Troubling The Angels Women Living With Hiv / Aids By...

The book Troubling The Angels: Women Living With HIV/AIDS by Patti Lather (an educator) and Chris Smithies (a psychologist) troubles the dominant cultural and social meanings of HIV/AIDS, and draws attention to women with HIV/AIDS because they are often left out from the dominant rhetoric in the United States. The participants are women in Ohio who are members of four HIV/AIDS support groups that are specifically for women. Although many of the scientific realities and statistics cited in this book are now outdated, the researcher’s methods and their methodology are still an important intervention to feminist research. In this paper, I examine how Lather and Smithies intentionally use certain research methods to trouble the politics representation and knowing, and insider/outsider binary. The methods that I will be focusing on include group interview, participants as an interpretative community, and the usage of â€Å"intertexts†. The salient feature of this research pr oject is that the researchers relied mostly on group interviews, and the book is mostly a transcript of those group interviews. Although the researchers initially intended to conduct multiple individual interviews, after they met with one of the support groups to discuss and explore possible interview questions, the researchers decided to keep this format because of the valuable dialogues that happened in the initial session (Lather and Smithies, 1997, Preface 2). According to Joey Sprague (2005), group interview