LIFE GOES ON : THE EXPERIENCE OF AIDS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Since the time of its discovery in the early 1980s, AIDS has been unrelenting in its sweep across the globe, devastating lives, revealing fault lines in societies and at the same time polarising social relations. Singapore has not been privileged by the disease. Increasingly AIDS has become a major medical and social concern in Singapore, and has been the subject of a number of studies here. Unlike previous studies on AIDS done in Singapore, my research seeks to bring humanity into the AIDS discourse by focusing on the experiences of two groups of people most intimately involved with the disease, namely: persons living with HIV/AIDS (PWAs), and the AIDS volunteers. The data for this study were gained mainly from four months of participation observation' as an AIDS volunteer, and from face-to-face interviews with both PWAs and volunteers. Adopting a social constructionist approach, and informed by the theoretical framework of symbolic interactionism, this ethnographic study first explores how PWAs cope and live with the disease in Singapore, and secondly, presents the experience of AIDS volunteers in their efforts to help the PWAs. As AIDS is not just a disease but also an illness, and therefore a social construct, this study situates the experiences of these two groups of people within the larger sociocultural contexts in which AIDS is embedded, and from which its acquires its meanings and connotations.