Can an HIV = positive woman find true love?: Romance in the stories of women living with HIV

The majority of new HIV infections worldwide occur in women, and women’s experiences of living with HIV have special connections with heterosexual relationships, reproduction and romance. Romance is also an important narrative genre for feminism, generating con-troversy over whether it can resignify or only reinforce dominant discourses and practices of gender and sexuality. This article reports on a longitudinal semi-structured interview study of UK HIV support. It focuses on the heterosexual romances told by HIV-positive women in the sample. It argues that these stories were, like all romances, strongly but implicitly situated in historical and social contexts, and that stories of romance and HIV emphasize such contexts. HIV-positive women’s narratives of ‘true love’, and their more ironic, Bridget Jones-like narratives of problematic relationships, all had this situated quality. In addition, women reported storytelling about HIV and romance as enabling them to talk about and conceptualize wider relationship and reproductive possibilities dialogically, with other HIV-positive women. Their romance stories also allowed the women to register desires that more conventional HIV narratives ignore or rationalize. The article argues that the HIV romance genre enabled these women to tell about, and perhaps think of and act on, problematic areas of their lives in new and useful ways