Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the concept of uncertainty as perceived by mothers living with HIV and AIDS in Egypt in the aftermath of 2011.I’ll depict how interlocutors navigated the biomedical, the familial,the social uncertainties,and authorities, in pursuit of ameliorating their living with HIV

Paper long abstract:

The moment of rupture caused by knowing the positive HIV status creates states of psychological, emotional as well as social uncertainties, in which the HIV-positive mother perceives it as passing through the “unknown” and its related panics. Living with embodied risk and embodied uncertainty makes configuring new realities somehow distant because of the momentary recognition of the precarious nature of life,which turns her future as she used to imagine it into a past. this embodied risk from a pathology would influence the type of uncertainty that the person would experience (Mol and Law 2004).This paper focuses on the concept of uncertainty in its biomedical and political aspects as perceived by mothers living with HIV and AIDS in Egypt in the aftermath of 2011 revolution. I’ll depict how my interlocutors navigated the biomedical, the familial, and the social uncertainties, and authorities, in pursuit of ameliorating their living with HIV. By doing so, they were preoccupied with fulfilling their roles as mothers and care givers whilst realizing the fleeting nature of their pathological as well political realities. The paper is part of a more detailed year-long ethnographic research that was conducted from spring 2014 to spring 2015, to explore how the research interlocutors perceived their individual experiences of living with HIV within the social and political context of Egypt post 2011. The ethnography situated the stories of the main research interlocutors within the interlinked discourses of power and authorities such as the medical, the social, the religious, the economic, and the political.