Repositori URV

Identifier: TDX:1332

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX1332

Authors:
Feijoo Cid, Maria

Abstract:
This is an Ethnography work based on Phenomenology the objective of which is to study what living with HIV and aids means and the experience of management of HIV treatment. Aids is a significant event, different and distinguishable from others of people’s day-to-day life. The life of people living with HIV includes a public and a private sphere as well as an intimate sphere identified as synonym of safety and calmness where body’s care and sexual relations are defined. Identity is de-constructed in face of the diagnosis and is re-constructed again into three different kinds: legitimated identities, identities of resistance and identities in project. The autonomous management of HIV treatment is a result of the constant re-interpretation of treatment in day-to-day life. In the “hard business of living with HIV” there is an attempt to incorporate treatment in daily life in order to continue life with daily and social normality, in order to avoid feeling stigmatized, and definitely to avoid feeling ill. Self-management aims to achieve pharmacological tolerance and to maintain normality, while socio management, also searching for this normality aims to the maintenance of social normality in order to avoid stigma. Key words: ethnography, phenomenology, HIV-aids, adherence to treatment, self-management of treatment.