| Abstract: | HIV is a condition that seems powerfully to define identities and communities. In some cases it appears to have generated new, culturally and politically radical forms of both. Drawing on a series of interviews over two to three years with people infected or affected by HIV, this article examines how interviewees describe their communities and identities as determined by HIV, though in partial, limited ways. The article explores how the "self" operates in the interviews, not as a consistent, reflexive project but as an occasional, situated resistance. I argue that the narrative form of the interviews was what enabled provisional, variable identities and communities to be articulated. The "coming out" genre was widely deployed to describe negotiating HIV stigma and fatality, as well as accepting and to some extent disengaging from serostatus. This genre's allowance of incompleteness also gave a place to HIV's abjection, to horrors that cannot be storied into subjective meaningfulness. Finally, the article looks at how, rather than focusing on identities or communities, interviewees told stories of citizenship, of subject positions shaped by neighborhood, national and transnational, as much as individual or group concerns. |
