HIV/AIDS-Related Research
From 2001-2016, I conducted four different projects focusing on HIV/AIDS policy and peoples’ experiences living with HIV in the US and South Africa.
Ancestors and Antiretrovirals argues that it is through HIV/AIDS policy that the South African government attempted to balance the contradictory demands of postcolonial nation-building – forced to satisfy the requirements of neoliberal global capital and meet the needs of its most impoverished population. This ‘postcolonial paradox’ is managed by state actors, health experts and people living with HIV/AIDS through the re-signification of the tropes of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity.’ Drawing on 30 months of ethnographic, discursive and historical research, the book traces the politics of AIDS in South Africa from 1994 through 2010 analyzing: the political economy of the post-apartheid health system, the shifting symbolic struggles over the signification of HIV/AIDS, and the ways in which communities profoundly affected by the epidemic incorporate culturally hybrid subjectivities, informed by both indigenous and biomedical healing paradigms. This bio-political history is positioned within the squatter camp, considering HIV/AIDS politics from the perspective of those in whose name these battles are fought but who have been rendered voiceless in its telling. The book details what it is like to live with and die of AIDS in South Africa’s urban slums.
Honorable Mention, Robert K. Merton Award, Section on Science, Knowledge & Technology, American Sociological Association
Honorable Mention, Eliot Freidson Outstanding Publication Award, Section on Medical Sociology, American Sociological Association
Honorable Mention, 2016 Theory Prize, Theory Section, American Sociological Association
The dissertation upon which the book is based, The Bio-Politics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa, also won the 2009 American Sociological Association Dissertation Award
Articles Based on the Book
Decoteau, Claire Laurier. 2013. “Exclusionary Inclusion and the Normalization of Biomedical Culture” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 1, 3: 403-430.
Decoteau, Claire Laurier. 2013. “The Crisis of Liberation: Masculinity, Neoliberalism and HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Men and Masculinities 16, 2 (June): 139-159.
Decoteau, Claire Laurier. 2013. “Hybrid Habitus: Toward a Post-Colonial Theory of Practice.” Political Power and Social Theory, Volume 24 (Postcolonial Sociology): 263-293*
*Winner, Junior Theorist Prize, Theory Section, American Sociological Association
*Winner, 2014 Outstanding Author Contribution, Emerald Publishing
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Sex Work, Transactional Sex & HIV/AIDS
Drawing on qualitative interviews, ethnographic observation and diaries, this project analyzes the relationship between sex work and transactional sex in contemporary South Africa. Historically, transactional sex exists in a gift economy of reciprocity, whereas sex is commodified in sex work. I argue that neoliberalism has eroded the distinction between these practices for poor, Black women living in Johannesburg. The project contributes to our understanding of how relations between intimacy and the economy are reconfigured in the face of structural crisis and how this shapes peoples’ subjectivities.
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Decoteau, Claire Laurier. 2016. “‘You Can’t Eat Love’: ‘Getting By’ in South Africa’s Transactional Sexual Economy.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 4, 3: 289–322.
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Testimonial Activism
Based on research collected in 2001-2002, this project explores the performative strategies used by HIV-infected activists in the United States. Because of shifts in the cultural construction of AIDS as well as the widespread availability of antiretroviral medication, I argue that people living with the disease act as specters of a forgotten epidemic, forcing audience members to reckon with processes of social exclusion and cultural othering.
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Decoteau, Claire Laurier. 2008. “The Specter of AIDS: Testimonial Activism in the Aftermath of the Epidemic.” Sociological Theory 26, 3 (September): 230-257.
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Community Participatory Research
In June/July 2009, I engaged in community participatory research with residents of two squatter camps (Lawley and Sol Plaatjie) in Johannesburg, South Africa. The primary premise of this methodological approach is that authentic knowledge is produced in collaboration with and for the community it targets. In this form of research, local participants are recruited, trained and supervised as they carry out the data collection, coding and analysis. As such, this methodology repositions those who have been passively demarcated as research objects as the architects of research design. The goal of this project was to explain growing health inequality in informal settlements and pinpoint the precise obstacles informal settlement dwellers face in accessing both formal and informal health care and in maintaining healthy lifestyles. A pamphlet was published and used by these communities to advocate for better access to basic services.