The Women bookstore features books on HIV/AIDS for and by women. Books are listed in alphabetical order by title. Click the title to read more about each book. Missing your favorite book? Click here to send us your recommendations.
- The Gender Politics of HIV/AIDS in Women: Perspectives on the Pandemic in the United States
- A Positive Life: Portraits of Women Living With HIV
- Sistah’s Speak
- Women’s Experiences With HIV/Aids: Mending Fractured Selves
- Women, Families and HIV/AIDS: A Sociological Perspective on the Epidemic in America
- Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS
The Gender Politics of HIV/AIDS in Women: Perspectives on the Pandemic in the United States
by Jennifer Manlowe and Nancy Goldstein
Women now account for the majority of all new HIV/AIDS cases diagnosed in the United States. Yet, the resources allotted to women for research, health services, education, and outreach remain woefully inadequate. The Gender Politics of HIV/AIDS in Women fills crucial gaps in understanding the specific effects of HIV and AIDS on and in women’s lives. It takes as its starting point the premise that it is vitally important for researchers, teachers, health service providers, public policy makers, and community-based organizers to begin taking gender-- especially as it intersects with race, class, and sexuality-- into consideration as they work with HIV-infected women.
A Positive Life: Portraits of Women Living With HIV
by River Huston and Mary Berridge
She could be your mother, your sister, your neighbor, your colleague. She’s just like anyone you know, except she’s living with HIV. The women portrayed in this profoundly moving volume of essays and photographs speak openly about their feelings and their hopes, while conveying what it is like to be, in the author’s words, “a woman living with a disease that provokes anger, hatred and denial, yet somehow inspires in us equal measures of compassion, faith, and humanity”. As Huston, who is HIV positive herself, has written, “like many of the women in this book, I have frequently been misquoted, misunderstood, or censored beyond all recognition. Quite simply, I want these women to tell their remarkable stories.”
Sistah’s Speak
by Khafre Kujichagulia Abif
Sistah’s Speak is an anthology, a collection of nonfiction stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, personal narratives, and critical essays from women living with HIV/AIDS. This project seeks to create a space for women to share their stories in their own voice, with an open heart as a vehicle for chronicling the experiences of women living with HIV/AIDS. The goal of this project is to empower the reader, support the soul, and uplift the spirit of women living with HIV/AIDS and the collective communities each one represents.
Women’s Experiences With HIV/AIDS: Mending Fractured Selves
by R Dennis Shelby and Desiree Ciambrone
Drawing on interviews with 37 HIV-positive women, this study analyzes the effects of the illness on women’s identities, the meaning women assign to HIV infection and the ways in which they integrate HIV into their biographies. Ciambrone (Brown University) also discusses the nature and consequences of women’s coping strategies, and the dual challenge of caregiving and living with HIV infection.
Women, Families and HIV/AIDS: A Sociological Perspective on the Epidemic in America
by Carole A. Campbell
Carole Campbell examines the position of women in the AIDS epidemic (women living with HIV, and women caring for HIV-infected family members) in a sociocultural context. Campbell draws a connection among women’s risk of AIDS, gender roles (particularly adolescent gender role socialization), and male sexual behavior, demonstrating that efforts to contain the spread of the disease to females must also target the male behavior that puts women at risk. This study concludes that compared with men, HIV-infected women face unequal access to care and unequal quality of care. Informed by the moving personal accounts of eleven HIV-infected men and women, this book offers a rare, broad picture of the sociocultural causes and the impact on American society of AIDS among women.
Workable Sisterhood: The Political Journey of Stigmatized Women with HIV/AIDS
by Michele Tracy Berger
“An important contribution to the sociology of AIDS and to feminist writing concerning women who are multiply stigmatized by racism, poverty, sexual abuse, drug use, and gender.”—Nancy Stoller, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Lessons from the Damned: Queers, Whores, and Junkies Respond to AIDS.
"Groundbreaking! Workable Sisterhood expands the discussion of the new face of HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and it introduces unique qualitative empirical data. I am unaware of any other book that enables the reader to hear firsthand women’s personal stories of addiction, infection, and personal transformation. Berger’s scholarship sets a feminist standard in work on stigmatized women by presenting such women as actors and thinkers, rather than victims and voiceless research data."—Julia Sudbury, Mills College, author of Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organizations and the Politics of Transformation
