Black Anti-Bodies Versus Resistive Antibody in a Feminist Infrastructure of Care

Bibliographic Data

ID2725883
AuthorsJallicia Jolly (0000-0002-5778-3320, American Studies and Black Studies Departments Amherst College Amherst Massachusetts USA, corresponding author)
Year2025
Publication date2025-09-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Anthropologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/aman.70017
OpenAlexW4414125335
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited30

This essay distinguishes between Black anti-bodies and resistive antibodies to examine the grassroots care labor of Black Jamaican women living with HIV. Drawing on a brief ethnographic vignette from fieldwork in Kingston, it explores how women navigate and contest state violence, reproductive injustice, and biomedical neglect through community-based networks of care that are resistive antibodies-protective entities that offer adaptive forms of resistance to overlapping oppression. Grounded in Black and Caribbean feminist thought, this piece reframes care as a radical, life-sustaining praxis that challenges dehumanizing logics of contagion, pathology, and disposability. Ultimately, it responds to Dána-Ain Davis's anti-bodies call by advancing a Black feminist infrastructure of care that both critiques structural violence and foregrounds the protective work of antibodies laboring for wellness, interdependence, and collective survival

Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

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