At the Crossroads: Caribbean Women and (Black) Feminist Ethnography in the Time of HIV/AIDS

Abstract

This article illustrates how feminist analyses and insights have offered anthropology expansive ethnographic possibilities as it charts possible futures for doing more ethically and politically invested work that emerges from the lives and experiences of Black women and women in the Global South. It takes on the problematics of situatedness, difference, reflexivity, and writing about women's lives in the (feminist) anthropology of HIV/AIDS to challenge the omission and misrepresentation of multiple-voiced subjects and non-European experiences as well as the elided racial and gendered experiences of HIV/AIDS. I situate myself within the decolonial turn and the scholarly and political genealogies of Black feminist anthropology to explore the challenges and opportunities of feminist ethnography in the era of “the end of AIDS.” Using ethnographic work on the experiences of HIV-positive women in Kingston, Jamaica, conducted between 2015 and 2018, I foreground the life and death of Shanna, a mother of four to argue that the lives and afterlives of HIV-positive Black Caribbean women expand the heterogeneous inheritances of feminist ethnography by offering insights on how to envision futures that are attentive to cross-cultural experiences, embodied realities, social location, and structural condition. As I reconsider my own relationship to feminist ethnography and anthropology, I ask: How can (Black) feminist ethnography grapple with the ethics around HIV/AIDS and death while addressing the long-standing problematic within feminist anthropology of relating to subjects in the field and writing about evolving subjectivities?