Motherhood is dominantly a secondary identity in which the baby is more important than the mother. It seems that adding HIV to the mix explodes this expectation of facelessness. Although interview material was predominantly concerned with motherhood from the perspective of the baby, there were notable instances where women occupied motherhood from their own perspectives. This chapter examines some such moments, focusing particularly on the maternal body. This body, which belongs only to the mother and which expresses the feelings and identities of maternity, signifies one place where motherhood lives in its own right. The previous chapters suggested that the baby's body – its meaning, status and the care it receives in mother– infant interaction – is central to HIV-positive motherhood. In its urgency, it drowns out the mother's body. Examining the ways in which the mother's body entered (or did not enter) into interviews – providing an analysis of the margins that support the centre, or of the bodily container that holds motherhood as well as babyhood – makes it easier to recognise the power and pervasiveness of dominant discourses about motherhood, which posit the all-importance of the baby and, implicitly, the absence of the mother. Analysing the few and very specific instances where the mother's body did emerge in interviews also foregrounds the ways in which these dominant discourses police the boundaries of subjectivity. The mother's body does not only foreground dominant discourses, however; its existence, sidelined as it is, also challenges them. The mother's body cannot be made sufficiently docile, and so breaks through and threatens (at the boundaries of subjectivity) the dominance of discourses that the mother's body and the mother's identity are fundamentally less important than the baby.

This chapter suggests that, while the maternal body is largely absent from interview material, it nonetheless inserts itself – and maternal identity – in important moments. These moments are entangled with HIV-positive identities: the mother's body is most visible as an infecting body; it is most powerfully evoked through the stories of other HIVpositive mothers; it is constructed and reconstructed through the baby's HIV status.