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4 marginalizing the marginalized through multiple Stigmas AidS is a war against humanity. We need to break the silence, banish the stigma and discrimination and ensure total inclusiveness within the struggle against AidS. if we discard the people living with hiv/AidS, we can no longer call ourselves human. nelson mandela most scholars and activists now recognize stigma as one of the most important factors in the lives of people living with hiv (mahajan et al., 2008). There is no escaping the stigma that is attached to hiv. everyone who is living with hiv is stigmatized to some extent. The experiences of that stigma, however, fluctuate across many variables, including gender. Women and men are stigmatized differently —for example, there are differences in regard to the extent to which men and women are blamed for their actions that supposedly led to their hiv-positive status. The blaming that occurs in hiv stigma is linked to gender and reproductive roles that define “good” and “bad” behavior and “wrongdoings,” especially sexual “misbehaviors,” which are different for men and women. most women are still held to a double standard that expects them to be less interested in sex and more responsible for controlling both their own sexual behavior and that of their men partners (Lorber & moore, 2002). furthermore, the staying power or escalation of gendered hiv stigma may stem from the fact that stigmatization in general is inextricably linked to a marginalization or “othering” of one kind or another, and gender “others” women. in societies where masculine hegemony exists, women are marginalized. Women are compared negatively to norms where masculinity is considered the normal, correct, superior model. Women, then, are deemed as not behaving properly as women if they stray from the prescribed formulas of femininity. or if women are properly feminine, then they are not as intelligent, strong, or valuable as men and not quite human, since men are the measure of humanity. hiv stigmatization, therefore, adds to the “normal” marginalization of women. What is gendered hiv Stigma? in order to understand the many aspects of hiv stigma, it is helpful to understand how stigma has been described. goffman (1963), one of the first scholars to 43 44 | South African Women Living with hiv study stigma, explained it as the belief that “people who possess a characteristic defined as socially undesirable acquire a ‘spoiled identity’ which then leads to social devaluation and discrimination” (p. 15). his definition notes the relationship between stigma and discrimination. When people with supposedly undesirable traits are stigmatized, it is likely that they are also discriminated against. This two-step process has been observed in the perception and treatment of people who are living with hiv, and goffman’s definition remains the dominant one in research on the virus. in their hiv stigma research for the human Sciences research council (hSrc) in South Africa, for example, deacon, Stephney, and Prosalendis (2005) discuss the distinction between stigma and discrimination and the link between the two terms. They define “hiv stigma” as negative ideas about people living with hiv, and “discrimination” as the actions that are taken that unfairly disadvantage those people. other aspects of goffman’s work on stigma have been altered in contemporary thinking about hiv. he and other classical theorists focused their attention on the micro-interactions among individuals and did not link stigma to the larger social context. more recent scholars, however, have expanded upon goffman’s ideas and now understand stigma as a political issue. They observe that stigma does not take place within a vacuum; rather, it occurs within social contexts that include political relationships, inequities, and tensions. Stigma is influenced by this context and serves to maintain existing power relations ensuring that those who are perceived as “others” are kept in that position. in addition, not just relationships of inequity but systems of inequality themselves are retained in part by the use of stigma (deacon et al., 2005). Stigma and subsequent discrimination “[have] the effect of reproducing relations of social inequality that are advantageous to the dominant class, [thus] these forms of stigmatisation are functional [at least for those in positions of power] in the sense that they help maintain the sociopolitical status quo” (p. 17). Stigma directs any social critique toward individuals who do not fit properly within the existing system of social relations rather than toward the system itself. Stigma focuses attention on the supposed failings of individuals and groups of people and away from the inequalities and failings of the social...

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