Finding the HIV-positive mother between constructions of motherhood and of HIV and between the social and psychodynamic resonances of the two identities involves finding a multitude of positions, identities, meanings and emotions rather than finding a fixed and definable entity. This chapter explores possible processes of finding HIV-positive motherhood, taking two very different approaches. Firstly, the chapter explores the kind of HIV-positive mother who has been ‘found’ in the scientific literature and critically examines the ways in which this figure has been constructed, socially and perhaps also unconsciously. Secondly, the chapter suggests a possible framework for understanding HIV-positive motherhood as lying between inner and outer reality. This section draws on the psychodynamic and the discursive as a prelude to the chapters that follow, in which interview data is directly explored.

FINDING THE HIV-POSITIVE MOTHER IN THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGINATION

Reading photographs of HIV-positive mothers involves looking for social discourses and psychodynamic meanings regarding the fantasies hidden in the representations. Studies on HIV-positive motherhood can be similarly read. If women are invisible in the AIDS epidemic, mothers – ironically constructed as a separate category to women – are considerably more so. This is despite the common practice of countries estimating prevalence rates from statistics gathered at antenatal clinics. There is remarkably little research or social commentary on HIV-positive motherhood, and the research that does exist constructs mothers only in relation to the harm HIV-positive mothers could potentially cause their babies. Zivi (1998: 49) notes that when mothers do become the object of focus, this trend serves to ‘demonize pregnant women, scapegoating them for perinatal transmission of HIV, and coding them as irresponsible, irrational, uncaring mothers’. Somewhat more colourfully, Patton (1993: 175) suggests that when HIV-positive women ‘are not vaginas waiting to infect men, they are uteruses, waiting to infect fetuses’. Part-objects defined by reproductive organs, damage and infectiousness, mothers are constructed as an extremely problematic category.

It is striking that the ways in which HIV-positive mothers are spoken about, both in academic literature and in the public realm, are often characterised by either the idealisation of their status as mothers (and concomitant denial of the emotional pain involved in being HIV-positive) or by denigration through the identification of deficit.