Abstract

Research within geography and cognate disciplines have worked to demonstrate the important ways care(ing) informs the emotive, bodily and obligatory nature of gendered health. Although acts of care shape gendered health inequalities and possibilities for reconfiguration, scholarly research tends to focus on individual caregiving and receiving relationships within the domestic sphere, eliding more complicated, contradictory and uncomfortable questions of care that emerge in and through the wider social context. South Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic provides important opportunities to engage contradictions in care since expanded access to antiretroviral therapy allows women to care for their health with increased confidence. Drawing on qualitative research with women in South Africa, we argue that while new HIV management regimes rework opportunities for women to care for and enhance bodily health and wellbeing, they paradoxically conflict with women’s ability to care for and maintain their gendered selves, generating possibilities for harm, conflict and abuse. New biomedical modes of care mean women are often forced to make contradictory decisions between caring for their health but losing idealized notions of the gendered self, or caring for their gendered self, but undermining their possibilities for health. This article concludes that future geographic research on gender-health-place interactions should extend the practice and politics of care by illuminating how constructions, experiences and enactments of gender, health and disease mediate encounters with care and the institutions that attempt to manage them.

摘要

地理学和同源学科的研究已经努力证明了关心（ing）告知性别健康的情感、身体和义务性质的重要方式。尽管护理行为塑造了性别健康不平等和重新配置的可能性，但学术研究往往侧重于家庭领域内的个人护理和接受关系，忽略在更广泛的社会背景中出现的更复杂、矛盾和令人不安的护理问题。南非的艾滋病毒/艾滋病流行为解决护理中的矛盾提供了重要机会，因为扩大获得抗逆转录病毒疗法的机会使妇女能够更有信心地照顾自己的健康。借鉴对南非妇女的定性研究，我们认为，虽然新的 HIV 管理制度为女性提供了照顾和增强身体健康和福祉的机会，但自相矛盾的是，它们与女性照顾和维持性别自我的能力相冲突，从而产生了伤害、冲突和虐待的可能性。新的生物医学护理模式意味着女性经常被迫在关心自己的健康但失去性别化自我的理想化概念，或者关心自己的性别化自我但破坏健康的可能性之间做出相互矛盾的决定。本文的结论是，未来关于性别-健康-场所相互作用的地理研究应该通过阐明性别、健康和疾病的结构、经验和制定如何调节与护理的接触以及试图管理它们的机构，从而扩展护理的实践和政治。