Contradicting Maternity
HIV-positive Motherhood in South Africa- Publication Date: 2009
- Dimensions and Pages: 220 x 150 mm, 240 pp
- EAN: 9781868144945
- Recommended Price (ZAR): 290.00
- Recommended Price (USD): 34.95
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. Whereas motherhood is often assumed to be a secondary identity compared to the central figure of the child, this book reverses the focus, arguing that maternal experience is important in its own right.
The book explores the situation in which two very powerful identities, those of motherhood and of being HIVpositive, 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 personal and social meanings resonate with, and also fail to encompass, the experiences surrounding HIVpositive 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, but also 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 an Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and a practicing clinical psychologist.
Table of Contents
- Chapter 1. Introduction
- Chapter 2. Facing the HIV-positive Mother
- Chapter 3. The Joys of Motherhood
- Chapter 4. Finding the HIV-positive mother
- Chapter 5. Minding Baby’s Body
- Chapter 6. Mother’s Mind
- Chapter 7. Mother’s Body
- Chapter 8. Thula Mama
- Chapter 9. Contradicting Maternity
- Appendix 1. Interview Schedule
[scribd id=26814141 key=key-12vw7ntpa461bdvfx45t mode=list]