Die Kontroverse um HIV/AIDS in Südafrika. Zur Politisierung von Sexualität nach der Apartheid

Abstract

Since 1994, South Africans have witnessed the unexpected and enigmatic politicisation of sexuality to an unprecedented extent. This paper attempts to demonstrate, and make sense, of this phenomenon. It is structured in two parts. The first part considers „how sex is brought into the realm of discourse“, as Foucault put it, and how this discursive constitution of sexuality is informed by wider dimensions of the postapartheid social order – in particular, the acceleration of the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, on one hand, and the generational shifts associated with the emergence of new black elites, on the other. Drawing on this discussion, the second part proposes a reading of the so-called „HIV/AIDS controversy“ which has come to summarise Thabo Mbeki’s presidency in many national and international circles, and which has generated more political division, conflict, uncertainty and anger than any other issue since the inauguration of the post-apartheid state. I argue that this „controversy“ – although immediately concerned with questions of science and drugs – is more fundamentally a struggle over the discursive constitution of sexuality, in a form which dramatises the enmeshment of the manner of sexuality with the politics of nationalism, and the inflections of race, class and generation within it.