Between Discipline and Empowerment: Temporal Ambivalence at a Sleepaway Camp for HIV-Positive Children in Botswana

Abstract

Recreational camping is increasingly popular among US-based organizations as a means of socializing HIV-positive African children. Drawing on research conducted at a week-long sleepaway camp in Botswana, I argue that the US pediatricians and other volunteers running the camp sometimes undermined their own efforts to orient HIV-positive children to a fantasized future of independence and self-management, thereby evincing tensions between the camp as a space of generational self-transformation and the camp as a space of intensified scrutiny and surveillance. While pediatricians zealously, even forcefully, pursued their mission of separating children from their families and ensuring children's long-term survival by inculcating in them the dispositions necessary for continued adherence to their antiretroviral medications, at times they abandoned this objective in favor of enforcing discipline in the short-term in ways that called into question whether children could ever truly be capable of self-management. I focus on the productive instability of "bare life," that is, a tension between rehabilitation and an unchanging regime of surveillance, in order to draw attention to the temporal ambivalence that pervaded Camp Lesego. The frames of short-term discipline and long-term empowerment and self-transformation, I argue, were always immanent at Camp Lesego even as these frames implied two radically divergent trajectories for campers and for Botswana's epidemic more broadly.