WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO YOU?: HIV and the (Re)Making of Moral Personhood

In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Erving Goffman (1963, 3) highlights the relationship between stigma and personhood when he defines a stigmatized person as someone “possessing an attribute that makes him different from others in the category of persons available for him to be, and of a less desirable kind. . . . He is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted discounted one.” But what does it mean to be a “whole and usual person” or a “tainted discounted one”? This chapter centers on these questions and opens with