At a crossroads: health and vulnerability in the era of HIV

The contemporary modern age is marked less by relations that take place within national borders and far more by those that transcend these frontiers. This chapter presents ethnographic research on HIV in South Africa and Brazil alongside a literature in international relations (IR). It highlights how global institutions are themselves implicated in people's embodied vulnerability and how they draw attention to the intersecting forms of inequality, linked to race, class, and gender, that undermine improved and equitable health—with a focus on access to AIDS medicines—across the scale from the molecular to the global. Drawing on this ethnographic research in South Africa, alongside qualitative and secondary research in Brazil and India, the chapter details current debates in global health in light of the networked threads that weave HIV-positive women's embodied vulnerability into the governance of biomedical technologies and the technologies of governance.