Unruly death : the social organization of AIDS suicide
The decision to contribute my words to the discussion regarding HIV and AIDS emerged from my experience of the illness and subsequent death of my brother Jay, a gay man who killed himself eighteen months after a diagnosis of AIDS. The inquiry begins from my own experience of confusion, fear and even...
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| Format: | Others |
| Language: | English en |
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2017
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| Online Access: | https://dspace.library.uvic.ca//handle/1828/8589 |
| Summary: | The decision to contribute my words to the discussion regarding HIV and AIDS emerged from my experience of the illness and subsequent death of my brother Jay, a gay man who killed himself eighteen months after a diagnosis of AIDS. The inquiry begins from my own experience of confusion, fear and eventual loss. Employing Jay's journal of his eighteen month “journey” with AIDS, I illustrate what can be learned about the social organization of AIDS “suicide” through the method of inquiry known as institutional ethnography. I assumed, when I began the analysis that I had found Jay's standpoint, his voice, that his words would show me the real Jay and how he finally made, by himself, his decision to die. Yet I found the narratives of medical, professional and immune and self-help discourses interjecting, defining, categorizing and being reflected in his words and actions.
The analysis (that begins from Jay's journal as entry points) makes visible how a variety of ruling practices, ways of knowing, and authoritative knowledges organized Jay's account of his experience of living with AIDS, as they must have done his life itself and his decision to die. Thus, my central methodological interest has been to illustrate a way of knowing that is not simply a subjective rendering, nor an ideological account available only as discourse, but rather one which offers insight into how various social relations (might have actually) organized the everyday life of a man living/dying with AIDS.
This project is not about who owns truth but rather about how HIV disease works today; that is, how concepts, institutional practices, and professional discourses intersect with and become part of the daily lives of actual individuals. The analysis displays the “work” involved in choosing to live or choosing to die by those with HIV disease and the discursive practices that “rule” those choices. The inquiry makes visible from an account of one person who lived with HIV/AIDS and those caring for him, how the standpoint of the everyday differs from the standpoint of professional action. While it is individual people with AIDS who will decide whether to take their own lives, depending on the circumstances in which they find themselves, I have attempted through this inquiry, to articulate how these decisions are fully social. As my research progressed, I discovered how my brother's death by his own act was turned from a heart-breaking attempt to take charge of his life—an unruly act-into conformity with official rules. I have shown what it means to say that his death, as well as his life with AIDS, was discursively organized and ruled. === Graduate |
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