Читать книгу Contradicting Maternity - Carol Long - Страница 18

For the four women introduced above, an HIV-positive diagnosis was intertwined with family relationships, gender relations, social and cultural norms and beliefs, and financial hardship, as well as with the practicalities of living with HIV, including the need to live a healthy lifestyle, to forego breastfeeding and to face the uncertainty of their baby’s HIV status for at least a period of time. In this telling, context has not been fully or accurately described, but has been partially described through the lens of particular women, their telling of what has been important and my retelling of their setting. Inevitably in the telling, certain aspects run the risk of becoming objective realities when they are not. These stories only begin to describe events and experiences in a particular time and place, but tell something of the contradictions and challenges encountered.

Each woman tells a story that is simultaneously intimately personal and indelibly social. In each story, AIDS discourse constructs how women are understood by others and by themselves. HIV/AIDS is distinctly a disease that has lent itself to metaphor (Sontag, 1988). Although many illnesses could be considered metaphoric, Sontag (1988) argues that AIDS becomes particularly so because it is linked to sexuality and perversity and because it therefore inscribes itself on the identity of the HIV-positive person. Other diseases share this link, but AIDS dominates the metaphorical market: ‘It seems that societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its “victims”, but it is hard to be obsessed with more than one’ (Sontag, 1988: 16). Because of its associated stigma, it has been argued that HIV/ AIDS cannot be understood outside the social systems of meaning that inscribe the HIV-positive (and -negative) body. This makes HIV/AIDS an ‘epidemic of signification’ (Treichler, 1988: 31), implying that it has prompted an epidemic of meanings and also that these meanings fuel and perpetuate the escalation of the epidemic. Treichler (1988) suggests that AIDS discourse proliferates by linking to pre-existing systems of difference, thereby making ‘us’ feel safe. It has therefore been suggested that investigation into the significations attached to HIV/AIDS is far from an abstract enterprise, since these meanings directly relate to social policy and practice and to the experience of being HIV-positive (Seidel, 1990). Understanding these meanings is central to curbing the epidemic (Strebel, 1997) and to a better understanding of the ways in which these meanings construct HIV-positive subjectivity (Willig, 2000). AIDS discourse is not simply about irrational and politically loaded meaning; it is centrally about the ways in which these social meanings proliferate both themselves and the virus. As matrices of discrimination have strengthened as it became clearer that the virus does not discriminate, so the virus has proliferated as a consequence of this discrimination.

South African HIV-positive motherhood finds itself within a knot of such discrimination. Walker (1990) notes that any South African feminism can only be relevant with a recognition that the majority of women in South Africa are not just women, but face a triple oppression of gender, class and race. South African women who find themselves HIV-positive thus add another type of discrimination, marked as it is by stigma. Considering the powerful fantasies circulating in the social world, the experience of actually becoming HIV-positive brings into experience the laden question of whether one has become these fantasies, as well as the dilemma of finding and defining oneself in relation to HIV and others.

1 <http://www.globalstrategies.org>.

2 This category was constructed during the apartheid era in order to indicate people of mixed racial heritage. The term continues to be used.