Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the concept of care and its politics as perceived by mothers living with HIV and AIDS in Egypt in the aftermath of 2011. It is an ethnographic portraiture illustrating ways in which my research interlocutors narrated their perceptions and experiences encountering care

Paper long abstract:

"I cannot show that I am depressed.It is a burden to hide my depression; given that I have to take care of my child and make sure he does not feel or see me in suchtired emotional and physical state."(Maha,an interlocutor,2015).This paper focuses on the concept of care and its related politics as perceived by mothers living with HIV and AIDS in Egypt in the aftermath of 2011 revolution.Iwill depict an ethnographic portraiture illustrating ways in which my interlocutors narrated their perceptions and experiences while encountering care. Care is conceptualized as"when someone comes to matter and the corresponding ethics of attending to the other who matters" (Stevenson 2014:P3).I navigate "care" at the juncture point of the intersecting coordinates of the failed promises of health institutions, political unrest, " idealized caricatures of motherhoods"(Downe P 2011:P12),and the " lines of flight" (Guattari 2015) that mothers deploy and innovate in their everyday to reconfigure care.The paper is part of a more detailed ethnographic research that was conducted from spring 2014 to spring 2015, to explore how my interlocutors perceived their individual experiences of living with HIV during the social and political context of Egypt post 2011. I situated the stories of the research interlocutors within the interlinked discourses of power and authorities such as the medical, the social, the religious, the economic, and the political. It was conducted in Greater Cairo and the interlocutors were mothers living with HIV in their mid-thirties.