Postfeminist motherhood?: Reading a differential deployment of identity in American women’s HIV narratives

Abstract

The deployment of motherhood as a centralizing identity is evident in the narratives of women living with HIV. This deployment creates new affective landscapes within which HIV can be understood. This chapter compares the deployment of motherhood in two HIV memoirs and argues that motherhood can function as both a tactic for social justice claims and a white supremacist claim to affective citizenship. HIV motherhood, it turns out, is neither simple nor postfeminist, as Tasha Dubriwny and others have claimed. In a discussion of women’s health activism and advocacy, Dubriwny argues that the social justice goals of the late-twentieth-century women’s health movement have been abandoned in favor of neoliberal and postfeminist agendas. Dubriwny argues that this utilization of motherhood for the purpose of women’s health advocacy is not only a simplification of the complex experience of illness, but a reification of traditional gender norms. Unlike Dubriwny, this chapter argues that the deployment of motherhood in HIV narratives is actually not a simplification of women’s experience with illness, particularly if these narratives are read for the differential deployment of identity in relation to racist, classist, sexist, heterosexist, and ableist oppression.