A01=Michele Tracy Berger
Activism
Addiction
Advocacy
African Americans
Author
Author_Michele Tracy Berger
Call girl
Caregiver
Category=JBFA
Category=JBFA1
Category=JBFN
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSL
Community service
Crack cocaine
Criticism
Deviance (sociology)
Disease
Distrust
Domestic violence
Drug rehabilitation
Employment
Empowerment
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eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
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eq_society-politics
Exclusion
Feminist theory
Finding
Gender identity
Gender role
Gratitude
Health care
Health policy
Heroin
HIV
HIV-positive people
HIV/AIDS
HIVAIDS
Homeless shelter
Hostility
Intersectionality
Interview
Lesbian
Narrative
Nonprofit organization
Oppression
Oral history
Outreach
Participant
People With AIDS
Person of color
Politics
Poverty
Prevention of HIV/AIDS
Prevention of HIVAIDS
Project
Prostitution
Public health
Public sphere
Qualitative research
Relapse
Respondent
Routledge
Safe sex
Self-advocacy
Sex work
Sex worker
Sexism
Sexual violence
Shame
Social issue
Social status
Social stigma
Substance abuse
Suggestion
Support group
Survival sex
The Various
Thought
Violence
Product details
- ISBN 9780691127705
- Weight: 369g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 23 Jul 2006
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Workable Sisterhood is an empirical look at sixteen HIV-positive women who have a history of drug use, conflict with the law, or a history of working in the sex trade. What makes their experience with the HIV/AIDS virus and their political participation different from their counterparts of people with HIV? Michele Tracy Berger argues that it is the influence of a phenomenon she labels "intersectional stigma," a complex process by which women of color, already experiencing race, class, and gender oppression, are also labeled, judged, and given inferior treatment because of their status as drug users, sex workers, and HIV-positive women. The work explores the barriers of stigma in relation to political participation, and demonstrates how stigma can be effectively challenged and redirected. The majority of the women in Berger's book are women of color, in particular African Americans and Latinas. The study elaborates the process by which these women have become conscious of their social position as HIV-positive and politically active as activists, advocates, or helpers.
She builds a picture of community-based political participation that challenges popular, medical, and scholarly representations of "crack addicted prostitutes" and HIV-positive women as social problems or victims, rather than as agents of social change. Berger argues that the women's development of a political identity is directly related to a process called "life reconstruction." This process includes substance- abuse treatment, the recognition of gender as a salient factor in their lives, and the use of nontraditional political resources.
Michele Tracy Berger is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has been a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
