ideas about the autonomous individual. Our paper reflects on our work on the South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), focusing on how we have confronted issues such as research design, reflexivity, methodology and ethics. We also show how TAC activists have redefined entrenched ideas about agency and victimisation. In developing a language and politics of activism that radically unsettles conventional understandings of embodied acts in the context of the HIV epidemic, TAC raises challenges for research, writing and media representations of embodiment and social marginalisation in African contexts.