Apprehending HIV Stigma

Abstract

The literary narrative Kiss of the Fur Queen, by Indigenous author Tomson Highway, calls for applying a decolonial framework that brings together different disciplinary systems to investigate responses to the stigma associated with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Approaching the narrative as testimony in which Highway foregrounds Indigenous knowledges, the text allows for a reframing of stigma as working within much larger systemic violences and operations of power than can be anticipated within a politics of recognition, indexed to the expository logic of Eve Sedgwick's paranoid position. Locating HIV-related stigma as emerging within the context of intergenerational collective trauma rooted in colonial violence makes possible the kind of reparative work that Sedgwick envisions, as well as allowing for an engagement with the infinite possibilities of encounter as an ethical response to this socially polarizing behavioural phenomenon that has proven so difficult to dislodge. Attentive to specific racialized and minoritized colonial histories, Highway's narrative unravels the entanglement of events and conditions surrounding HIV in a watershed moment when decolonial work collides with ongoing histories of colonial violence. Such a decolonial lens offers a non-positivist framework to potentially unsettle the stasis of stigma reduction.