Abstract
D.Phil.
This enquiry represents an attempt to understand the ways in which the ecology of ideas
surrounding HIV and Aids in post-apartheid South Africa functions discursively to silence
people living with the dis-ease. In this regard, it seeks to understand how the range of
subject positions available to people with HIV and Aids influences their opportunities for
treatment and disclosure.
The meanings emerging from this enquiry have implications for interventions aimed at
people living with HIV and Aids, in that they challenge the liberal humanism underpinning
a Western individualist paradigm which constructs people as ‘rational’ and ‘responsible’ on
the basis that such constructions tend to attribute guilt or moral culpability to people living
with HIV and Aids. The conversations and narratives elicited in the process of this enquiry
suggest that such discourses constitute a form of disciplinary power in a Foucauldian
sense, positioning people living with HIV and Aids defensively and limiting their options for
‘positive’ self-definition by foreclosing available subject positions, thereby contributing to
the spread of HIV and Aids.
Hence, this enquiry focuses on social constructions of morality and the impact of these on
participants’ attempts to maintain key relationships that afford them a ‘positive’ sense of
them-selves. Thus, it looks at experiences of connection and dis-connection and explores
the ways in which efforts to retain ‘relatedness’ in order to maximise possibilities for the
co-construction of a ‘moral self’ mediate opportunities for disclosure and treatment
options.
The enquiry aimed to assist participants in deconstructing dominant social constructions of
HIV and Aids implicit in cultural and political discourse by applying a critical,
poststructuralist and discourse-analytic lens in order that they might resist moral
attributions based on liberal humanism and access their own voices in narrating the
experience of living with HIV and Aids in keeping with their lived experience. My aim in this
regard was to resurrect alternative or previously silenced accounts and to open up spaces
for a multiplicity of meanings associated with HIV and Aids to emerge and be heard,
toward the end of breaking the silence and creating a conversational space in which
people’s meanings could simultaneously be heard and challenged through dialogue.Ultimately, this enquiry highlights the importance of attempting to understand the local and
idiosyncratic nature of people’s constructions of HIV and Aids, which are often a hybrid
mix of ideas and meanings circulating within social, cultural and political discourse. It also
underscores the salience of considering people’s lives in context and particularly their
need to maintain relationships that afford a positive sense of self. This is reflected in the
tendency for participants to construct their identities in relation to significant others and for
these relationships to mediate decision making in relation to HIV and Aids by availing or
foreclosing certain subject positions, depending on the discourses within which they are
situated.