Transforming AIDS: The moral management of stigmatized identity

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The majority of research exploring AIDS, stigma, and identity has focused primarily on the experiences of gay men and other disenfranchised populations. Stigma, however, is an unavoidable feature of AIDS in America regardless of gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Moreover, persons not represented as ‘high risk’ may feel especially threatened and demoralized by stigma when they are HIV+. This paper explores how White, middle‐class women experience HIV/AIDS, and the moral responses they mobilize to deflect stigma and reconstruct self. These women incorporate spiritualized and transformational rhetoric—AIDS as calling, redemption, and/or blessing—to organize their experience, empower self‐reconstruction, and manage stigma. Further, these women use this rhetoric, I suggest, to reconstruct and reassert a ‘safe’ and coherent moral identity. Moreover, the moral arguments implicit in this type of transformational rhetoric are self‐protective and empowering because they respond to social constructions of AIDS which essentialize people with HIV/AIDS as ‘immoral.’ Further, this spiritualized discourse may hold special appeal for these women because it symbolically defends and maintains an ‘insider’ or middle‐class identity, and satisfactorily explains why ‘bad’ things happen to ‘good’ people.