HIV, Gender and the Politics of Medicine: Embodied Democracy in the Global South

✍ Scribed by Elizabeth Mills

• Publisher: Bristol University Press
• Year: 2024
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 289
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book centres on women living with HIV in South Africa who have navigated affective relationships, activist networks, government institutions and global coalitions to transform health policies that govern access to HIV medicines. Drawing on 20 years of ethnographic and policy research in South Africa, Brazil and India, it highlights the value of understanding the embodied and political dimensions of health policy and reveals the networked threads that weave women’s precarity into the governance of technologies and the technologies of governance. It illuminates the entwined histories of health policy evolution, systemic inequality and everyday life and calls for a recognition of the embodied ramifications of democratic politics and global health governance. By integrating medical anthropology with science studies and political theory, this book traces the history of the struggle to access HIV medicines in the Global South and brings it into the present by articulating the lessons learned by activists and policy makers engaged in shaping these vital health policies.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Cover
HIV, Gender and the Politics of Medicine: Embodied Democracy in the Global South
Copyright information
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Background
From the inside out: a personal history
From the outside in: a political history
Shifting landscapes
A shifting biomedical landscape
A shifting political landscape
Book outline
Conclusion
2 Concepts, Contexts and Methods
Concepts
Medicine and the politics of life
The state of the body: embodiment
The body of the state: governance and citizenship
Global assemblages and actor networks
Biopolitical precarity in the permeable body
Contexts
South Africa
Brazil
India
Methods
Research design
Multi-sited ethnographic research
Research methods
Ethnographic research with women in Khayelitsha
Narrative life-history interviews and body maps with the BWG
Narrative life-history interviews
Participant observation with TAC
Key informant interviews with policy actors in Brazil and South Africa
Reflexive analysis
Ethics
Conclusion
3 Gender, Health and Embodiment
“So my baby gets HIV too”: vertical pathways of precarity
Lineages of loss
Generations of life
“It’s hard to be a girl in this country”: horizontal pathways of precarity
It’s hard to be a girl in this country
Eschewing shweshwe: navigating risk and pleasure
“I am the household”: diagonal pathways of precarity
Negotiating affect and harm
Conclusion
4 New Generation Struggles
“Amandla! Awethu!”: the struggle for ARVs and embodied vitality
New generation struggles and embodied precarity
The context of the body: side effects, adherence and viral resistance
“You feel tired!”: treatment fatigue and viral resistance
The body in context: unemployment and economic insecurity
Conclusion
5 Health Citizenship
Sustaining life on ARVs: between rights and responsibility
“I voted for my treatment”: health, rights and citizenship
“[The government] is … managing our health”: rights and responsibilities in the era of ARVs
Sustaining life beyond ARVs: seeing and speaking to the state
“It was … amazing, the president passing by my house”: seeing the state
“Every generation has its struggle”: speaking to the state
“My vote must speak for me”: having voice
“You need to show a fist”: between having voice and being heard
Conclusion
6 Therapeutic Governance
Brazil’s rising power and the tide of neoliberal reform
Looking into Brazil: beyond the ‘activist state’
The judicialization of the right to health
Looking across Brazil and South Africa: evolving challenges
Conclusion
7 Global Health Governance
IPRs and the global governance of health
The WTO, patents and the governance of medicine
Global health and the problem with patents
Trips flexibilities: mechanisms for ensuring access to essential medicines
The maximalist agenda and mechanisms for restricting access to essential medicines
IPRs and resistance: BRICS and the case of Brazil, India and South Africa
Towards the sustainable governance of medicines: civil society organizations and global health agencies
Conclusion
8 Conclusion
The right to a nonprojected future
Between hope and dystopia: findings and contributions
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 1
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 7
References
Index