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HIV, Gender and the Politics of Medicine: Embodied Democracy in the Global South

Online ISBN:
9781529221992
Print ISBN:
9781529221916
Publisher:
Policy Press
Book

HIV, Gender and the Politics of Medicine: Embodied Democracy in the Global South

Elizabeth Mills
Elizabeth Mills

Senior Lecturer in International Development

University of Sussex
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Published online:
23 January 2025
Published in print:
29 April 2024
Online ISBN:
9781529221992
Print ISBN:
9781529221916
Publisher:
Policy Press

Abstract

This book centres on the lives of women who live with HIV in South Africa and who have navigated a complex assemblage of affective relationships, activist networks, government institutions and global coalitions to transform international and national health policies that govern access to essential HIV medicines.Drawing on 20 years of multi-sited ethnographic and policy research in South Africa, India and Brazil, the book foregrounds the value of understanding the embodied and political dimensions of health policy and reveals the networked threads that weave women’s embodied precarity into the governance of technologies and the technologies of governance.This study of women’s activism to access HIV medicine is not simply a study of the evolution of global and national health policy but one that reveals the extent to which policy becomes embodied, recognizing that bodies too are never the same and experience intersecting inequalities in profoundly unique ways. By focusing specifically on policies around access to HIV medicines at a national, transnational and global level, this book traces an important history – the struggle to access these medicines in the Global South – and brings this history into the present by articulating the lessons learnt by the activists and policy makers engaged in shaping these vital policies over the first two decades of the 21st century.

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