Legal consciousness on the margins of society: Struggles against stigmatization in the AIDS crisis

This study compares how two groups of people, situated at the margins of society, position themselves differently with regard to the law: the HIV‐infected women see themselves as objects of surveillance, while the gay men with HIV imagine themselves as rights‐bearers. At the same time, both groups are influenced by a core liberal presupposition embedded in the American legal order that promotes individualism. Both groups express the conditions of their lives as a product of individual choices, and as a consequence, turn stigmatization, trouble, and injury back upon themselves in the form of self‐blame. This expression of self‐blame is most pervasive among the female injection drug users, in that it is reinforced by moral and therapeutic discourses associated with drug addiction.

Key words:

• legal consciousness
• law
• identities
• AIDS/HIV disease
• discourse
• blame