Other life: AIDS, biopolitics, and subjectivity in Brazil's zones of social abandonment

This dissertation focuses on the emerging interplay of science, the government of poverty, and subjectivity in the context of Brazilian AIDS. In 1992, a new AIDS Coordination began to be implemented; it has been largely funded by the World Bank. By 1998, the Coordination allegedly made significant progress toward circumscribing affected populations and containing the epidemic's growth. I consider this 'AIDS transition' in the context of Brazil's readjusting economy, state, and moral order. International health, biomedicine, non-governmental and pastoral organizations rationalize social inclusion with respect to disease in Brazil's zones of abandonment. Rational-technical interventions generate new biosocial experiences among AIDS abandonados and determine their experience of dying.;I conducted a nation-wide comparative survey of the uneven impact of this new AIDS management in several regions of Brazil. My long-term fieldwork took place in Salvador, Bahia, 1996/1997. 1 worked in the AIDS public health milieu (infirmaries, surveillance, laboratory and testing services, prevention programs), in the streets, and in Caasah, a community-run AIDS hospice. Services were either monitored or funded by the National AIDS Coordination.;I documented an AIDS epidemic in apparent invisibility among marginal groups. These 'non-citizens' only become visible in the health system when they are dying; they are socially blamed for having caused their own death through drug use and medical noncompliance; after death, the majority is erased from public records. This infra-politics of disease, truth, and power foster a continuous state of social death.;A few of these AIDS abandonados are selected out for social regeneration and life extension in pastoral sites. These sites operate as triage services of the state. Here, the diseased biological is the material of citizenship---a new, selective AIDS citizenship. Together with sovereign power, science, and the pastoral, these abandonados become agents in the negotiation over the immediate conditions for being alive and develop their own biopolitics. These AIDS citizens actively differentiate themselves from the 'living dead' of the social environment they left behind. Patienhood provides them access to a marginal economy and to a new pharmacological identity. From within this novel experience they claim their right to live, and engineer hope.