Contradicting Maternity. Carol Long

acceptable relations of respect between mothers and daughters. She was worried that if her mother became infected, she would not be able to look after Nombeko when she became sick, or Nombeko’s son when Nombeko died.

      In the fourth interview, events had intervened again to foreground sickness and death. Nombeko had been diagnosed with syphilis and told that it may become neurological if she did not follow treatment. This provoked anxiety about her body and, in conjunction with the request for a further HIV test for her son, about his body. Discussion of monitoring the body was common among most respondents, and had been present in previous interviews with Nombeko, but was strongly expressed in this interview. The interview occurred before she was due to go back to her rural home, and she was worried about seeing her baby’s father and fearful of encountering people dying of AIDS at home, where she felt she could not disclose her own status for fear of rejection. The interview ended on a triumphant note as she told me she had successfully spoken to her mother, asked her not to have sex without a condom and explained her concerns. Her mother was proud of her, as was Nombeko, for having the strength to talk.

      Nombeko had wanted a final interview, but could not afford to return to Johannesburg. When we spoke on the telephone, she said she had been reunited with her son’s father, at first as a coerced reunion, but then he had become progressively more open and she was optimistic about their relationship. Her son’s negative status was confirmed. She had been sick, and said she had lost weight. When we ended our last telephone conversation, she laughingly said that I should not worry, because she would still be alive when I returned to South Africa. I put the telephone down with the sinking feeling that perhaps she would not be.

      Conclusion

      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.