Can an HIV positive woman find true love? Romance in the stories of women living with HIV

Article

Squire, C. 2003. Can an HIV positive woman find true love? Romance in the stories of women living with HIV. Feminism & Psychology. 13 (1), pp. 73-100.
AuthorsSquire, C.
Abstract

The majority of new HIV infections worldwide occur in women, and women's experiences of living with HIV have special connections with heterosexual relationships, reproduction, and romance. Romance is also an important narrative genre for feminism, generating controversy over whether it can resignify or only reinforce
dominant discourses and practices of gender and sexuality. This paper reports on a longitudinal semi-structured interview study of HIV support. It focuses on the heterosexual romances told by HIV positive women in the sample. It argues that these stories were, like all romances, strongly but implicitly situated in historical and social
contexts, and that stories of romance and HIV emphasise such contexts. HIV positive women's narratives of 'true love,' and their more ironic, Bridget Jones-like narratives of problematic relationships, all had this situated quality. In addition, women reported storytelling about HIV and romance as enabling them to talk about and conceptualise wider relationship and reproductive possibilities dialogically, with other HIV positive women. Their romance stories also allowed the women to register desires that more
conventional HIV narratives ignore or rationalise. The paper argues that the HIV
romance genre enabled these women to tell about, and perhaps think of and act on problematic areas of their lives in new and useful ways.

KeywordsHIV; women; romance; narrative; genre; gender; sexuality
JournalFeminism & Psychology
Journal citation13 (1), pp. 73-100
ISSN0959-3535
Year2003
Accepted author manuscript
License
CC BY-ND
Web address (URL)http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0959353503013001009
http://hdl.handle.net/10552/99
Publication dates
PrintFeb 2003
Publication process dates
Deposited17 Mar 2009
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Citation:
Squire, C. (2003) ‘Can an HIV positive woman find true love? Romance in the stories of women living with HIV’ Feminism & Psychology, 13 (1) 73-100.

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