1. A magic bullet for the “African” mother? Neo-Imperial reproductive futurism and the pharmaceutical “solution” to the HIV/AIDS Crisis.
- Author
-
Booth KM
- Subjects
- Africa South of the Sahara ethnology, Ethics, Medical education, Ethics, Medical history, Female, History, 20th Century, History, 21st Century, Humans, Patient Participation economics, Patient Participation history, Patient Participation legislation & jurisprudence, Patient Participation psychology, Politics, Pregnancy, Public Health economics, Public Health education, Public Health history, Public Health legislation & jurisprudence, United States ethnology, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome economics, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome ethnology, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome history, Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome psychology, Antirheumatic Agents economics, Antirheumatic Agents history, Clinical Trials as Topic economics, Clinical Trials as Topic history, Clinical Trials as Topic legislation & jurisprudence, Clinical Trials as Topic psychology, Ethics, Pharmacy education, Ethics, Pharmacy history, HIV, Pharmaceutical Solutions economics, Pharmaceutical Solutions history, Women's Health ethnology, Women's Health history
- Abstract
On the basis of a close reading of popular and medical texts which address a debate over the ethics of clinical drug trials funded by the United States and designed mainly for sub-Saharan Africa, I argue that international public health discourse about infant HIV infection in that region reflects and legitimates a neo-imperialist, anti-reproductive justice ideology. Participants share a fetal-centered logic that US-funded biomedicine must shoulder the burden of rescuing sub-Saharan Africa from itself by using the bodies of HIV-positive pregnant women to transmit biomedicine's magic bullet—antiretroviral drugs—to the next generation. The survival of the fetus, disguised as the well-being of the HIV-positive woman and accomplished by the magic of biomedical research, becomes the survival of a region otherwise doomed by its present state of economic, political, and medical incapacity. This version of what queer theorist Lee Edelman (2004, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive) calls “reproductive futurism” redounds to the benefit of the more explicitly women-hating and nationalist ideologies of still-powerful right-wing movements against reproductive and sexual rights.
- Published
- 2010
- Full Text
- View/download PDF