The Many Meanings of the Body to Women Living With HIV on Antiretroviral Medication.

The Many Meanings of the Body to Women Living With HIV on Antiretroviral Medication, Mylene Fernet, Joanne Otis, Lyne Massie, and Joseph J. Levy, Universite du Qurbec a Montreal, Canada; Isabelle Toupin, Universite de Montreal, Canada; Germain Trottier, Universite Laval, Canada; Johanne Samson and Normand Lapointe, Centre Maternel et Infantile sur le SIDA, Canada

We studied the different meanings women on antiretroviral therapy attribute to their transforming bodies. As a part of a qualitative study, 42 French-speaking women (from Quebec, Africa, and Haiti), ages 25 to 51 years old, participated in a semi-structured interview. A content analysis of the interviews was performed. Significant bodily changes were reported by a majority of women as a result of their treatment. Undesirable effects such as lipodystrophy and lipoatrophy led some women to feel repelled by their bodies. These feelings appeared to cause lower self-esteem, to threaten their female identity, to increase psychological distress, and to impact their intimate and sexual lives. Some women even contemplated changing or ending their treatment. Although the majority of women experienced these manifestations as a deterioration of their physicality, as revealing the secret of their infection, or as signaling a somber prognostic, they were welcomed by others whose changed appearance was seen to better conform to personal standards of feminine beauty and health or to those privileged by Western society or their ethnic group. Finally, these bodily changes were interpreted as normal by some women, which they explained as an effect of age or pregnancy. These findings can help professionals in the sexual health field to guide women on antiretroviral therapy for HIV toward a reconciliation of the multiple, dissonant, and fragmented meanings they attribute to their body.