Embodied Triumph and Political Mobilization: Reading Marvelyn Brown’s The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful and (HIV) Positive

Using disability theory, Melissa Harris Lacewell’s politicized “strong black woman,” Michelle Tracy Berger’s “intersectional stigma” in relation to HIV-positive women, and Deborah Walker King’s troping of blackpain to theorize Marvelyn Brown’s media persona and her 2008 memoir, The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful and (HIV) Positive, this essay shows how Brown invokes triumph in disability narratives for political mobilization.