The Perils and Promises of the Politics of Visibility: Media, AIDS/HIV Activism, and the Sanctity of the Child

This essay focuses on a documentary film, Brian Tilley’s “It’s My Life” which deals with South African AIDS activist Abdurrazzack “Zackie” Achmat and his organization, the Treatment Action Campaign, as they struggle to make antiretroviral drugs available to the millions of South Africans who need them to survive. I argue that while the campaign’s focus on winning this battle in the minds of the worldwide public through media exposure requires Achmat to wield the language of childhood innocence and blameless victims, the film is also able to articulate a vision of another definition of the political, one that makes central sexual desire as a means of highlighting, rather than erasing, racial, class, and sexual difference.