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This study explores the world of drag performance and beauty pageantry at one of Johannesburg’s landmark gay nightclubs – Club Indigo. It examines how the participants’ consumer identities, material culture, and systems of kinship were constructed within and beyond the House of Indigo. This study investigates how this subcultural community, located at the longest-running queer institution of its kind, was shaped by the contemporary politics and realities of race, class, queerness, and gender identity. This mixed qualitative study incorporates various research materials such as interview and archival data, ethnographic fieldnotes, as well as digital and online social media content. By providing critical discourse and social semiotic analyses, this study argues that these performances of consumption were both liberating and constraining for the various subcultural members. The empirical chapters provided herein critically analyze the different ways in which queer kinship, beauty pageantry, drag performance, and self-stylization simultaneously empowered and limited claims towards belonging and queer citizenship by various members. This interdisciplinary study contributes to the scholarship on drag and beauty pageantry by paying attention to the members’ practices of consumption and the collective construction of material cultures within this subcultural context. This ethnographic study interrogates how the politics of race, class, gender, and queerness were performed through the world-making practices of drag and beauty pageantry. It provides an ethnographic snapshot into one of Johannesburg’s most premier queer subcultural communities. It also demonstrates how this landmark institution contributed to the city’s queer entertainment landscape. Moreover, it shows how this particular subcultural community enabled its members to make claims about public visibility, upward mobility, and queer citizenship in Johannesburg.

Following the discovery of potent novel biomedical HIV technologies in the form of Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision and Test and Start, Eswatini implemented these important technologies to curb the spread of HIV infections in the country with the highest HIV prevalence in the world. In dire need of these efficacious technologies, the country with technical and financial support from donors successfully implemented both novel biomedical technologies. With technical and financial might, due to known historical statistics of low uptake of HIV services, Swazi men were targeted as a crucial population to make these technologies effective and reduce new HIV infections. This technological and financial prowess turned out to be inconsequential as uptake was low. Drawing on evidence from ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis explored Swazi males’ perceptions on VMMC and Test and Start. I aimed to gain an emic perspective on why there was low utilization of these readily available potent biomedical technologies by Swazi males. Implementation of these interventions was challenged by complex social, economic and political realities. Policy makers had overlooked the social realities and complexities of the interventions, failing to consider how targeted populations would receive them or if they would use them to the extent required to have the desired population-level preventive effect.

This anthropological study focuses on the transformations of gender dynamics in the context of migration and the implications these have for masculinity scholarship in South Africa. Using a case study of migrant men, who found themselves pushed to the margins of the economy and society or the ‘corner of life’, as they called it, I examine how various forms of marginalisation intersect with normative ideas of masculinities. This cornered space was characterised by violence and precarity that undermined their roles and identities as men. Contrary to studies that argue that men with limited options turn to violence to assert themselves, so as to align with hegemonic masculinities, the men in this study did not view hegemonic masculinity as fixed. Failure to live up to hegemonic standards led them to redefine masculinities to match their lived experiences. Drawing from dominant tropes of masculinities, they negotiated and reformulated their own standards and scripts, which recognised their own varied forms of capital. Observing the varied ways that my study participants navigated and negotiated their precarious lived realities, a process they termed ‘kukiya kiya’ – meaning trying various keys to open doors and seize opportunities – I have come to understand masculinities as fluid and plural by definition, consisting of a set of ideas, behaviours and practices resulting in unstable subject positions in the process of being and becoming. I therefore, propose looking at masculinities not as a structure, as implied by the term ‘hegemony’, but as an open-ended space (corner) that is under constant construction.

