This paper is part of a wider research aimed to study the way in which medical care and the use of procedures to prevent HIV perinatal transmission shapes the experience of living with this sickness and the meanings given to motherhood and HIV by women suffering from this condition. I explore the role played by medical knowledge and the conditions of medical attention in the production of meanings about the body in HIV infected women. Considering the specificity of human body - both subject and object-, the ethnographic approach and narrative analysis allow us to go beyond the limits of an exclusively representational point of view. Thus, I analyze the accounts of four women living with HIV framed in a hospital ethnography in a obstetrical centre in southern Buenos Aires city.
body; hospital ethnography; mother to child HIV trasmission; narrative