Caring from the margins: Community HIV/AIDS care work as social reproduction in the era of HIV/AIDS

Abstract

I come to my research interest through experiences as an activist, holding firm to the belief that community HIV/AIDS care work is profoundly deprivational for the women who do it. With a commitment to feminist research, I was interested in exploring what care work meant for gender equality and commensurate development consequences. Employing the theoretical framework of feminist development economics, I adopted a qualitiative methodology to explore my interests in women community HIV/AIDS care workers' experiences. Feminist epistemology holds that all in the study terrain have epistemic agency, and as such I was interested in making meaning of care workers' own representations of their experiences, and what their representations could mean for theorising about care work as a new form of social reproduction, situated in the specific space of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa.