This review essay is based on two articles, both are written by Cecilia Van Hollen. Both are about the contemporary HIV/AIDS epidemic of India, however, the main focal point is different. First one is about the traditional medicine of India and another one is about the Gendering of Stigma in Tamil Nadu, south India. In her first article Nationalism, transnationalism, and the Politics of "traditional" Indian Medicine for HIV/AIDS illustrates how nationalist discourse conveys nationalistic, transnationalistic impression on "traditional medicine" for HIV/AIDS in contemporary India. In contemporary time, the usages of nonbiomedical medicine are rising not only in the developing countries, as well as in richer countries. The global pandemic of …show more content…
According to Erving Goffman stigma is a "social identity" and "attribute that is deeply discrediting", he also claimed that "we believe the person with the stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chance". In this research one significant question asked by the author was " is there a difference between how society treats HIV-positive women vs. HIV-positive men? If so, what are those differences, and why do you think such difference exist?"(641). Some women clearly supported the argument that women face greater stigma and discrimination than HIV-positive men. Vijaya an HIV positive woman added some more, according to her, members society treat HIV-positive women worse than they treat HIV-positive men because if a woman is HIV positive they say that she is immoral but they do not say that about men. Angamma, also an HIV positive women, infected from her husband, also replied the same answer. One important thing the author mentioned here that the tendency for a stigma to spread from the stigmatized individual to his close connections, we found this happened with Saraswati, her stigma threatens to extend to her sister. Another HIV-positive patient Vasuthi who was also an NGO worker working with HIV positive people, her response was "in my own experience, this has not been the case. But in my fieldwork experience, I find that 90 percent of the time the family will blame the wife and say that it is because of the wife that HIV has come to the husband. Only in a few houses will people have pity for the wife, saying that the husband gave HIV to the wife"(644-645). She also added that, people usually think that AIDS is a "women's disease", this disease comes because of the woman. Some HIV-positive women mentioned a distinction between stigma inside the family and