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C H A P T E R E I G H T Looking to the Future: Struggle and Commitment for Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS Telling collective stories is one way in which we as social scientists can use our skills and privileges to give voice to those whose narratives have been excluded from public domain and civic discourse. —Laurel Richardson, Writing Strategies Collective Stories The women whose stories are told in this book—HIV-positive women from stigmatized pasts who became politically active—represent a new thread of participation in contemporary political life. Individually, their early histories were daunting. Additionally, the hegemonic influences of race, class, and gender predominate in describing their life challenges. But the ability to change the seemingly irreversible avalanche of negative life circumstances dominates the majority of the book. Their collective story narrates a complex series of events stemming from both the public and private sphere that has helped them transform themselves and the lives of many other HIV-positive people in Detroit and the surrounding Metro area. Richardson (1990) suggests that the power of telling collective stories lies in its potential to shape collective identity (for those listening to the stories), and in a most optimistic manner creates the promise for collective solutions to social problems. Collective solutions to the dilemmas of women and HIV/AIDS will require attention, commitment, and social change. This book takes issue with the traditional framing of politics and the invisibility of marginalized/stigmatized women’s political awakening. First, to understand stigmatized women’s political involvement, we must broaden our notion of what is political and examine the circumstances that lead women to act on behalf of themselves and their communities. Scholars can only gain by such an expansion in the definition of politics. Scholars gain from this expanded definition by being able to observe and record the multifaceted responses to injustices that galvanize women (see Ackelsberg 1988; Bookman and Morgen 1988; Naples 1998). The evolution in political consciousness that a respondent experiences is a change first experienced by the self, which then moves out through her community. Ackelsberg suggests that active participation and resistance “often [engender] a broader consciousness of both the nature and dimensions of social inequality, and the power of people united to confront and change it” (1988, 307). Respondents were able to identify that they were marginalized and stigmatized through acquiring the HIV/AIDS virus, act on that identification, and communicate that knowledge to others . Marginalized and stigmatized women need a place from which to speak about contradiction, resistance, and agency. These women challenge timely ideas about former female lawbreakers but they also challenge notions about the route to political socialization and about what is possible for people labeled deviant. Second, I began the book with the argument that it is necessary to understand these women’s lives, before and during the HIV/AIDS crisis, through the framework of intersectional stigma. Intersectional stigma presents an innovative theoretical apparatus in conceptualizing the complexity of respondents’ politicization process. Stigma, I have argued, as it intersects with social location provides researchers with useful ways to study manifestations of inequality as well as barriers to participation. Stigma suggests people can occupy the margins of society with qualitatively different types of experiences. Stigma condemns and confers power. HIV stigma is a totalizing type of stigma, developed in local and global contexts; it is predicated on issues of difference, sexuality, and taboo. HIV-stigma developed along axes of inequality in U.S. society. What this research demonstrates is that HIV stigma and social status converged to shape women’s experiences with HIV and, later, participation in dramatically different ways than have been previously observed. Intersectional stigma impacts resources including time, money, and civic skills. This concept is particularly useful in moving beyond the mantra of race, class, and gender, which at times suggests a “sameness” of experience for all working-class Latina women (for example), and pushes us as social scientists to engage with other complex ways in which societal rewards and punishments are allocated. As stated before, respondents share some similarities to other groups of HIV-positive people, but their political evolution was distinct because of intersectional stigma. Third, life reconstruction was a specific, ongoing process for the respondents . The two components of life reconstruction are recovery and gender identity/consciousness. The life reconstruction process helped women redefine themselves. While women were highly disadvantaged when it came to accessing traditional political resources, the life...

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