Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper explores how women living with HIV in Chile navigate gendered and moralized care labor. Drawing on feminist multimodal ethnography, it examines institutional stigma, moral regulation, and everyday tactics through which care becomes a site of survival, resistance, and dignity.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how gendered and moralized forms of care labor are produced, regulated, and contested within Chile’s public healthcare system through the lived experiences of women living with HIV. Drawing on feminist and multimodal ethnography conducted in southern Chile, it explores how women navigate institutional settings that simultaneously demand reproductive, affective, and moral labor while subjecting them to stigma, surveillance, and suspicion.

Within neoliberal health regimes, women living with HIV are positioned as both recipients and providers of care: expected to embody responsibility, adherence, and maternal morality, while performing the emotional and relational labor necessary to sustain treatment, family life, and social belonging. Institutional practices in healthcare—ranging from clinical encounters to prevention discourses and welfare logics—produce moral distinctions between “good” and “deviant” patients, shaping access to care and recognition as legitimate subjects of health and citizenship.

At the same time, these moral economies are not passively endured. Through collaborative visual and arts-based methods, this paper traces how women actively negotiate and rework stigma by reframing care as a collective, ethical, and political practice. Everyday tactics such as selective disclosure, mutual support, and creative expression emerge as forms of resistance that challenge dominant moral orders surrounding sexuality, productivity, and deservingness.

By situating HIV-related care within feminist anthropological debates on labor, moral regulation, and institutional power, this paper argues for understanding care not only as feminized labor but as a contested terrain where legitimacy, survival, and dignity are continuously negotiated.