THE POLITICS OF MARGINALIZATION - THE APPROPRIATION OF AIDS-PREVENTION MESSAGES AMONG INJECTION-DRUG USERS

This essay addresses the space between a cultural critique and a class analysis of HIV transmission. It explores how injection drug users, a s a disempowered group, resist hegemony through dissent. Distrust of t he medical establishment and severe social and legal constraints force injection drug users to reconstruct the AIDS message. Economic and po litical survival inflates the need for trust and reciprocity within th eir social network. This makes the meaning of AIDS a continually ambig uous one for drug users. The ways in which dissent to domination is en acted and the effect this has on HIV prevention is explored.