Photograph 6 is from a collection by Gideon Mendel entitled ‘Looking AIDS in the face’ and this photograph reflects a familiar theme in which ‘looking AIDS in the face’ often involves looking at faceless bodies. This person chose to be photographed with her hands at the focal point ‘as a symbol of her renewed capacity to do her domestic chores’. The photograph is thus about activity and a renewed sense of agency in the world. It overtly draws attention to her hands, but covertly draws our attention to what her hands embrace: her tummy. The caption accompanying her photograph tells us something more about this tummy: she had previously been pregnant and her child, born prematurely, died at three months, around the same time that she discovered she was HIV-positive. The photograph is therefore ostensibly about her hands, but the traces of her tummy, and the sense of the proximity of procreation and destruction that is evoked, transform our understanding of the image.
The ‘Looking AIDS in the face’ collection is distinct in two ways. Firstly, those photographed were free to choose how they would like to represent themselves (hence the frame in the background), thereby taking some ownership over the form of representation. Secondly,
[u]nlike much … other work done on the issue of HIV/AIDS in Africa, there are no images of sick and dying people here. The people photographed are dynamic and empowered. The haunting power of this work lies in the fact that while most of the images are gentle, the traumatic and painful material is contained within the text (Mendel, 2006: 43).
This collection aims, therefore, not to shock or to re-present, but to reflect images as chosen by those being photographed. Within this collection, there is a series of photographs in which mothers chose to represent their maternal presence, but also their maternal facelessness. Mother and baby are positioned in different configurations, but each photograph foregrounds the innocent child in contrast to the faceless mother.
In photograph 7, the baby shields the mother’s face and the mother shields her baby from the camera. It is almost as if they are sharing a private moment. The caption tells us that the mother chose this frame because her baby had just tested HIV-negative. Despite this joyful news, the baby hides the mother’s identity.
The mothers in photographs 8 and 9 both chose to represent their choice to bottle feed rather than breastfeed their babies in order to minimise the risk of HIV transmission. In both cases, the image is about the baby. The women hide their faces so as to avoid recognition, and also because their faces are less important than the bottle and the primary subject, the child.
Photograph 10 offers a similar representation of the centrality of the child and marginality of the mother. This particular mother is waiting for her baby to be old enough to be tested and is therefore unsure of her baby’s status. It is this issue that is, for her, centre frame.
In contrast to images of facelessness, absence and destructiveness, photograph 11 presents a different image of the HIV-positive mother. This mother and her baby are both HIV-positive, but she has decided to represent an intimate moment between herself and her baby. Unusually, both her face and her joy are visible. She has refused to be represented as tragic, destructive or absent. The composition of the photograph also suggests the possibility of a maternal position in which the mother is the subject of the photograph: the child’s face is somewhat blurred, with the effect that the mother is centre frame.
My telling of these images is from the point of view of my search for the mother within them; it provides one possible account in order to suggest that it is difficult for the idea of the HIV-positive mother to enter into the social world except through fantasies of abjection, infection, absence, blame and guilt. Around the edges of her body lurks dangerous sexuality, but not, ironically, a gendered relationship. The images do not portray fathers. Men are largely absent, despite their crucial role in the family drama of HIV/AIDS. Of course, these portrayals capture the seriousness and tragedy of HIV infection, as well as the desire to hide one’s face; but, I would suggest, they also capture the fear and horror of public images of HIV-positive motherhood, fear and horror that belongs more squarely in the imagination of the onlooker than in the totality of the HIV-positive mother. The final image (photograph 11), but perhaps also the peripheries of the other images, suggests a different way of imagining and a different area of maternal imagination, and it is this multiplicity of maternity that this book will aim to explore.
About This Book
Contradicting Maternity can be read in different ways, and the book has different purposes. One purpose is to present a theoretical understanding, based on interview data, of motherhood in the context of HIV. This aspect of the book will appeal to academic readers. The second purpose of the book, which will appeal to both academic and non-academic readers, is to explore the stories of real mothers, aiming to preserve the complexity, sophistication, conflicts and joys expressed by them. The reader will therefore notice that there are two different styles in the book, which reflect these different nuances. Certain chapters foreground the theoretical voice, while others foreground the voices of the mothers themselves, although all the chapters are interested in both foregrounding and theorising maternal experience. In the chapters more centrally concerned with the mothers themselves, theoretical concerns are deliberately implicit so as not to detract from the importance of the mothers’ voices.
There are also different perspectives in this book: those of the mothers and my own. Because I am writing the book, the mothers’ voices are necessarily filtered through my own positioning as a white women, an academic and a clinical psychologist, as well as through the voices of the theories upon which I draw. My presentation of motherhood in the context of HIV is interpretive, although it is grounded heavily in the actual words of the mothers I interviewed. I experienced an ongoing debate about how much of myself to put in the book. For example, there were points in interviews where my own responses to the stories I was hearing were striking: points at which I was unable to hear something, or found myself uncharacteristically sympathetic or annoyed, sometimes wanting to adopt mothers or their babies, sometimes wishing I were somewhere else. I sometimes wondered why it might be, for example, that, at one point in an interview with a particular woman, I could not think of a single question to ask, even though this had not occurred before, or where I identified or disidentified with interviewees. I found it useful to note my internal responses during the process of writing in relation to the meanings I was writing about (e.g. the points in analysis where I felt stuck, or where I felt that meaning was proliferating out of control, or where I dreaded writing about a particular issue). Another relationship useful to reflect upon while writing concerned aesthetics. I often had to wonder whether my desire for beautiful words was working towards my desire to convey the sophistication and complexity of interview material or whether it was working to defend myself against some of the difficulty and ugliness of HIV-positive motherhood.
My initial intention was to write these experiences fully into the analysis. However, I was concerned about the extent to which these reflections would rewrite interview material in ways that distanced the experiences I was trying to convey. While it is important to state one’s position, jokes about post-modern research (where it is all about the researcher) prompt caution about the practice of reflexivity. It could be argued that an overemphasis on the position of the researcher runs the risk of both reifying difference and