'Loving in a time of hopelessness': on township women's subjectivities in a time of HIV/AIDS.

The birth of a democratic South African state is being accompanied by increasing rates of HIV/AIDS related deaths among the country's young citizens. By the late 1990s South Africa became known as having the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates globally, with the worst hit province being KwaZulu-Natal, the focus of this article. Given these shocking realities of sick bodies and living in the presence of constant death, it is not surprising that studies that probe the medical, social and economic implications of this disease have dramatically increased over the past decade. However, what remains under explored are general continuities and changes within African women's lived experiences, which are being informed by their changing experiences of physical and spiritual uprootedness, economic and existential survival, constancy of death experiences and the desire for intimacy in a highly strained everyday that continues to be shaped by this epidemic. In addition to exploring these mundane aspects of young women's lives, the paper aims to broaden concepts of agency under limit conditions by emphasizing the role of young women's flawed agency, as they attempt to remake their social worlds under conditions where historical violences still resonate but now with an encounter with AIDS. By fitting the project within a socio-historico and cultural framework of viewing African youth sexualities, I will also show how this creates opportunities to tease out broader issues of personhood, choice, risk, interrelationships, childbearing, individuality, communality and love, and more generally how meanings are generated in times of socio-cultural breakdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]