Although there are numerous studies that have been conducted in Tanzania, most of them focused on understanding gay men from the angle of HIV. While appreciating the contribution of these previous studies my study attempts to understand the everyday lives of gay men in Dar es Salaam outside of their interaction with HIV intervention spaces. After conducting a one-year ethnographic research among gay men in Dar es Salaam from January to December 2017, I argue that although gay men in Dar es Salaam do have a comparatively high risk for contracting HIV, understanding this risk requires a broader consideration of the political, legal, social, and economic factors that contribute to that risk. In this thesis I bring into light the ways in which gay men’s desire for other men in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, is considered against the norms thus resulting to pressure from the state and people around them. The five empirical chapters presented in this thesis shows how gay men in that I worked with becomes fugitive in the first place and how they have created several navigation techniques to survive. In the midst of constant societal pressure, forming new kinships, tactically performing multiple identities by displaying their best masculine behaviour whenever they are in places that they feel that their sexual identities would be unacceptable, emerged as a very crucial practice among them.

This dissertation is an anthropological analysis of how orphan care and support has been transformed in the era of HIV/AIDS in Tanzania. It is a multi-sited study in a context of limited care and support resources. With the coming of AIDS, care for orphans was no longer left exclusively to kin, neighbors, and friends; it went beyond family, community, and even national boundaries. This dissertation shows how the increased demand for care and support for children who have lost their parent(s) attracted the attention of international agencies, thus making it no longer a concern only of relatives, community members, and the state but also of international organizations that advocated for universal human rights, including children rights. These international organizations, working in partnership with the state or and/or with local partners, supported existing care and support initiatives and introduced new initiatives that included massive efforts to document, enumerate, and categorize children. As a consequence, the provision of care and support for children became not only a matter of charity but also of rights, while at the same time creating “thin citizens” and “the caring community”.

The central aim of the thesis is studying the HIV continuum of care, otherwise known as the ‘leaky cascade’ in public health terms, to understand reasons for non-uptake of readily available HIV services and low retention to care of PLHIV regardless of adopting strategies recommended by implementation science. It shows how global HIV policies play out when implemented in the local context, and the imprints they leave on the health system.

HIV Support Groups are a multi-faced phenomenon in Kenya’s HIV mitigation landscape. The aim of this study was to examine the significance of HIV in the transformation of care and social support systems, and, additionally, the contribution of HIV support groups in the care and support of people living with HIV (PLHIV) in Nairobi County over the past three decades. Specifically, the study examined the emergence, evolution, dynamics, specificities and implications of HIV support groups. This thesis explores the relationships between individuals and the HIV support group structure. It explores how social relations are created, shaped and redefined vis-à-vis care and support. It draws on various data collected using ethnography techniques. The study shows that HIV support group space is an arena of many players where lives of PLHIV are remade and closely scrutinized. HIV support groups are spaces where the interests of PLHIV meet with those of development partners/ biomedical interventions. I argue using various ever-changing logics of care and support that these groups are not a simple replacement of the traditional care and support system – they are psychological, socio-reintegrating, hope-propelling, stigma-fighting spaces that also provide emotional healing, love, acceptability, appreciation and respect. I also argue that while support groups present opportunities, they, as well present disillusionments. The study concludes that in spite of the fluid state and shortcomings of the groups, they are life-changing initiatives and provide a foundation for coping with HIV, and thus instrumental in HIV interventions.

This dissertation adds to the literature on how institutions of care transform. It shows how differently positioned actors, including people with HIV, their friends and families, local health providers and officials, policy makers, local and international NGOs, bilateral, multilateral and transnational organisations, economy and technology interact to shape care practices for people with HIV and AIDS. I argue that it is the interactions and friction between different actors at the different times and spaces that shape both HIV/AIDS care practices and their evolution. The text highlights the friction between actors and their concepts and practices and how these interact with technology to create new forms and practices that are shaped by both the pragmatism and agency of local actors and knowledge of international agencies. To characterise HIV/AIDS care transformation, I provide a thick description of HIV counselling practice in all its main trajectories as currently practiced and attempt to provide a history and evolution of current policies and practices. I highlight the shifts in HIV/AIDS policy and practice as the epidemic matured from the pre-HIV test era through the Pre-HIV treatment era to the treatment era and beyond. I demonstrate the relationship between those shifts, the agency of different actors, the technology and age of the epidemic and show how friction between these actors has shaped HIV/AIDS care transformation in Zambia.