Hepatitis C is known as the ??silent epidemic??. Globally 170 million people live with chronic hepatitis C, yet it receives little policy, media or public attention. In developed countries the blood-borne virus is primarily transmitted through illicit drug injecting practices, aiding its silenced and stigmatised status. In this thesis I uncover some of these silences by exploring the narratives of forty people living with hepatitis C in New Zealand and Australia. My status as a person living with hepatitis C informed all aspects of this research project; I therefore also include my own experiences, foregrounding researcher reflexivity and the co-constructed nature of the interview process. My aims are both practical and theoretical. On a practical level I explore the experiences of people living with hepatitis C in order to inform recommendations for policy, research and practice, while also working to elucidate and employ an approach that allows for an analysis of the ill body as a lived experiencing agent, located in a substantive web of connections whereby discourse, corporeality and sociality, inform and mediate one another. To this end I employ a ??political phenomenology?? influenced by phenomenological and poststructuralist theoretical approaches. The central, previously under-researched, issues that arose in participants?? narratives structure the chapter outline, with results chapters focusing on participants?? experiences of diagnosis, living with hepatitis C, stigma, support group membership, alcohol use, and hepatitis C treatment. For many participants, it was found that living with hepatitis C was a liminal experience where distinctions between what it was to be healthy or ill were not clear-cut. Indeed, many of the participants?? narratives exposed the inadequacy of Western binary categorisations to speak to their experiences of living with hepatitis C. Throughout this thesis it can be seen that the meanings that participants ascribed to health, illness, and their hepatitis C were fluid and contextual, informed by the interplay of corporeality and discourse. From this interplay comes the ability to speak into the gaps of dominant discourses, creating the potential for the disruption, or subtle realignment, of normative ways of knowing.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/272626 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Harris, Magdalena, National Centre in HIV Social Research, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded By:University of New South Wales. National Centre in HIV Social Research |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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