(Re) Mediatizing HIV/AIDS in South Africa

Written from a partly autoethnographic perspective, this article investigates current and past South African government stances on HIV/AIDS, grounding them in their larger political and ideological contexts, and examining the broader repercussions. A comparative analysis of South Africa's loveLife and STEPS interventions problematizes the self-branding used by loveLife in favor of the uplifting and humanizing message of STEPS. The author highlights the dangers of favoring AIDS solutions seeped in racial and cultural discourse over scientific ones and calls for the country's current HIV/AIDS strategy to be (re)mediatized in terms of its local and global representations. The idea of sham reasoning is discussed in relation to the generation of pseudoscientific discourses.