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- Title
'HIV Is Not an Advocate': Self-Love, Self-Respect, and Responsibility in Marvelyn Brown's The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful, and (HIV) Positive.
- Authors
Gokulnath, A.; Venkatesan, Sathyaraj
- Abstract
The harrowing exigencies which follow the diagnosis of HIV/AIDS are an enormous challenge PLWHA (people living with HIV/AIDS) have to confront. Though the recent pharmacological advances prolong the life of PLWHA, the awareness of their mortality, coupled with the stigmatized HIV/AIDS identity, prevents PLWHA from accepting the diagnosis, forcing them to live with the disease. Marvelyn S Brown, in her memoir, The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful, and (HIV) Positive (2008), offers one possible remedy to overcome this vexed position. Coauthored with Courtney E Martin, Brown's memoir concerns the trauma that Brown confronts as an HIV-positive patient and her eventual conciliation with HIV/AIDS through "self-love, self-respect, and responsibility." Akin perhaps to Arthur Frank's notion of a "quest narrative," in which the patient reframes illness as a self-challenge, the memoir documents Brown's positive self-transformation, occasioned by her HIV-positive status. Taking these as cues, the present study, through a close reading of The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful, and (HIV) Positive, investigates how Brown, by distancing herself from the totalizing myths of AIDS, such as AIDS = death and sin, among others, self-fashions herself through self-love, self-respect, and responsibility. In so doing, the memoir remains a testament to her sheer will to morally triumph over the disease even in the face of death.
- Subjects
SELF-esteem; HIV-positive persons; HIV; NAKED Truth: Young, Beautiful &; (HIV) Positive, The (Book); BROWN, Marvelyn; MARTIN, Courtney E.
- Publication
IUP Journal of American Literature, 2011, Vol 4, Issue 3, p7
- ISSN
0974-6579
- Publication type
Article