HIV-positive motherhood is located within a collision of opposites. Folded into the same person are profound contradictions of creativity and destruction, hope and despair, good and bad, self and baby. For new mothers, the obligation and enjoyment of maternal care occupies the present, but awareness of the future is never far away, with all its uncertainties, except the knowledge of abandonment of some kind. This is complicated by social images of HIV-positive motherhood. Motherhood is contradictory in its own right, bringing expectations of virtue and purity of experience, but evoking the opposites of idealisation and denigration, power and powerlessness, creativity and destructiveness, with ‘good’ motherhood always on the brink of failure. HIV-positive identities are contradictory in a different way. The fantasised HIV-positive person is feared, evoking devastation and depravity. It seems that combining HIVpositive motherhood is incomprehensible and sets the mother apart from all other HIV-positive bodies. The contradictions of motherhood become solidified around the potential of the mother to damage her child and become hyperbolised in the popular and scientific imagination around death, guilt and abnormality. The HIV-positive mother amplifies social fantasies of both HIV and motherhood, but to become HIV-positive means grappling with the difference between this caricature and one's experience of oneself: it summons up gaps between social expectation and experience.

Recalling the photographs and scientific studies of HIV-positive motherhood presented in this book, the force with which fantasies of HIV-positive motherhood circulate in the social world becomes apparent. One way of reading Contradicting Maternity is through a comparison between these iconic social images of HIV-positive motherhood and the preoccupations of real HIV-positive mothers presented in chapters 5 to 8. This comparison foregrounds the fear resident in social images of HIVpositive motherhood and the associations of abjection they invoke. It is not just that HIV-positive motherhood is portrayed in relation to pathos: judgement and horror adhere to the fantasy such that the social fantasy returns the HIV-positive mother to a caricature who cannot be fully contemplated.

The fear of what the HIV-positive mother represents, of course, does not stand only in juxtaposition to the experiences of HIV-positive mothers recounted in this book. This fear was very much a part of the women's experiences and imagination about themselves and other HIV-positive mothers.