Healthy Bodies Versus Diseased Bodies: Romance as a Trope of Social Order in Kenyan HIV/AIDS Fiction

Abstract

This paper looks at how romantic discourses have been appropriated and employed as avenues for imagining and suggesting a particular kind of social order in the context of HIV/AIDS in Kenya. Most romance stories can be seen as dealing with emotions but in the texts discussed here, the writers' main focus is on the bodies of the characters. It is those people who carry healthy bodies who eventually succeed in their romantic pursuits while the ill experience failed romance. Individuals who are HIV-positive are represented as “polluting” the social order while those who are HIV-negative are seen as upholding the social order by maintaining a “clean” and healthy nation-state. The paper proposes that romantic relationships are used by the writers selected as strategies of ordering and selecting the healthy from the diseased, consequently proposing some form of containment and maintenance of social order. However, it has to be noted that this representation is framed within ideas that stereotype people as HIV-positive and HIV-negative. In addition, I argue that this ideology can be read as conservative and entrenching certain traditional notions of romance that have come to be associated with control, discipline and therefore setting the limits of sex and sexuality in society.