The Morality of Performance: HIV Disclosure in Speech and Song in South Africa

This article synthesizes anthropological research on morality and performance, drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with a Zulu choir that was an HIV support group and AIDS activist organization. The article responds to an increasing level of anthropological interest in the topic of morality and contributes to an emerging body of literature on language and experience. The concept of moral assemblages is used to examine the embodied communicative dispositions of choir members amid two overlapping and sometimes conflicting public discourses about HIV disclosure. Building on previous research on how performance makes it possible to address topics otherwise outside cultural boundaries of acceptable speech, the article explores how framing HIV disclosure as performance allowed some South Africans living with HIV to embody the conflicting prescriptions of two distinct public discourses about disclosure.