Living while being alive: education and learning in the Treatment Action Campaign

A reciprocal relationship exists between HIV/AIDS and LGBT organizing, both historically and in the current era. This chapter analyses the dynamics of the interconnection between these movements since the first description of the disease we now know as AIDS appeared in 1981. It begins by describing the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and how the first organizations dedicated to HIV/AIDS emerged out of and drew inspiration from LGBT groups. It then looks at the specific cases of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and how both groups linked their activism strategies to previous LGBT organizing experiences in the United States and South Africa, respectively. The chapter then examines the reciprocal relationships between the domestic and international levels in HIV/AIDS and LGBT politics. Finally, it explores the tensions between the HIV/AIDS and LGBT movements and the lines of division within the HIV/AIDS movement itself.

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‘I Don’t Want to Hear’

Strings Attached ◽

10.5871/bacad/9780197265680.003.0009 ◽

2014 ◽

Author(s):

Isak Niehaus

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

Local Knowledge ◽

Coming Out ◽

Antiretroviral Medication ◽

Aids Pandemic ◽

Hiv Antibodies ◽

Treatment Action ◽

Treatment Action Campaign ◽

Important Means ◽

Prominent Response

In recent years confessional technologies have become an important means of confronting the HIV/AIDS pandemic. These include ‘coming out’ with HIV positivity, and providing public testimony about sickness and the transformative effects of antiretroviral medication. In South Africa, the urban-based Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has effectively deployed speech as a means of overcoming pathos. Drawing upon ongoing fieldwork in Bushbuckridge, I point to various forms of resistance against the imported cosmopolitan practice of confession, and show how silence is frequently a more prominent response to the pandemic. Residents of Bushbuckridge have refrained from undergoing testing for HIV antibodies and hardly ever speak about their condition in public domains. I argue that silence was not merely a means of avoiding stigma, but also reflected a fear of hearing potentially dangerous and deadly words. In local knowledge, pronouncements that one is ‘HIV-positive’ could crystallise sickness, invoke negative emotions associated with pending death, and thereby worsen suffering.

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Is a New Worldwide Web Possible? An Explorative Comparison of the Use of ICTs by Two South African Social Movements

African Studies Review ◽

10.1353/arw.2005.0144 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 50 (1) ◽

pp. 109-131 ◽

Cited By ~ 14

Author(s):

Herman Wasserman

Keyword(s):

Social Movements ◽

New Media ◽

South African ◽

Information And Communication Technologies ◽

Communication Technologies ◽

Media Technologies ◽

Treatment Action ◽

Treatment Action Campaign ◽

Worldwide Web ◽

Information And Communication

Abstract:In this article the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), especially new media technologies such as e-mail and the Internet, by postapartheid South African social movements is explored. Following a discussion of the use of these technologies by activist groupings in international contexts, a typology suggested by Rheingold (2003) is used as a framework for comparing two South African social movements: the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF).

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“I Don’t Want to Live in a World Where People Die Every Day Simply Because They Are Poor”: From the Treatment Action Campaign to Equal Education, from Stories of Human Rights to the Poetics of Inequality

Humanity An International Journal of Human Rights Humanitarianism and Development ◽

10.1353/hum.2019.0026 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 10 (3) ◽

pp. 479-491

Author(s):

Neville Hoad

Keyword(s):

Human Rights ◽

Equal Education ◽

Treatment Action ◽

Treatment Action Campaign

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Should Access to Medicines and TRIPS Flexibilities Be Limited to Specific Diseases?

American Journal of Law & Medicine ◽

10.1177/009885880803400208 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 34 (2-3) ◽

pp. 279-301 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

Kevin Outterson

Keyword(s):

Access To Medicines ◽

Civil Society Organizations ◽

World Health ◽

Poor People ◽

Consultation Process ◽

Pharmaceutical Markets ◽

Drug Companies ◽

Treatment Action ◽

Extensive Consultation ◽

Treatment Action Campaign

The health needs of most of the world's population are not well served by patent-based pharmaceutical markets. The poor in low- and medium-income countries (LMICs) lack the financial resources to sustain the attention of global commercial drug companies. After an extensive consultation process, in 2006, the World Health Organization's Commission on Innovation, Intellectual Property and Public Health issued its Report (the WHO CIPIH Report), finding this concern to be significant:In the context of our work one of the important points is that, where the market has very limited purchasing power, as is the case for diseases affecting millions of poor people in developing countries, patents are not a relevant factor or effective in stimulating R&D and bringing new products to market.On this issue, the WHO CIPIH Report was preceded by the Access to Medicines movement, an informal coalition of civil society organizations such as Médecins Sans Frontières, Treatment Action Campaign, Health GAP, Oxfam, and Knowledge Ecology International (formerly the Consumer Project on Technology).

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