This essay examines care labor of black jamaican women living with HIV, suggesting community networks may serve as resistive antibodies against structural violence.
This essay distinguishes between Black anti‐bodies and resistive antibodies to examine the grassroots care labor of Black Jamaican women living with HIV. Drawing on a brief ethnographic vignette from fieldwork in Kingston, it explores how women navigate and contest state violence, reproductive injustice, and biomedical neglect through community‐based networks of care that are resistive antibodies— protective entities that offer adaptive forms of resistance to overlapping oppression. Grounded in Black and Caribbean feminist thought, this piece reframes care as a radical, life‐sustaining praxis that challenges dehumanizing logics of contagion, pathology, and disposability. Ultimately, it responds to Dána‐Ain Davis's anti‐bodies call by advancing a Black feminist infrastructure of care that both critiques structural violence and foregrounds the protective work of antibodies laboring for wellness, interdependence, and collective survival.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Jallicia Jolly (2025) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 2 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: