title: "They read [the truth] in your blood": African American women and perceptions of HIV health.
abstract: In this article I examine variations in the ways in which low-income HIV-positive African American women in Midway, North Carolina engaged with and made meaningful laboratory-based knowledge of HIV disease. I highlight how women's engagement with "blood-work," as it was popularly called, reflected perceptions of survival with HIV disease and the material conditions and social relations in which these perceptions were embedded. Focusing less on the diagnostics themselves and more on the social contexts in which they became socially significant for study participants, I assert that "blood-work" provided a multiply constituted lens through which women expressed their subject positions and attendant material conditions within the context of a public health care program shaped by values associated with global neoliberalism.
authors: a Department of Anthropology , University of Indianapolis , Indianapolis , Indiana , USA.
authors: Alyson J
authors: AJ
authors: O'Daniel
mesh_terms: D001741:Black or African American / Q000523:psychology*; D060432:Anthropology, Medical; D015658:HIV Infections / Q000208:ethnology* / Q000523:psychology*; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice / Q000208:ethnology*; D006801:Humans; D009657:North Carolina / Q000208:ethnology; D014930:Women / Q000523:psychology*
keywords: HIV/AIDS; health care; laboratory technology; neoliberalism; poverty gradients