Situating adherence to medicines: The embodied practices and hinterlands of HIV antiretrovirals

Abstract

Adherence to medicines tends to be envisaged as a matter of actors’ reasoned actions, though there is increasing emphasis on situating adherence as a practice materialised in everyday routines. Drawing on the qualitative interview accounts of Black African women living with HIV in London, UK, we treat adherence to HIV medicines as not only situated in the practices of the immediate and everyday but also relating to a hinterland of historical and social relations. We move from accounts which situate adherence as an embodied matter of affect in the present, to accounts which locate adherence as a condition of precarity, which also trace to enactments of time and place in the past. Adherence is therefore envisaged as a multiple and fluid effect which is made-up in-the-now and in relation to a hinterland of practices which locate elsewhere.