Living with HIV: Resistance by Positive People

Efforts to destigmatize AIDS by a group of HIV‐positive people in an Australian city include a counter discourse that inverts the stigma of AIDS by confronting images of a hopeless disease and appropriating concepts from the alternative health movement and New Age philosophy. These strategies constitute a resistance to mainstream discourses about AIDS and echo the strategies employed by other stigmatized groups. The explanatory model used by the HIV‐positive people allows them to actively intervene in the disease process by collaboration with the medical profession, exploration of alternative therapies, and political action to urge more research. 1992 American Anthropological Association