The Effect of Stigma and Social Networks on Role Expectations among African Immigrants Living with HIV

Abstract

This paper examines how African immigrants living with HIV negotiate and reconstruct their productive (i.e., educational and career opportunities), sexual, and reproductive identities. We used data from a mixed-methods study to explore how stigma and social networks in which participants were embedded shaped how they understood and negotiated their role expectations and responsibilities. Participants revealed how HIV not only changed their identities and limited their sex life, partner choices, and fundamental decisions about fertility and reproduction, but also presented them with the opportunity to reinvent/reshape their lives. Our analysis revealed that the cultural discourses about illness and HIV in participant’s countries of origin, the acculturative and migratory stressors, and the competing influences and expectations from family and friends in their home and host countries shape their illness experience, and how they adjust to life with HIV. This paper builds on sociological understanding of illness experience as a social construct that shapes the ill person’s identity, role, and function in society. Specifically, the paper contributes to discourses on how (i) participants’ social location and identity (as transnational migrants adjusting to acculturative stressors associated with resettlement into a new country), (ii) cultural discourses about illness and HIV in their countries of origin, and (iii) embeddedness in transnational social networks influence health outcomes, including lived experiences with chronic illnesses and stigmatized conditions such as HIV.