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 HIVinfected, 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.