Abstract
Risk is one significant piece of HIV & AIDS discourse. Stigma associated with increased risk is another. Sociologist Erving Goffman defines what he considers to be the three types of stigma people most often experience: (1) “abomination of the body,” (2) “a blemish of individual character,” and/or (3) “the tribal stigmas of race, nation, or religion.”3 In other words, stigma regarding: (1) bodies in general, (2) what those bodies do, and (3) the ways in which different bodies are marked. HIV & AIDS, as with other STDs/STIs, carries a particularly weighty stigma because it tends to cut through each of these categories.
We have learned very little that is new about the disease, but much that is old about ourselves.2
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Notes
Frances E. Wood, “‘Take My Yoke upon You’: The Role of the Church in the Oppression of African-American Women” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil & Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 43.
Frederick C. Tilney, M. D. speaking on the polio epidemic of 1916 in New York and quoted in Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox, eds., AIDS: The Burdens of History (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1988), v.
Allan Brandt, “AIDS: From Social History to Social Policy” in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1988), 156.
Hans Küng, On Being a Christian (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1984), 31.
Martin E. Marty, “Tradition and the Traditions in Health/Medicine and Religion” in Health/Medicine and the Faith Traditions, ed. Martin E. Marty and Kenneth L. Vaux (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982), 19.
Elizabeth Fee, “Sin versus Science: Venereal Disease in Twentieth-Century Baltimore” in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 124.
Laurel C. Schneider, “Setting the Context: A Brief History of Science by a Sympathetic Theologian” in Adam, Eve, and the Genome, ed. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 18.
Darrel W. Amundsen and Gary B. Ferngren, “Medicine and Religion: Pre-Christian Antiquity” in Health/Medicine and the Faith Traditions, ed. Martin E. Marty and Kenneth L. Vaux (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982), 73.
Lisa Isherwood and Elizabeth Stuart, Introducing Body Theology (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 1998), 64.
Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), 69.
Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 26.
Laurel C. Schneider, “What Race Is Your Sex?” in Disrupting White Supremacy From Within: White People on What We Need to Do, ed. Jennifer Harvey, Karin A. Case, and Robin Hawley Gorsline (Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 2004), 147.
See Jean Comaroff, “Healing and the Cultural Order: The Case of the Barolong Boo Ratshidi of Southern Africa,” American Ethnologist, 7, no. 4 (November 1980): 637–657
or Diedre Helen Crumbley, “ ‘Power in the Blood’: Menstrual Taboos and Women’s Power in an African Instituted Church” in Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, and Performance, ed. R. Marie Griffith and Barbara Dianne Savage (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1983), 79.
Darrel W. Amundsen and Gary B. Ferngren, “Medicine and Religion: Early Christian History” in Health/Medicine and the Faith Traditions, ed. Martin E. Marty and Kenneth L. Vaux (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982), 121.
For more on this, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Kelly Brown Douglas, What’s Faith Got to Do with It? Black Bodies/Christian Souls (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 37.
Robert Crawford, “A Cultural Account of ‘Health’: Control, Release, and the Social Body” in Issues in the Political Economy of Health Care, ed. John B. McKinlay (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1984), 70.
Alan Whiteside, HIV/AIDS: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 117.
For more on the germ theory of disease and nineteenth century US life, see Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
Quoted in Charles E. Rosenberg, “Disease and Social Order in America: Perception and Expectations” in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1988), 28.
Simon Watney, Practices of Freedom: Selected Writings on HIV/AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 5.
Musa Dube, The HIV & AIDS Bible (London: The University of Scranton Press, 2008), 56.
Grace Jantzen, “AIDS, Shame, and Suffering” in Embracing the Chaos: Theological Responses to AIDS, ed. James Woodward (London: SPCK, 1990), 25.
Carter Heyward quoted in Elias K. Bongmba, Facing a Pandemic: The African Church and the Crisis of AIDS (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007), 21.
John E. Fortunato, AIDS: The Spiritual Dilemma (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 86.
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© 2012 Cassie J. E. H. Trentaz
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Trentaz, C.R.E.H. (2012). Mind over Matter: Risk and Stigma in Early Operating Theologies. In: Theology in the Age of Global AIDS & HIV. Palgrave Macmillan’s Content and Context in Theological Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137272904_5
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