1 - The Vertiginous Body and Social Metamorphosis

Summary

In 2001, Andries Botha, a South African artist, contributed a work to an exhibition on AIDS at the South African National Gallery. On close inspection, the piece, ‘Rupture’, proved to be a rendering of human skin. The curators of the exhibition, Kyle Kauffman and Marilyn Martin, wrote that it was a:

landscape of the body. There are bruises and veins that appear as stark and defoliated trees. The work … emphasizes the bruised and battered skin of the body. It evokes notions of illness, abuse, decline and disintegration: a rupture. (Kauffman & Martin, exhibition catalogue, 2001: 6-7)

Botha's depiction of skin in the publication in which it appears was accompanied by a written coda:

Skin represents the fragile physical membrane that mediates body, humanity, and identity. Its tenuous veil negotiates our relationships with the physical and emotional world. It also provides the necessary illusions of permanence, endurance and inviolability. (Ibid: 10-11)

The chapter marks both the sufferings of the flesh and the ways in which cultural understandings around HIV and AIDS in Okhahlamba at times increased the suffering of those dying of AIDS due to social isolation, and to the attachment of ideas of physical and moral pollution to those who were ill. Prior to the availability of antiretroviral treatment, notions of social and bodily coherence could not be upheld in a context of death on such a large scale. The literal and figurative dangers attached to the body's fluids were powerfully experienced in a context of AIDS, where transmission was precisely due to the permeability of bodies and the communication of fluids between sexual partners and between the ill and their caretakers.

Social worlds dictate which social categories of people may touch whom and in what ways. Spaces of intimacy in social life often begin with care of the body, through an older person tending to the bodily needs of an infant. The infant is cleansed, fed, and fondled, coming to know different parts of its own body through their being named and touched. The social relation between the older person and the child, their affinity, and to a degree their social interchangeability, is underscored.