Intentional Infections: Public Discourses of HIV Spread

In Bushbuckridge, as HIV prevalence and AIDS death increased, rumours about purposeful HIV infection and death flourished. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, rumours targeted scientists, medical professionals and technologies in tales of purposeful infection, casting HIV as a threat posed by external and foreign agents. However, by the mid to late 2000s, stories about young attractive women and wealthy men purposefully infecting people with HIV replaced these earlier rumours. I argue that this represents shifting comprehensions of AIDS from an external to an internal threat, its domestication and construction through cultural framings of moral personhood.