The politics of marginalization: the appropriation of AIDS prevention messages among injection drug users.
This essay addresses the space between a cultural critique and a class analysis of HIV transmission. It explores how injection drug users, as a disempowered group, resist hegemony through dissent. Distrust of the medical establishment and severe social and legal constraints force injection drug users to reconstruct the AIDS message. Economic and political survival inflates the need for trust and reciprocity within their social network. This makes the meaning of AIDS a continually ambiguous one for drug users. The ways in which dissent to domination is enacted and the effect this has on HIV prevention is explored.
Connors
M M
MM
Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA.
D000163:Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome / Q000208:ethnology / Q000517:prevention & control* / Q000523:psychology / Q000635:transmission; D000328:Adult; D003144:Communication Barriers; D005260:Female; D006266:Health Education; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D008297:Male; D008913:Minority Groups / Q000193:education* / Q000523:psychology; D011057:Politics; D011209:Power, Psychological; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D012747:Sexual Partners / Q000523:psychology; D012931:Social Environment; D012933:Social Identification; D015819:Substance Abuse, Intravenous / Q000208:ethnology / Q000523:psychology / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D014481:United States