Individual Responsibility for Health and HIV Infection: A Critical Investigation of the Lived Experience of HIV-Positive Women

Abstract

Individual responsibility for health is a popular discourse that extends to prescriptions on how to live ‘positively’ with HIV. This study used in-depth interviews over several months with 10 women at public healthcare clinics in Gauteng to examine their uptake of such prescriptions. The transcripted narratives were analysed using qualitative coding of emergent themes. Foucault's notion of technologies of the self is used to illuminate exemplars from interviews on how these women struggled to forge new identities as women living with HIV and to take responsibility for their health and that of their loved ones. It is demonstrated how material deprivation, dependence on the state and stigma contoured the lived experiences of these women. It is concluded that a notion of healthy consumers, free to choose and take responsibility for their own health, obfuscates the constraints that women living with HIV may face.