ABSTRACT

HIV and AIDS1 have been the subject of academic interrogation since the first cases of AIDS were diagnosed in the early 1980s. The nature of that interrogation has been extraordinarily diverse, reflecting a wide range of intellectual and practical concerns. For sociologists, economists, psychologists, social historians, philosophers, political and cultural theorists, writers, artists and – importantly people living with HIV and with AIDS (PLHA), the virus and its effects (both physiological and social) have provided an opportunity to question and explore from a novel perspective the nature of identity, stigma and dignity, the impact of globalisation, the right to health, the parameters of responsibility, and relations between people of different genders, ethnicities and sexualities. We have come, in short, to understand that HIV and AIDS is as much an ‘epidemic of signification’ (Treichler, 1988) as it is an epidemic that blights bodies.