"What I Got to Go Through": Normalization and HIV-Positive Adolescents

Therapeutic breakthroughs have transformed HIV into an illness that is routinized within the clinic. It is unclear, however, how these breakthroughs shape the lives of newly infected adolescents who are beginning to receive what will be life-long care and treatment. The reframing of HIV as no longer exceptional influences the lived experience of urban adolescents, whose futures must shift to incorporate expectations that they live a full life with HIV. They must now manage the clinical demands of a chronic and infectious disease, while navigating the transition from adolescence to a 'normal' adulthood, which, for some, means completing education, findings jobs, and building careers. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Baltimore, Maryland, I examine the tensions adolescents face as their experiences with HIV conflict with policy makers and researchers' reframing of HIV as a disease like any other.