ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how female students’ bodies function as sites for contestations over modernity, morality, and population health in Uganda’s public sphere. Global health NGOs target students in HIV awareness campaigns while tabloid newspapers circulate sexually explicit images of female students. Although these media producers have different aims, they draw upon overlapping claims to modernity in their mediations of young women. NGOs promote a vision of modernity in which young women engage in monogamous, romantic, same-age, heterosexual relationships that lead to marriage and a nuclear family, while tabloids traffic in tropes of licentious female subjects. This chapter suggests that both discourses do violence to young women’s claims to personhood by constructing them as promiscuous and immoral. Female students engage with media in surprising and sometimes contradictory ways, rooted in self-making practices that locate value in the extension of personhood through relationships and reputation. This chapter combines insights from performance studies with analyses of African personhoods to reveal the critical stakes of media misrecognitions in Uganda’s mature HIV epidemic.
