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.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• framing theory
• health communication
• health media
• theater

Acknowledgments

The project on which this research is based gained ethics approval through the IRB Committee at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA. This article was facilitated through the encouragement and feedback given by incomparable colleagues within the 2015–2017 Social Science Postdoc Forum at the Wits School of Public Health.

Funding

The research reported in this article was funded by the National Science Foundation (grant no. DDIG 1019652).

Notes

1. Styles I heard discussed most often include activist theater, Theater in Education, dramatherapy, Playback theater, Forum theater, physical theater, and dance.

2. Audience members tend to choose actors based on physical similarity or emotional connection. For example, a person may choose an actor of different ethnicity and/or gender to represent her based on a feeling of connection, such as a White South African female choosing a Black South African male to play her role because he projects a quality resonating with how she sees herself.

3. The first Playback company was founded in 1975 by Jonathan Fox and Jo Salas in the United States as a way to honor ordinary life experiences, reveal differences of perspective, and facilitate community cohesion and empathy (Fox 2000). It has since spread throughout North America, Europe, and Australia, and the International Playback Theater Network, founded in 1990, claims 152 companies and 234 individual members across 40 countries (IPTN 2016).

4. The award-winning television show “Intersexions” is a notable exception that aired nationally in 2010 and was developed in partnership between Johns Hopkins Health and Education in South Africa, SABC Education, and the Centre for AIDS Development, Research, and Evaluation. It focused on HIV/AIDS through fictional stories and portrayals of secrets within relationships, instead of primarily highlighting biomedical information (http://www.intersexions.co.za/about-intersexions.html).

Additional information

Funding

The research reported in this article was funded by the National Science Foundation (grant no. DDIG 1019652).

Notes on contributors

Jessica S. Ruthven

Jessica S. Ruthven, PhD is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Public Health at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research and teaching cover HIV/AIDS, gender, the anthropology of performance, critical medical anthropology, and health communication studies. She is currently working on a monograph about activism and technology at the intersection of South Africa’s public health, biomedical, and arts sectors.