HIV, Embodied Secrets, and Intimate Labour in Northern Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This article explores how HIV-positive women manage secrets through the use of their bodies. Women conspicuously enhance their beauty in an attempt to defend themselves against the violence of social exclusion. Moreover, they do so in order to forge safe, loving, and prosperous relationships with their boyfriends, husbands, and families. My goal is to understand how intimacy, as a material, affective, psychological, and embodied state, characterises these women's corporeal and sartorial acts. Further, I question how these embodied practices become imbricated in exchange relations with family members, health workers, and the larger community. To describe these routinised toils and triumphs as women seek to care for themselves and others, I employ the term ‘intimate labour’. I demonstrate how women gain access to social and economic resources by attending to and capitalising on the sensual and bodily desires and needs of others.

KEYWORDS:

• HIV
• intimacy
• body
• secrecy
• Nigeria

Acknowledgements

For the fieldwork upon which this article is based, I gratefully acknowledge the support of the American Philosophical Society; the West African Research Association; the New Faculty General Research Fund from the University of Kansas; the Mellon/ACLS Early Career Fellowship Program; the Fulbright IIE, Fulbright Hays, and Boren fellowship programs; the National Science Foundation; and the Population Studies & Training Center at Brown University. I thank Jan Brunson, Jennifer Aengst, Akiko Takeyama, Colleen Pollock, and an anonymous reviewer for their generous feedback.