Narrativas del cuerpo. Experiencia cotidiana y género en personas que viven con VIH

Abstract

This paper discusses some results of an ongoing study focused on gender in the everyday life experience of living with HIV. The participants in this study were women and men with at least three years of diagnosis, under ambulatory treatment within the health services system of the city of Buenos Aires . The theoretical stand is a relational gender approach based on two main categories: social construction and hegemony. I use the concepts of illness experience and life trajectories to argue that living with HIV is a construction that confronts social metaphors shaped by gender. This is an ethnographic research that applies combined qualitative techniques: in-depth interviews, participant observation and biographical narratives analysis. The main results display gender differences in the experience of living with HIV and in the perception and confrontation of generized social constructions.