Affect and the "Really Real": The Politics of HIV/AIDS Framing in South African Theater.

Funding in South Africa privileges HIV prevention campaigns underpinned by individual behavior change goals, despite over two decades of intervention but little reduction in national HIV prevalence. In response, civil society has begun calling for innovative interventions and ways of speaking about the epidemic. Employing framing theory, I analyze differences in how HIV/AIDS is characterized in public media and interrogate the knowledge politics underpinning a group of artists' emerging attention to the nexus of affect, intersubjectivity, and epidemics within performance. I suggest this focus challenges but also complements dominant HIV intervention models by destabilizing common content, relations of power, and hierarchies of knowledge that shape normative health discourse and practice. Simultaneously, such performances reveal deep disparities between the neoliberal principles undergirding most global public health ideology, South Africa's current political economy of HIV intervention, and the dynamic concerns of its HIV-affected constituents.

"Making it personal": ideology, the arts, and shifting registers in health promotion.

In South Africa, health promotion related to HIV/AIDS has been characterised as a component of public health prevention. It has heavily utilised global health ideology to construct promotional messages that rely on neoliberal models of individual, responsible health citizenship. However, after nearly 30 years of public health messaging, there have been only minor shifts in the country's HIV prevalence rates; it has become apparent that there is disconnect between policy, programmes, and target audiences. Debates about where this disconnect occurs tend to focus on the role of problems in biomedical knowledge translation or with structural inequalities that lead to health inequity. As debates increase, artists involved in health have emerged to address an additional reason: audience interpellation. In this article, I interrogate relationships between health promotion ideology and processes of interpellation. I suggest that disconnect between the two has roots in the tone of programming, the ways sociality is constructed within health promotion, and the kind of subject which global prevention programmes seek to constitute. Using a case study, I illustrate how public health ideology is made actionable through arts practice. While conventional health promotion programmes address populations in a way that allows individuals to distance themselves, members of South Africa's arts sector have worked to integrate prevention and care in a way that bolsters interpellation through making messages personal. The case study presents one performance but is informed by my broader research with over 20 theatrical groups conducted during 18 months of fieldwork. Analysis of the production reveals that artists act as mediators between population-level public health messages and individuals through the embodied technologies of applied theatre. However, I argue that artists also create space for participants to reimagine configurations of care, responsibility, and intimacy within health practices.