From “at Risk” to Interdependent: The Erotic Life Worlds of HIV+ Jamaican Women

Abstract

In post-colonial Jamaica, the iconic portrayal of “sun, sex, and smiles” clashes with the disproportionate rates of HIV among working-class black Jamaican women. Even though the Caribbean has both the highest incidence rates of reported AIDS cases and HIV prevalence rates in the Americas, second only to Africa, the region remains largely ignored in scholarship on the HIV/AIDS pandemic and black political movement. This essay draws from feminist ethnographic research on the grassroots organizing of HIV-positive Jamaican women in Kingston, Jamaica. In this essay, I delineate how women in an HIV/AIDS activist organization, EVE for Life, develop and cultivate HIV/AIDS care strategies through women-centered networks. I read these networks as intentional communities of interdependence and psychosocial care, rather than simply invisible “at-risk” groups or passive victims subjected to “a paralyzing plague.” I contend that the homosocial intimacies that characterize these networks of care reflect an “intraventive” cultural practice and knowledge, a term that Marlon Bailey uses to describe the organic ways community members represent themselves individually and collectively. Furthermore, they reveal how the embodied knowledges of HIV-positive Black women challenge pathologizing public health and academic discourses, while also serving as conduits for enhancing and extending theories about bodies, sexuality, power, and intimacy. By offering a culturally-specific exploration of the socio-erotic lives of working-class HIV-positive Black Jamaican women, this paper concludes with a discussion about how centering our analysis on the Caribbean and Black women expands the geographic and thematic scopes of studies of race, racism, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS.