The Unseen Things by Rhine Kathryn A.;

Author:Rhine, Kathryn A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

GRAMMATICAL PERSONHOOD

HIV disclosures, as I have described, are speech acts. They do far more than simply present information to listeners. HIV-positive women uniformly contend that the timing of disclosure is crucial. Context matters. Women further insist that it is important they learn their husbands’ results first. When a husband and wife finally exchange this information, some couples experience greater intimacy and even a sense of equality within the marriage. In addition, they may communicate their gratitude and personal integrity, thus inspiring forgiveness. Nevertheless, too often people disclose their status when they have nothing left to lose. If disclosures go awry, women are far more likely than men to jeopardize the little capital they possess. Thus, many women say nothing.

Silences, like disclosures, are performative. They unfold in the context of other speech acts. For example, in Hausa, people not only speak obliquely about HIV – “the disease without a name” – but also about bodies, sex, and illness, among others. In this chapter, Halima offered an open-ended story of a couple whose identity was unknown to me but whose actions sounded analogous to popular tropes about the dangerous sexuality of HIV-positive women. Using a third-person voice, she distanced herself from the description she provided, yet still guided me to a conclusion that these tropes do not typically reach.

Silences also reflect and shape the power an individual possesses. On one hand, they allow us to gain access to knowledge otherwise unavailable. HIV-positive women, like Laraba, strategically employ silence to establish plausible deniability. If they do not know their status, no one will accuse them of failing to respond in ways they cannot. On the other hand, husbands and their families may conspire to silence women to deny them the opportunity to defend themselves against their abuses. Silence is therefore not merely the absence of speech. However potent the substance of a woman’s knowledge, it may not offer sufficient protection when other structural inequalities strip her of the ability to raise her voice.

To forestall the consequences of saying too much or saying too little, HIV-positive women lie. Lies express much more than untrue statements. They are socially shared and performed and serve a variety of purposes. For example, counselors and their clients engage in subterfuge to convince men to take a blood test. They achieve this by replacing a clinical rationale for testing with a cultural rationale. HIV-infected wives can then circumvent power structures that prevent them from confronting their husbands directly. As accomplices in these lies, women are tied with people who share this knowledge. Access to damaging information may also provide women protection from retaliation.

Just as they give rise to new forms of solidarity, lies also produce the grounds for social exclusion. HIV-positive women are frequently the targets of lies. Rumors about Mercy’s character provided a clear illustration of this. These insinuations were products of “smoke and mirrors” – elaborate displays in which people state misleading or irrelevant information to manipulate others’ perceptions. Her relatives’ gossip allowed her husband’s misdeeds to go unquestioned.

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