Contradicting Maternity: HIV-positive Motherhood in South Africa Book

Drawing on rich and poignant interviews with mothers who have been diagnosed HIV-positive, Contradicting Maternity provides a rare perspective of motherhood from the mother's point of view. The book explores the situation in which two very powerful identities, those of motherhood and of being HIV-positive, collide in the same moment. This collision takes place at the interface of complex, and often split, social and personal meanings concerning the sanctity of motherhood and the anxieties of HIV. The book offers an interpretation of how these meanings resonate with, and also fail to encompass, the experiences surrounding HIV-positive mothers. Photographs, academic literature and the accounts of real women are read with both a psychodynamic and discursive eye, highlighting the contradictions within maternal experience, as well as between maternal experience and the social imagination. Contradicting Maternity will appeal to scholars, students and practitioners in psychology, the social sciences and the health professions. The sensitive and readable analysis will also be of interest to mothers, whether HIV-positive or not. Carol Long is a associate professor in psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa), and a practicing clinical psychologist.Read More