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.
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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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137272904_5
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