Morality plays: Popular theatre for AIDS awareness in the Commonwealth of Dominica

The global HIV/AIDS epidemic has given rise to global AIDS intervention initiatives that are based on largely cosmopolitan constructions of sexuality and sexual mores. The pandemic also provides fertile breeding ground for theories of the origin of HIV/AIDS, its mode of transmission, and the allocation of blame. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Commonwealth of Dominica, this dissertation examines the articulation of AIDS through AIDS prevention initiatives and through gossip and rumor. These oral forms create moral readings of behavior and shape everyday narratives of HIV/AIDS that resist dominant behavioural explanations. The two AIDS prevention initiatives utilized popular theatre methods to involve local participants in the dissemination of information related to the virus, modes of transmission and prevention that were shaped by global organizations like UNAIDS. Dominican organizers and participants shifted the focus of these initiatives to questions of moral community. To untangle the sometimes complex negotiations between dominant, largely foreign constructions of HIV/AIDS and the desire to situate the virus, and people living with the virus, in terms of Dominica's moral community, I draw on other performative genres such as Carnival, Heritage Day and "Folklore". I show that for Dominicans, it is structural violence resulting from their tenuous location in the global political economy that renders members of their population vulnerable to HIV infection. AIDS rumors circulating in Dominica during the fieldwork period pointed to theories of racially motivated genocide, either through deliberate infection or through preventing future births. Given the structural vulnerability of much of Dominica's population, AIDS prevention education must be aware of the implications of promoting condom use in a climate where such advice is often viewed as complicit with genocidal initiatives. In conclusion, the implications of these findings for social responses to the AIDS epidemic and HIV/AIDS prevention in the developing world are explored.