The HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa is both invisible and ubiquitous: seemingly indiscernible on one's face and undetectable within a population, and pervasive in its presence across global health agendas, flows of intervention capital, and (im)moral pronouncements. Since it was first identified in Nigeria in 1986, a positive diagnosis has widely been considered a death sentence, presumed to place in jeopardy one's health, education, work, and family; stripping a person of all but her (deteriorating) organic existence. The advent of voluntary HIV testing and subsidized treatment, initiated in the early 2000s by an assemblage of international and local health and development agencies, is poised to reconfigure the exclusionary dynamics that have accompanied this prognosis. This dissertation explores the loves, pains, hopes, frustrations, and dilemmas of northern Nigerian women participating in the world that these global health campaigns have opened up. Focusing upon their pursuit of dignified and fulfilled marriages, I show how women infected with HIV engage with both the ubiquity and the anonymity of the epidemic's political face. These women seek to avert the threats that this stigmatizing diagnosis poses to their social identities. At the same time, they attempt to forge new relationships that both reinforce their respectability and help them obtain support for their healthcare and daily subsistence needs. Women participate in public health programs, paradoxically, to secure their privacy. Their ability to make claims for and benefit from testing and treatment is contingent upon the ways in which institutions, their social ties, and their very physiologies intersect, creating new life trajectories for some and excluding others. HIV-positive women's marriage aspirations are windows onto the symbolic importance of families in Nigeria, the political economic dynamics that shape social and illness prognoses in resource-poor settings, and the overarching constraints that prevent women from enacting global expectations of health citizenship.
Rhine, Kathryn Angela,
"AIDS, Marriage, and the Management of Ambiguity in Northern Nigeria"
(2009).
Anthropology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0J38QTJ
