Disability in Neoliberal Times: HIVPositive Immigrants’ Experiences of the Ontario Disability (original) (raw)
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Work (Reading, Mass.), 2014
For individuals with HIV positive status, multiple barriers exist to accessing and re-entering employment. Studies on employment for people living with HIV lack a detailed consideration of race and ethnicity. This is the first article that focuses on barriers to employment for the HIV positive Latino community in the Canadian context. OBJECTIVE:To document the barriers that a sample of HIV positive Latinos and Latinas encounter in finding and maintaining employment in Toronto. A non-probability sample of immigrant and refugee Latino men and women living with HIV/AIDS in Toronto participated in in-depth interviews concerning their experiences in the labor market, emphasizing the barriers that they have faced in access to employment. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and later analysed with NVivo 9. Two sets of barriers emerged from the analysis: structural barriers that immigrants encounter in access to employment, such as language difficulties, lack of Canadian work experi...
A Qualitative Study of Systemic Barriers Encountered by HIV-Positive Immigrants in Spain
2020
Background: Immigrants are disproportionally impacted by HIV infection in Europe and in Spain. Immigrants are also identified as a vulnerable population during economic crises. Various socioeconomic barriers hinder HIV-positive immigrants from accessing healthcare services in the host country. As a result of the 2008 financial crisis, Spain has implemented multiple austerity measures, one of which was the enactments of Royal Decree Law (RDL) 16/2012 and Royal Decree (RD) 1192/2012 which abolished universal healthcare coverage. In this context, this study examined systemic barriers encountered by the participants while accessing health care after the enactments of 2012 RDL and RD. The study also researched distress felt by the participants and their experiences as HIV-positive immigrants living in Spain. Methods: Participants were recruited through a nongovernmental organization (NGO) during routine visits at the their center. A total of 12 participants were interviewed to reach data...
BMC Public Health
Background Immigrants are disproportionally impacted by HIV infection in Europe and in Spain. Immigrants are also identified as a vulnerable population during economic crises. Various socioeconomic barriers hinder HIV-positive immigrants from accessing healthcare services in the host country. As a result of the 2008 financial crisis, Spain has implemented multiple austerity measures, one of which was the enactments of Royal Decree Law (RDL) 16/2012 and Royal Decree (RD) 1192/2012 which abolished universal healthcare coverage. In this context, this study examined: 1) Participants’ mixed experiences in accessing health care after the enactment of 2012 RDL and RD, and 2) Distress felt by the participants and their experiences as HIV-positive immigrants living in Spain. Methods Participants were recruited through a nongovernmental organization (NGO) during routine visits at the center. A total of 12 participants were interviewed to reach data saturation. Participants were HIV-positive i...
This paper interrogates the ambiguity of disability identification for women living with HIV, drawing on a nine-month field research project where participants formed a book group, reading memoirs about chronic episodic conditions such as HIV, lupus, MS, and chronic depression, and discussed their relationships to disability. In investigating this ambiguity, this paper re-reads Social Contract Theory, primarily the work of John Locke, Mills, Pateman, and Winnubst, to introduce the Ability Contract. Social Contract Theory can provide us with an understanding of labor’s centrality in the construction of the liberal subject, which implicitly shapes construction of dis/ability. Several scholars have written about Social Contract Theory’s applicability to gendered subjects and racialized subjects, but few scholars have used dis/ability to interrogate Social Contract Theory. This project looks at John Locke to argue that his understanding of labor, utility and waste, and the predictability of what will be produced, is a result of understanding one’s bodily boundaries. The Ability Contract is this triad of labor-utility-predictability that is foundational to liberal subjectivity. Disability upsets this construction of liberal subjectivity, which in turn, enables an unstable negotiation of identity that extends Chicana feminist theorist Chela Sandoval’s theorization differential consciousness. For women living with HIV, disability identification is useful for accessing temporary assistance but ultimately, the women who participated in this nine-month book group, disidentified with disability through a negotiation of labor. Through the Ability Contract, and the centrality of labor-utility-predictability, we can understand that a stable identification with disability is a privilege dependent upon male-bodied whiteness.
International Journal for Equity in Health, 2022
Background: Migrants are overrepresented among people living with HIV in Sweden as they often face conditions that increased their risk and vulnerability for HIV/STI infections prior, during or after migration. Yet, there is limited research on their experiences and perceptions of living with HIV in the Swedish context. This study aims to explore migrants' experiences of living with HIV in Sweden. Methods: This is a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with 13 migrants from 11 countries living with HIV in Sweden. Interviews were analysed with thematic analysis using an intersectional perspective to explore the interactions of multiple social identities such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, age, and sexual orientation that shape an individual's or group's experiences. Results: The analysis resulted in a main theme: 'Prioritizing social integration-HIV ends up in second place' , which is based on four subthemes: 'Better opportunities in the new country than what the home country could offer' , 'Better conditions for LGBTQI people than in the home country' , 'Navigating a new system: linguistic and bureaucratic challenges' and 'Feeling like a second-class resident: racism, xenophobia and multiple discrimination'. The results suggest that migrants living with HIV in Sweden experience social integration as a greater challenge than HIV infection. Although the new country offers opportunities for better living conditions, many participants described being challenged in their daily life by linguistic and structural barriers in their encounters with public services. They are facing multiple discrimination simultaneously as migrants due to their multiple and intersecting identities (e.g. being non-white, foreigners/foreign-born and non-Swedish speakers), which is compounded by HIV status and thus limit their opportunities in the new country and too often result in an existence of exclusion. Conclusion: The study shows that most of the challenges that migrants living with HIV face are related to their status as migrants rather than HIV status, which is often not known by the public or authorities. These challenges are similar, but still differ depending on social position, previous experiences, time since arrival and since diagnosis. This emphasizes the importance of both intersectional, intersectoral and multisectoral approaches to address reported issues.
Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2018
South Asian immigrant women in Canada face unique structural barriers that influence their HIV vulnerability. Using an intersectional and anti-oppressive lens, we explored the role of immigration in bringing about changes in gender roles and the structure of gender relations and their effect on HIV risk among immigrant women as they experienced crisis tendencies in the face of hegemonic masculinity. Informed by Connell's theory of gender, the study entailed in-depth interviews with 12 self-identified South Asian immigrant women living in the Greater Toronto Area, in Ontario, Canada. A thematic analysis yielded four themes: power relations, emotional relations, gendered division of labour and social norms. Our findings revealed interdependencies between immigration and each of structural, individual and normative factors (the themes) as they pertain to crisis tendencies when patriarchy is disrupted. Given the rapid increase in global immigration, the connections between transnationalism and hegemony, and the established link between immigration and HIV, future research should extend this work to other immigrant communities.
Cartographies of Friendship, Desire, and Home; Notes on surviving neoliberal security regimes.
Disability Studies Quarterly
In this auto-ethnographic essay I shed light upon processes of racialiazation and sexualization which work to construct the figure of the disabled, diseased, alien. The paper argues disability based immigration policies, along with neoliberal notions of productivity and enterprise operate as technologies of power, excluding queer HiV positive migrant subjects from the gates of the US nation-state. I shed light upon HIV based immigration policies, disability and sexuality rights activism, pre and post 9/11 US national security practices by retracing lived experiences of mine from Kolkata, India and post 9/11 New York City. The narrative journeys to spaces such as HIV clinics, S&M chambers, and hospital rooms in hopes of understanding collective claims to life being made by those occupying the interstitial shadow spaces between nation-states, perverse/ normal, ability/disability, and ultimately life/death.
The post-migration sexual citizenship of Latino gay men in Canada
Citizenship Studies, 2015
The Cuéntame! Study interviewed 25 Spanish-speaking gay and bisexual men in Toronto. Their migration experiences are traversed by economic rationales, security concerns, and the embodied experiences of race, gender, culture, and sexuality. Most express narratives of empowered opportunity in distancing themselves from restrictive sexual regimes of their place of origin, but at the same time, many migrants trade a new sense of social acceptance as gay for marginalized statuses defined by diminished social and economic capital. The social participatory rights of citizenship are particularly affected by sexuality and social class. The need and desire to establish social and sexual connections in a new environment often characterized by economic vulnerability shape experiences of social capital and citizenship rights. Migratory experiences are embedded in complex networks of connections, motives, rationales and opportunities, and at times limited options especially among those fleeing war, economic devastation, insecurity, or persecution due to ethnicity, politics, religion, or sexual orientation, and gender. Immigrants can experience devaluation of their professional credentials, work experience, and a loss of social networks, along with immersion in a new language and cultural codes in which they are not fully fluent. At the same time, the migration experience can be an opportunity for discovery, transformation, and even reinvention in new forms of sociality and participation in the host society.
International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies, 2019
This article examines how the Canadian immigration regime socially organizes the everyday lives of queer and trans migrants with precarious status. Drawing from key findings from an institutional ethnographic study, this article maps out the disjuncture between the actual experiences of queer and trans migrants with precarious status and the ideological and textual production of precarious status by the Canadian state. Making explicit this disjuncture reveals how the Canadian immigration regime enacts structural violence upon queer and trans migrants. This article also engages with the response-based approach to violence in order to understand how queer and trans migrants actively respond to this violence. In doing so, this article highlights the ways in which queer and trans migrants respond and resist the structural violence integral to the Canadian state’s production of precarious status.
How Sam Became a Father, Became a Citizen: Scripts of Neoliberal Inclusion of Disability”.
In a 2005 queer double issue of Social Text, David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam and Jose Esteban Muiioz state that [t]he contemporary mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity -as a massmediated consumer lifestyle and embattled legal category -demands a renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that sexu,ality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference, and calibrated to firm understanding of queer as apolitical metaphor withoutfixed referent. (2005: 1; my emphasis) Although the authors expressly set out to map the future directions of queer critique, none of the texts· gathered in the collection of professedly queer intersectional work considers disability as a category (or one of the categories) that intersect(s) with queer analyses of heteronormativity. This is a curious omission, given that as recently as 2003 GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies published a special issue titled Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies, edited jointly by Robert McRuer and Abby L. Wilkerson. This issue provided a collection of inspiring essays that sketch out the multiple ways in which disability and queer critiques interact. Over the past seven years since this issue, the interest in exploring the ways, forms and modes of mutual conditioning and intersections, as well as the genealogies of both categories and analytical perspectives, has multiplied significantly (see most importantly McRuer 2006; 1 I wish to express my thanks to the editors of this volume for their inspiring comments and critique on the earlier drafts of this chapter.