Negotiating therapeutic citizenship and notions of masculinity in a South African village

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Abstract
The article explores the idea of therapeutic citizenship in relation to the experiences of men who attend support groups for people living with HIV or AIDS (PLHIV). At a rural South African health facility offering free antiretroviral (ARV) medicines, support groups aim to empower HIV-positive clients through knowledge and skills that enable them to adhere to their ARV regimen. Members are exhorted to abandon their ‘traditional’ health and gender beliefs in favour of a biomedical understanding and approach to health; to embrace participation in a support group for PLHIV; and to actively challenge HIV stigma through the public disclosure of their HIV-test result. Fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, investigated how men negotiated these efforts – normally characterised in the academic literature as ‘therapeutic citizenship’ – in relation to men's socio-cultural definitions of masculinity. The findings reveal that most of the men gained the...

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