ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses such questions via "the thinking that writing produces" out of the efforts of Chris Smithies to write a book about women living with HIV/AIDS. It raises three issues from Chris and "postbook" location: the ruins of ethnographic realism, the masks of authorial presence, and the work of a recalcitrant rhetoric. The chapter deals with some thoughts on a "methodology of getting lost" by looking at the intersection of research, theory, and politics. Working both within and against disciplinary conventions, sense of task is to explore methodological economies of responsibility and possibility that engage will to know through concrete efforts both to produce different knowledge and to produce knowledge differently. The chapter engages in an ethnography of women living with HIV/AIDS. It invites into the project by Chris Smithies, a local feminist psychologist, who facilitated a support group whose members wished to publish their stories of living with HIV/AIDS.