We refuse to standardized ways

By Dawn Cavanagh

April 19, 2007: In last week’s South African Constitutional Court tour, I visited the Old Fort prison which used to jail political prisoners. Some of Robert Sobukwe’s words during his trial of pass laws campaign are still striking and could still epitomize the present day struggles of queers.

Such words as “we refuse” are words of power, resistance, resilience and the beautiful relentlessness of activism. These words could only be spoken by those who have hope in their struggle and commitment to change the environment.

Efforts to date to address HIV and Aids claim to use ‘a rights-based approach’, which is espoused by everyone in the broader process, and it has become a standard way of approaching any progress in the sector.

And as we start to consider how to move beyond ABC and its threat to life and health, we are forced to make sense of this rhetoric – ‘a rights-based approach’ to HIV and Aids.

Responses to HIV and Aids by countries are still invested in technical approaches to stem down the tide, which is ‘behavior change’. And now we have been following the ‘behavior change’ for over a decade but there’s no deep change… transformation!

The country sought short-cuts to addressing HIV and Aids in the first two decades of the epidemic. We have developed plan after plan using UN frameworks, which were short and medium plans.

Every so often, thinkers elsewhere present us with a conceptual framework or a new thing to think about when we plan our response at a global, regional and national, including local levels. So every year for many years the UN presented themes for World Aids Day (WAD) that would hopefully spur new or different or deeper or expanded action.

Men Make A Difference, Break the Silence and so on were themes for some of the WAD we have honoured. Then, there are the broader conceptual frameworks that were to be used by our governments – the “expanded response”, “multi-sectoral” response and more recently, the “three ones”.

Essentially, the planning frameworks and processes guided by the UN and international standards of good and best practice are based on an assumption of consensus by civil society and by governments. So taking the issue of ‘a rights-based response’ discussed above, the question for us, as queers, is how do we create frameworks for a response to HIV and Aids that fit our realities.

We can see that even in terms of the response to HIV and Aids for heterosexuals – where the energy and resources have been invested – the idea of ‘a rights-based response’ is still in its infancy. ‘Rights-based’ suggests that the foundation, the basis of our thinking, analysis and strategy are all developed out of our commitment to rights. Our assessment, review and assertions of success in the response use these rights as the measure, the criteria of transformation and change.

So as queers, as we recover from the shock of our recent success in getting ourselves ‘written in’ to the National Strategic Plan of South Africa, we must slow down just long enough to gear ourselves up to interpret for ourselves how ‘a rights-based response’ amongst ourselves should, must and could look.

Nobody knows and understands our sexuality and identities like we do. We must ask ourselves some hard questions to prevent ourselves from following plans and ideas that are based on faulty understandings of how change happens, and of what it means to use ‘a rights-based response’. First we must recognize that the NSP and its operational plan are not value free, and the officials who are charged with making it happen are not objective beings.

As a queer community, committed to justice and the rights of all, including our own rights, we should think of engaging to our national responses to HIV and Aids, freedom, autonomy, dignity and equality.

The mainstay of international human rights instruments and the core of the constitution of South Africa is the ‘equality’ clause. What is the alternative to behavior change and ABC as solutions for our wellbeing? How can our understanding of rights inform and shape the national response to HIV and Aids? And how do we claim these understandings and ideas in the new National AIDS Council, with or in the absence of a seat at the table.

And for now let’s recognize for the fact that we don’t have a seat at the table. Every sector and community are at the ‘rights-based’ National AIDS Council table except gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Maybe its time to say like great activists that have gone before us that ‘we refuse…, and we don’t feel justice can be done under the circumstances’.

• The writer is a lesbian feminist, HIV/Aids activist and Interim Director of Forum for the Empowerment of Women(FEW)