Chapter 1: “I Take Responsibility, No Care, Why Not Harm?”: Drug-related HIV-positive Widows’ Narratives of Family Trajectories

This chapter examines the long-term familial consequences of drug-related HIV transmission among Yi women in Liangshan, China. Drawing on in-depth life-history interviews with 22 HIV-positive widows whose husbands contracted HIV through injection drug use in the late 1990s, the study traces three critical phases that conceptualize the trajectories of the families: crisis (1995–2005), making-do (2005–2020), and nirvana (2020–2024). The analysis highlights how these women were subjected to structural and intimate “predation,” silently endured caregiving and survival under severe neglect, and ultimately attempted to reconstruct meaningful family roles in their later years. The findings reveal that families can function not only as potential spaces of healing but also as sites of structural harm, abandonment, and stigma. In particular, the study challenges dominant models of family-centered rehabilitation by exposing the limits of kinship care, especially within patriarchal lineage systems and performance-oriented governance regimes. This chapter argues for a family-person dual empowerment that recognizes both the moral agency of infected women and the structural ambivalence of the family, proposing more context-sensitive rehabilitation approaches that honor the lived realities and intergenerational labor of HIV-affected women.