Troubling The Angels

Educator Patti Lather and psychologist Chris Smithies observed and chronicled support groups for women diagnosed with HIV. Whether black, Latina, poor, or middle class, the women in these groups share the common bond of living with HIV/AIDS, and they describe how it affects their lives in terms full of practical reality and moving poignancy, as they fight the disease, accept, reflect, live, and die with and in it.The authors weave into these accounts their own experiences as researchers, but also as women emotionally tied to the sufferings of sisters, mothers, wives, and lovers with HIV/AIDS.Finally, the reader is provided with statistics and fact boxes that put these women's words in context for a fuller understanding of the epidemic of HIV/AIDS as it affects its fastest growing population. In an epilogue, Lather and Smithies revisit these women in 1995 and 1996, not only to once again chronicle their lives with HIV/AIDS, but to visit the friends they had made and to mourn the friends they have lost.