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HIV-positive Mozambican migrants in South Africa: loneliness, secrecy and disclosure
- Source :
- Culture, Health & Sexuality. 22:48-63
- Publication Year :
- 2019
- Publisher :
- Informa UK Limited, 2019.
-
Abstract
- South Africa continues to bear a heavy burden of HIV and a significant proportion of the nation's population consists of immigrants from other severely afflicted African nations. Yet little is known about how migrant populations respond to HIV in shifting cultural and clinical landscapes. Analysing 21 ethnographic life history interviews, this paper explores the social complexities of living with antiretroviral therapy and disclosure of serostatus among HIV-positive Mozambican migrants in Johannesburg. It focuses on (i) conceptualising the 'biosocial ambiance of illness'; (ii) how transformations occur in perceptions of disease; and (iii) how stigma produces an ambit of loneliness and secrecy, which inflects disclosure unevenly in different life-spaces and health-worlds. The net effect of these three processes is a silence which is detrimental to the social normalisation of HIV, treatment-seeking and clinical drug adherence, which in turn may increase rates of morbidity and mortality and contribute to drug resistance.
- Subjects :
- Adult
Male
Health (social science)
media_common.quotation_subject
Social Stigma
Immigration
Population
Stigma (botany)
HIV Infections
Disclosure
Disease
South Africa
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
medicine
Humans
030212 general & internal medicine
Sociology
Socioeconomics
education
Anthropology, Cultural
Mozambique
media_common
Transients and Migrants
education.field_of_study
030505 public health
Loneliness
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
virus diseases
Biosocial theory
Silence
Anti-Retroviral Agents
Female
medicine.symptom
0305 other medical science
Serostatus
Confidentiality
Prejudice
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14645351 and 13691058
- Volume :
- 22
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Culture, Health & Sexuality
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....731947e1a418fe84455a7f3601cd229d