Contradicting Maternity. Carol Long
is informed by my own subjectivity, but the inclusion of particular examples does not necessarily help to understand maternal experience and potentially complicates interpretation rather than making it more transparent. I have therefore limited reflections on my own position in the book, and have aimed to practise reflexivity by inserting my subjectivity into my writing, i.e. in a less descriptive and more process-oriented manner. I have used relationships with a trained psychoanalyst, who supervised the project, and with colleagues (including fellow graduate students, academics and clinical psychologists) to explore the analysis with the help of other subjectivities. This has provided a countercheck regarding the coherence of interpretation and the verity of its links to the data (Elliott, Fischer & Rennie, 1999; Taylor, 2001). Because the study has an unusually large sample size for qualitative research, it has also been easier to use repetitions in the data in order to reflect upon my interpretations.
Readers will also encounter the book through their own subjectivity and may read the accounts of mothers in different ways to the ones presented in this book. Each reader will find his/her own way to read the book, and I have deliberately avoided presenting a monolithic account. As one of the anonymous reviewers for the book favourably noted, Contradicting Maternity ‘insists on complicating matters, rather than simplifying them. As such, it perhaps raises more questions than it answers’. Such questions invite possibilities for dialogue and for avoiding constricted understandings of motherhood in the context of HIV.
Overview of the book
Chapter 2, ‘Facing the HIV-positive Mother’, begins the book with an introduction to some of the women who participated in the study. After describing the context of the study, the stories of four women are introduced. The book deliberately begins with the stories of real mothers so as to highlight the complexity of their stories from the outset.
Chapter 3, ‘The Joys of Motherhood’, offers a critical interpretation of academic literature on motherhood, including feminist, psychodynamic and South African perspectives. It is hoped that consideration of motherhood as an identity, whether or not overshadowed by HIV, will encourage readers to encounter HIV-positive motherhood as a particular instance of motherhood, which, because of its extremity, allows us to examine identities of motherhood more broadly as well. Chapter 4, ‘Finding the HIV-positive Mother’, extends examination of the literature specifically in relation to HIV-positive motherhood. By reading this literature with a psychodynamic and discursive eye, some of the discomforts and assumptions of HIV-positive motherhood begin to emerge. This analysis argues that such studies are almost exclusively interested in the potential of mothers to damage their children. Like listening for slips of the tongue, I argue that one can read such studies with an eye to gaps and points of irrationality in order to understand the specific anxieties that the figure of the HIV-positive mother evokes in the scientific imagination. Specific themes of absence, death, guilt and abnormality are explored. This task leads into the second half of the chapter, in which discursive and psychodynamic frameworks, central to the theoretical framework of the book, are explored.
Chapters 5 to 8 present an analysis of interviews conducted with HIV-positive mothers. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the maternal position in which the baby is the primary subject. Chapter 5, ‘Minding Baby’s Body’, explores mothers’ interactions with their babies’ bodies and the ways in which they keep their babies’ bodies in their own minds. Babies’ bodies are encountered through the imaginations and fantasies of mothers, with the promise of medicine guiding, but not completely allaying, their fears. Chapter 6, ‘Mother’s Mind’, explores the mother–infant relationship and maternal care, including breastfeeding, in order to suggest that maternal care has a particular quality in relation to HIV-positive motherhood, where maternal selflessness and the threat of HIV occupy centre stage.
Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the more marginal, but ever-present position of the mother herself, in which mothers foregrounded their own subjectivity as mothers, and from their own perspectives. Chapter 7, ‘Mother’s Body’, asks where the mother’s body, in contrast to the baby’s body of previous chapters, is brought into interviews. The focus is on how maternal bodies are written into subjectivities of motherhood. Chapter 8, ‘Thula Mama’, presents an analysis of the mother’s voice, i.e. the ways in which mothers expressed their own loves, losses, tragedies and joys. It will be argued that the baby is the primary subject of the mother’s attention, while the mother’s own active position, from her own point of view, is secondary. Nonetheless, the active subjectivity of the mother is strikingly present, if not dominant. However, the mutual exclusivity between primary baby and secondary mother, so often implied by discourses of motherhood (e.g. good selfless mother versus bad selfish mother) cannot account for the interconnectedness of mother and baby in maternal subjectivity.
The book concludes with chapter 9, ‘Contradicting Maternity’, in which a synthesis of the book and a theoretical discussion of its implications for HIV-positive maternal subjectivity are explored.
1 I am using ‘black’ as a political category to include coloured and Indian; i.e., in the modern parlance, all ‘previously disadvantaged’ women. I mostly interviewed black African women, but there were also coloured and Indian women, as well as one white woman, whom I excluded from the analysis because her story was quite different (and very racialised).
2 This book is specifically concerned with HIV-positive motherhood and focuses on interview material related to this. Other primary issues related to gender, heterosexuality and the HIV-positive body are reported elsewhere (see Long, 2006; Long, forthcoming).
2. Facing the HIV-positive Mother
In comparing the HIV-positive mother depicted in photographs and constructed in the literature (see chapter 4) to the women I interviewed, perhaps the most striking feature is that these images do not begin to convey the multiplicity or complexity of experiences of motherhood in the context of HIV infection. To construct a discrete and measurable object called the ‘HIV-positive mother’ is thus an impossible task. There were as many differences among women as there were similarities. This is further complicated by the fact that each woman had a different life story, which inflected her experience of motherhood in the context of HIV differently. It becomes clear that trying to characterise the HIV-positive mother implies that a type exists that is either productive of or produced by HIV infection – that either a certain type of person contracts HIV or that HIV invokes a certain brand of motherhood. The multiplicity of experience reflected in interviews with HIV-positive mothers implies that this unifying assumption is a form of monolithic stigmatisation.
The complexity of experience reflected in the data seems to further undercut the polarised descriptions implicit in the literature. Responses to the experience of motherhood raised a plethora of different issues. These issues were often entangled with one another, and were sometimes clearly defined and sometimes fragmented and disjointed; sometimes clearly articulable and sometimes inhabiting a space that went beyond what could be said. While the women spoke more fully and directly about the experience of being HIV-infected, discussion of motherhood had a much more contingent and shifting texture in interviews. It was easier for the women to talk about their HIV infection than it was to talk about themselves as mothers. This reflects the slipperiness of the concept of motherhood in broader psychological theory and public understanding of what it means to be a mother. Similarly, the experience of being HIV-positive, while easier for the women to talk about than experiences of motherhood, and, as the analysis will show, often talked about drawing on established and practised discourses, was nonetheless expressed in multiple ways. A positive diagnosis held different meanings in relation to different aspects of their lives and at different points in the telling: the experience of being HIV-positive was sometimes strange and exotic (echoing the object of the ‘HIV-positive mother’ in the scientific and popular imagination); sometimes all-eclipsing; and sometimes just another aspect, albeit an important and painful one, of everyday life.
This chapter places the women in this study within the ethos of the research setting and of their environment in order to contextualise some of the everyday ‘realities’ for black women living