Paper Short Abstract:

This paper documented the experience of an intersectional stigma among people with podoconiosis. This underscores the contribution of medical anthropology in mapping health disparities caused by individuals’ positionality and the need to reframe interventions based on social science perspectives.

Paper Abstract:

A growing body of knowledge demonstrates that multiple positionality and identities intersect to shape the experience of stigma. Nevertheless, there remains a significant gap in our understanding regarding the positioning of individuals affected by podoconiosis and the associated stigma. Studies on podoconiosis-related stigma have often focused on individual factors, and often link stigma to podoconiosis features; symptoms or causal beliefs. Taking an ethnographic approach, using the framework of intersectionality, this paper explores the experience of stigma among people with podoconiosis.

Affected people are not stigmatised because of the illness alone, but individuals’ multiple positionality and identities intersect with diverse podoconiosis features –illness stages, chronic nature of the condition, symptoms and cultural understandings –to amplify the overall experience of stigma. People with low social positions and oppressed identities experience a huge amount of stigma. Women and men can be stigmatised, but poor married women and young girls with podoconiosis are highly stigmatised compared to men. This is caused by social positionality, identities, cultural norms, and traditions attached to being poor, female, married or unmarried, and being in rural areas, which all converge to fuel stigmatisation. Interventions to eradicate the stigma experienced by people with podoconiosis need rethinking by focusing on the intersection of people’s identities and positionality in a particular context. This paper sheds light on the contribution of medical anthropology in mapping health disparities and injustices based on an individual’s positionality across affected people and the need to reframe interventions based on social science perspectives.