Dealing with life: Tactics employed by drug-using Thai mothers living with HIV

Abstract

Throughout their lives, women injecting drugs in Thailand have been subjected to stigmatisation, a socially informed, painful experience that has become part of their disposition. Stigma, in fact, dominates their everyday lives. This study argues that Thai women injecting drugs are in effect 'doubly stigmatised': As drug users, they fail to fit the Thai 'good' women/mothers image, that is, to meet their socially expected or stereotypical gender roles. Constant exposure to stigma sees their clear sense of self-dissipate and replaced by the relational self, in the process rendering their gender and identity hazy and complex. Being a mother requires bridging the public and private lives of women injecting drugs, who find themselves faced with coping with the dual roles of motherhood and drug users. This chapter is based upon my ethnographic data and on in-depth interviews conducted with 25 Thai women living with HIV and injecting drugs, most of whom were informed of their HIV status when tested for pregnancy. Pregnancies among female drug users are invariably unplanned: The women do not consider the absence of menstruation as indicative of pregnancy because taking drugs may cause irregular menstrual periods; thus, they wait until more overt physical signs appear. Drug-using pregnant women are reluctant to share information concerning their drug use with doctors because of the guilt they (are often made to) feel regarding foetal well-being. In this chapter, in which I explore women who use drugs living with HIV/AIDS as mothers, I look at the specific ways in which they deal with their lives in a habitus that constitutes conditions for social suffering. The tactics they use could be informed by the particular form of drug culture they pursue and how it is integrated with their gendered habitus.