| This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the "Tahitian Islander," a Tampa, Florida residential facility for homeless people with AIDS. Drawing on seventeen months of participant observation fieldwork conducted between January of 1993 and June of 1994, this study examines how a small group of people with AIDS communicatively construct lifestyles and identities, wrestle with issues of community and social alienation, and collectively and individually struggle with the terms of life and death. While this is a study of one local AIDS housing facility, the narratives contained in these six chapters suggest the broader set of conditions and circumstances experienced by many people who live with AIDS throughout urban America. Through a variety of narrative episodes, the author attempts to offer an alternative to familiar representations of AIDS often carried through various forms of mass media. Instead, the six chapters of this dissertation embrace an ethnographic approach organized around narratives, dialogues, and descriptions drawn in collaboration and participation with the residents of the Tahitian Islander housing facility.;After providing an orientation to the research site and the author's approach to ethnography, the second chapter offers an overview of mainstream mass media representations of AIDS as a means toward locating the study in the broader discursive realm of cultural discourses about HIV illness and disease. As popular media representations enlarge cultural awareness of AIDS, they also serve as a means of reinforcing the marginal status of people who live with the disease. In contrast to the mediated cultural dramas of AIDS, chapter three presents the stories of three Tahitian Islander residents that illustrate how discursive social performances are central in helping them negotiate identity and a sense of place in the face of social stigmas about their disease. Chapter four critically examines the problems and possibilities of "AIDS communities." Compared to mass media stories depicting a sense of social solidarity among people with AIDS, this chapter describes the conditions of social fragmentation and divisiveness evident among Tahitian Islander residents. Chapter five shows how death serves as a unifying force at the Tahitian Islander. Compared to the social factions and disunity among residents described in chapter four, death appears as a leveling force temporarily binding some residents together as they confront a friend's rapid decline with activities and words suggestive of denial. Finally, chapter six describes the important functions of testimony for people with AIDS and their loved ones by showing how it is used to cope with adversity, preserve worth and merit, acknowledge limitations, and gain intimacy. Through the story of one Tahitian Islander resident, testimony is also shown to be a rite of passage marking a transformation of status from living with AIDS to dying because of it. |
