Visuality, sick bodies, and the politics of the healthcare crisis in Zimbabwe

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In Zimbabwe, discourses on healthcare during the socio-economic and political crisis period since the turn of the century have largely centred around the quantitative and physiological dimensions of healthcare. Yet the healthcare crisis manifests many varied dimensions and dynamics whose origins, effects, nature, and trajectories over time may not be fully comprehended through conventional inquiries steeped in death counts, rates of infections, the extent of outbreaks, etc. Going beyond the quantifiable and measurable manifestations of the Zimbabwean healthcare crisis, this article shifts focus to visuality in its attempt to unsettle notions of ‘data’, method, and epistemology in approaches to the crisis. The article looks to visual mediatisation to understand how else knowledge about the crisis is being generated, circulated, internalised, and contested in the Zimbabwean public sphere. Placing a specific focus on social media-mediated images of the sick body, the article argues that such images are epistemic sites of power where politicised knowledge of the healthcare crisis is not only challenged and negotiated by ordinary citizens, but it also facilitates a hegemonic discourse of healthcare that reveals the politics of the visual economy of sick bodies in the era of the ‘viral’.