ABSTRACT
Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on HIV/AIDS in Aceh, Indonesia, in this chapter I delineate various forms of violence in women’s lives that lead to, or exacerbate the consequences of, HIV infection. In particular, the chapter focuses on the diverse entanglements of silence with experiences of violence and illness. Telling the stories of two women, the chapter highlights two prominent ways in which silence figures in their lives, discussing, first, the silent, invisible ways, in which the absence of state intervention shapes health access in gendered ways, aggravating the socio-historical conditions through which gendered violence persists; and, second, the silence work of HIV-positive women and, sometimes, their families to make life liveable under the threat of serious illness and social death.
