She's Positive

Despite the ongoing scourge of AIDS in African American life, the stories of Black women and their relationship with HIV are systematically neglected. Even during the social reckoning over racial injustice that ignited amidst the COVID pandemic, the world turned a blind eye to the overlapping crises unfolding within Black communities throughout the United States.

Using original interviews, ethnographic research and photography, She’s Positive: The Extraordinary Lives of Black Women Living with HIV by Thurka Sangaramoorthy chronicles voices excluded from standard accounts of the AIDS crisis in America. The oral histories that Sangaramoorthy collected for this book were acquired by the Smithsonian Institute’s permanent online archival collection.

She’s Positive includes portraits of numerous women in the Washington, D.C., area over eight years, showing how the afterlife of an epidemic still intimately and publicly shapes Black women’s lives. It reveals how the prevailing social history of HIV in the U.S. is ultimately embedded in white supremacy, erasing the disease’s continued and devastating impact on Black communities.

THURKA SANGARAMOORTHY is a professor of anthropology at American University and an affiliate professor of social anthropology at Addis Ababa University. Sangaramoorthy has been conducting community-engaged ethnographic research among vulnerable populations in the United States, Africa, and Latin America / the Caribbean for over twenty years. Her previous books include Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America.