Treatment literacy, therapeutic efficacy, and antiretroviral drugs: notes from Bushbuckridge, South Africa.

Health activists often see the uptake of antiretroviral drugs and adherence to antiretroviral treatment as the outcome of 'treatment literacy.' Organizations have invested considerable resources into educating the public in conventional scientific understandings of HIV and AIDS. Drawing on the results of fieldwork in South Africa and the life history of a man living with AIDS, I highlight the complex and unstable relationship that exists between therapeutic literacy and treatment efficacy. Factors that have little to do with treatment literacy have impacted upon uptake and adherence. These include a lack of political support, stigma generated by labelling, access to social welfare, and gender constructs. Moreover, in situations of medical pluralism, marked by multiple, constantly shifting understandings of sickness, it is very difficult to ascertain treatment literacy, and treatment literacy neither implies therapeutic efficacy, nor vice versa.

Gendered endings: narratives of male and female suicides in the South African Lowveld.

Durkheim's classical theory of suicide rates being a negative index of social solidarity downplays the salience of gendered concerns in suicide. But gendered inequalities have had a negative impact: worldwide significantly more men than women perpetrate fatal suicides. Drawing on narratives of 52 fatal suicides in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, this article suggests that Bourdieu's concepts of 'symbolic violence' and 'masculine domination' provide a more appropriate framework for understanding this paradox. I show that the thwarting of investments in dominant masculine positions have been the major precursor to suicides by men. Men tended to take their own lives as a means of escape. By contrast, women perpetrated suicide to protest against the miserable consequences of being dominated by men. However, contra the assumption of Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus', the narrators of suicide stories did reflect critically upon gender constructs.

Maternal incest as moral panic: envisioning futures without fathers in the South African lowveld.

During 2008, rumours about revolting incestuous encounters between sons and their mothers circulated in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the South African lowveld. This article views these rumours as expressing moral panic, paying particular attention to the historical contexts of their emergence and circulation, and to their temporal orientation. I locate these rumours in the periphery of South Africa's de-industrialising economy, marked by increased unemployment and criminality among men and by a growing prominence of women-headed households. They express a regressive temporalisation and pessimistic vision, not of development, progress and civilisation, but rather of deterioration and de-civilisation. Through the alleged act of incest, sons who engage in crime usurp the authority of fathers who once produced value in strategic industries and mines. As such the rumours envision a dystopia marked by the 'death of the father' and chaotic disorder without morality and law.

Dr. Wouter Basson, Americans, and wild beasts: men's conspiracy theories of HIV/AIDS in the South African Lowveld.

This article investigates HIV/AIDS as a cosmological problem among Northern Sotho and Tsonga-speakers in the South African lowveld. Based on in-depth interviews with 70 informants (35 men and 35 women) I show how the attribution of blame for HIV/AIDS articulates gendered concerns. I suggest that women blamed men and envious nurses for spreading the virus and that these discourses expressed women's ideological association with the domestic domain. By contrast, men invoked conspiracy theories, blaming translocal agents--such as Dr. Wouter Basson, Americans, soldiers, and governments--for the pandemic. I suggest that these theories are informed by men's humiliating experiences of job losses and deindustrialization in the global labour market. My discussion highlights the need for HIV/AIDS interventions in order to address not only women's oppression but also men's gendered concerns.