Читать книгу Contradicting Maternity - Carol Long - Страница 11

In comparing the HIV-positive mother depicted in photographs and constructed in the literature (see chapter 4) to the women I interviewed, perhaps the most striking feature is that these images do not begin to convey the multiplicity or complexity of experiences of motherhood in the context of HIV infection. To construct a discrete and measurable object called the ‘HIV-positive mother’ is thus an impossible task. There were as many differences among women as there were similarities. This is further complicated by the fact that each woman had a different life story, which inflected her experience of motherhood in the context of HIV differently. It becomes clear that trying to characterise the HIV-positive mother implies that a type exists that is either productive of or produced by HIV infection – that either a certain type of person contracts HIV or that HIV invokes a certain brand of motherhood. The multiplicity of experience reflected in interviews with HIV-positive mothers implies that this unifying assumption is a form of monolithic stigmatisation.

The complexity of experience reflected in the data seems to further undercut the polarised descriptions implicit in the literature. Responses to the experience of motherhood raised a plethora of different issues. These issues were often entangled with one another, and were sometimes clearly defined and sometimes fragmented and disjointed; sometimes clearly articulable and sometimes inhabiting a space that went beyond what could be said. While the women spoke more fully and directly about the experience of being HIV-infected, discussion of motherhood had a much more contingent and shifting texture in interviews. It was easier for the women to talk about their HIV infection than it was to talk about themselves as mothers. This reflects the slipperiness of the concept of motherhood in broader psychological theory and public understanding of what it means to be a mother. Similarly, the experience of being HIV-positive, while easier for the women to talk about than experiences of motherhood, and, as the analysis will show, often talked about drawing on established and practised discourses, was nonetheless expressed in multiple ways. A positive diagnosis held different meanings in relation to different aspects of their lives and at different points in the telling: the experience of being HIV-positive was sometimes strange and exotic (echoing the object of the ‘HIV-positive mother’ in the scientific and popular imagination); sometimes all-eclipsing; and sometimes just another aspect, albeit an important and painful one, of everyday life.

This chapter places the women in this study within the ethos of the research setting and of their environment in order to contextualise some of the everyday ‘realities’ for black women living with HIV in South Africa. Because HIV circulates so powerfully in the social world and in its power relations and institutions, personal meanings and stories cannot be alienated from these social meanings. Conversely, an understanding of HIV-positive subjectivity cannot take subjectivity prior to HIV-diagnosis as a pre-existing and unmarked given, but as constituted within a particular social, economic and historical context. Furthermore, the image of the ‘black HIV-positive mother’ is one that potentially incites the imagination, offering easy flights of fancy aided by race, gender, ideals of motherhood and fantasies of HIV.

This leads to the second task of this chapter: to describe the context of women I interviewed in order to disrupt the homogeneity often implicit in the category of ‘HIV-positive mother’ and to unsettle the exoticism often associated with African women (Mama, 1995; Zivi, 1998). HIV-positive women are largely portrayed in public policy, through medical discourse and in popular culture as either unidimensional victims or as hazardous sources of infection, but seldom simply as women (Squire, 1993). Hogan (1998: 169) suggests that black women are othered in multiple ways by AIDS discourse, which compounds existing racial discrimination:

When poor women and women of colour are not being presented as containers of sexual pollution and moral pathology, they are reduced to signifiers of abjection and unspeakable impoverishment. In discourse on AIDS from a global perspective, for example, women are often framed as one-dimensional victims who are located in faraway, pitiful developing countries.

While it is certainly important not to caricature women as abject and unspeakable, the irony of this comment is that most HIV-positive women are in fact located in far-away, pitiful developing countries, or at least in developing countries. Four out of five HIV-positive women in the world live in Africa (Lawson, 1999), yet the vast majority of literature is Western and presumes a Western audience and a Western subject. Conversely, constructions of the category ‘African AIDS’ have led to implications that the AIDS found in Africa is foreign and related to a mysterious set of ‘African’ processes. It has, for example, become interwoven with tropical and distant associations (Seidel, 1993), as well as associations of bestiality and aberrant sexuality (Patton, 1993). This distinguishing of ‘African AIDS’ is potentially laden with racist assumptions. Patton (1990) suggests that social and medical science are often guilty of ‘inventing “African AIDS”’ such that much of the resultant work inscribes difference and exoticises Africa rather than attempting to ground analysis in a realistic understanding of Africa’s needs. To view this literature as more culturally sensitive simply because it more often takes Africa as its object of study, then, is not always unproblematic. Patton (1990: 77) warns as follows:

Debates about ethics in particular occur in a middle ground between two cultures, but the ‘second voice’ (the ‘African perspective’) is carried by Western ethicists and researchers who speak of an ‘African culture’ based largely in their fantasies. In this middle ground of pretended cultural sensitivity, virtually the only audible speech is that which occurs within, or is translated into, the conceptual categories of the modern Western episteme.

Whether an African subject or an African culture exists outside of anyone’s fantasies, however, is highly debatable. Further, the devastation of AIDS on the continent may be fantastical, but it is also real. Encountering the African context in the era of the Western episteme, then, perhaps inevitably involves balancing a tightrope of negotiation between valuing the differences an African setting brings and resisting patronising assumptions that Africa is so unique and different as to be incomprehensible to outsiders. Comments such as Patton’s, therefore, risk taking on a level of paranoia that leads to paralysis rather than to culturally sensitive understanding. The challenge is to understand African AIDS as both typical and unique and to hold a strong African voice and a strong general stance.

In order to avoid repeating these splits, I understand the task of providing context as inherently contradictory and inevitably incomplete. It is often considered important to contextualise studies conducted outside the West. The assumption is that the correct descriptions will render the (unknown) objects of study known and graspable. But perhaps all that can be expected is that contextualisation ignites both expected and unexpected ruminations and images. The imperative to provide context often implicitly holds assumptions about difference – about the need to explain the exotic and unknown. If participants were British, for example, it would be conceivably possible to provide very little context and assume some shared sense of reality between reader (whether British or not) and research participants. Providing context is thus potentially a task that requires explaining where difference and exoticism lies, and thereby in turn holds potential for homogenising and inscribing difference.

The women I interviewed, despite their cultural, economic and environmental landscape, are in many ways not different or strange: they conduct relationships; they have similar hopes and fears to those of other women; they are mothers just like other mothers. At the same time, however, they live within a particular context that is not necessarily familiar to those living outside South Africa (or, indeed, to some living within South Africa), and which informs their subjectivities and their material existence. They are simultaneously familiar and strange, and need to be contextualised as both strange and familiar.

Given the paradoxical nature of the task of ‘mapping context’, I will avoid abstract depictions of this particular context. Instead, I will describe the research context and then introduce four women who participated in the study, and whose stories vividly illustrate aspects of the social environment. A description of the milieu in which they live will emerge from (inevitably incomplete) exploration of their personal stories; in this way, it is hoped that context will be portrayed as fluid: as both general and unique, familiar and strange.