'Your husbands are bringing it to you': South African rural women and HIV in Darrell Roodt's Yesterday (2004)

The ways in which rural women living with and/or affected by HIV are portrayed in films can potentially influence how social transformation is imagined, including the extent to which the women can be involved in problem-solving processes. This is because, in addition to conceptualising the problem,...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Culture, health & sexuality health & sexuality, 2020-04, Vol.22 (sup1), p.96-110
Main Author: Mdege, Norita
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Health problems
Health status
HIV
Human immunodeficiency virus
Husbands
Motion pictures
Problem solving
Roodt, Darrell
Rural communities
rural women
sexual health
Social change
South Africa
structural violence
Transformation
Victims
Violence
Women
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The ways in which rural women living with and/or affected by HIV are portrayed in films can potentially influence how social transformation is imagined, including the extent to which the women can be involved in problem-solving processes. This is because, in addition to conceptualising the problem, such representations often place women in a certain position in relation to, or within, the problematic situation, which in turn influences how solutions are framed. This paper uses a discursive approach to explore the portrayal of South African rural women living with and/or affected by HIV in Darrell Roodt's film, Yesterday (2004), which is set in rural KwaZulu-Natal. It considers how the film deals with the tension between structural violence and rural women's agency in grappling with HIV. Structural violence has a significant impact on the experiences of rural women and, hence, their health outcomes. However, when representing rural women, too heavy an emphasis on structural violence runs the risk of portraying them as passive or helpless victims, thus severely limiting their agency.
ISSN:1369-1058
1464-5351
DOI:10.1080/13691058.2019.1658805