Embodied Topologies: Space and the Place of Memory Among Women Living with HIV in South Africa

This chapter draws on multi-sited ethnographic research conducted with HIV-positive women living in Khayelitsha, South Africa. Weaving theory and ethnography together, it explores the dynamic relationship between memory and space through women’s recollections of their search for healing at different times in South Africa’s shifting political landscape over the last two decades. First, it traces women’s illness narratives across salient spaces and times and along the lineages of social relations that stretch out before and after them. Second, it explores women’s memories of embodied precarity in Khayelitsha, a site of political resistance in the struggle for democracy and then, later, in the struggle for ARVs. To explore these facets of memory, the chapter integrates ethnographic material with medical anthropological theories of embodiment and human geographical theories of space-time. Reflecting on these intersections between this ethnography and wide-ranging theories on embodiment and space-time, the chapter makes two linked arguments around the intersections of HIV and memory. First, it demonstrates how memories are embodied, and, second, it suggests that not only are memories influenced by the time in which they are located, but also by the spaces in which they take place.