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Dissertation Information for Sam N. Bullington

NAME:
- Sam N. Bullington

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Women's Studies

SCHOOL:
- University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (USA) (2005)

ADVISORS:
- Susan Craddock

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Amy Kaminsky
- Richa Nagar
- Janet Spector
- Daphne Berdahl
- Susan Geiger

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Ambiguous

Title: From the "Rainbow Nation" to the "New Apartheid": Sexual orientation and HIV/AIDS in contemporary South African nation building

Abstract: How does political change happen? What is the relationship of the present to the past? Can we really make a "complete break" with the past? This dissertation is a political history of the dramatic changes that have taken place in South Africa over the last two decades. It examines the role of history---specifically the apartheid era---in contemporary progressive social change, highlighting both the haunting and constraining effects of past injustices unresolved as well as the ways that the national desire to distance from the past has been strategically utilized by social change activists.

I approach these questions via two different scales---that of abstract national narratives and that of the minutiae of everyday life. I take as my starting place the stories that South Africa tells about itself. First is the early 1990s rhetoric of the "Rainbow Nation," a rhetoric of human rights, national belonging, and equality for all that was founded in direct opposition to the repression, exclusions, and injustices of the apartheid era. The most significant legacy of this time of openness in South African history is that South Africa has what is considered one of the most progressive Constitutions in the world.

The second national discourse I examine is the late 1990s rhetoric of AIDS as the "new apartheid," taken up as the rate of HIV infection threatened to undo whatever gains had resulted from the transition to democracy. What appeared to be a simple call to mobilize against a new national enemy actually became, with Mbeki's 2000 public assertions that "a single virus cannot cause an entire syndrome," quite complex and contested due to competing knowledge claims regarding the phenomenon known as AIDS.

Both narratives illuminate ways that contemporary South African self-understanding is articulated in opposition to colonial and apartheid regulation of racialized sexualities. Nineteen months of field research in various parts of South Africa allow me to analyze the impact of government policy and law on everyday lives and the ways that social movements intersect with such popular narratives.

MPACT Scores for Sam N. Bullington

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A+C = 0
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W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-03-24 10:55:52

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