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Chapter 2, ‘Facing the HIV-positive Mother’, begins the book with an introduction to some of the women who participated in the study. After describing the context of the study, the stories of four women are introduced. The book deliberately begins with the stories of real mothers so as to highlight the complexity of their stories from the outset.

Chapter 3, ‘The Joys of Motherhood’, offers a critical interpretation of academic literature on motherhood, including feminist, psychodynamic and South African perspectives. It is hoped that consideration of motherhood as an identity, whether or not overshadowed by HIV, will encourage readers to encounter HIV-positive motherhood as a particular instance of motherhood, which, because of its extremity, allows us to examine identities of motherhood more broadly as well. Chapter 4, ‘Finding the HIV-positive Mother’, extends examination of the literature specifically in relation to HIV-positive motherhood. By reading this literature with a psychodynamic and discursive eye, some of the discomforts and assumptions of HIV-positive motherhood begin to emerge. This analysis argues that such studies are almost exclusively interested in the potential of mothers to damage their children. Like listening for slips of the tongue, I argue that one can read such studies with an eye to gaps and points of irrationality in order to understand the specific anxieties that the figure of the HIV-positive mother evokes in the scientific imagination. Specific themes of absence, death, guilt and abnormality are explored. This task leads into the second half of the chapter, in which discursive and psychodynamic frameworks, central to the theoretical framework of the book, are explored.

Chapters 5 to 8 present an analysis of interviews conducted with HIV-positive mothers. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the maternal position in which the baby is the primary subject. Chapter 5, ‘Minding Baby’s Body’, explores mothers’ interactions with their babies’ bodies and the ways in which they keep their babies’ bodies in their own minds. Babies’ bodies are encountered through the imaginations and fantasies of mothers, with the promise of medicine guiding, but not completely allaying, their fears. Chapter 6, ‘Mother’s Mind’, explores the mother–infant relationship and maternal care, including breastfeeding, in order to suggest that maternal care has a particular quality in relation to HIV-positive motherhood, where maternal selflessness and the threat of HIV occupy centre stage.

Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the more marginal, but ever-present position of the mother herself, in which mothers foregrounded their own subjectivity as mothers, and from their own perspectives. Chapter 7, ‘Mother’s Body’, asks where the mother’s body, in contrast to the baby’s body of previous chapters, is brought into interviews. The focus is on how maternal bodies are written into subjectivities of motherhood. Chapter 8, ‘Thula Mama’, presents an analysis of the mother’s voice, i.e. the ways in which mothers expressed their own loves, losses, tragedies and joys. It will be argued that the baby is the primary subject of the mother’s attention, while the mother’s own active position, from her own point of view, is secondary. Nonetheless, the active subjectivity of the mother is strikingly present, if not dominant. However, the mutual exclusivity between primary baby and secondary mother, so often implied by discourses of motherhood (e.g. good selfless mother versus bad selfish mother) cannot account for the interconnectedness of mother and baby in maternal subjectivity.

The book concludes with chapter 9, ‘Contradicting Maternity’, in which a synthesis of the book and a theoretical discussion of its implications for HIV-positive maternal subjectivity are explored.

1 I am using ‘black’ as a political category to include coloured and Indian; i.e., in the modern parlance, all ‘previously disadvantaged’ women. I mostly interviewed black African women, but there were also coloured and Indian women, as well as one white woman, whom I excluded from the analysis because her story was quite different (and very racialised).

2 This book is specifically concerned with HIV-positive motherhood and focuses on interview material related to this. Other primary issues related to gender, heterosexuality and the HIV-positive body are reported elsewhere (see Long, 2006; Long, forthcoming).