Considers how heterosexual women living with HIV make sense of their HIV acquisition, challenging the victim–culprit binary. None of the women interviewed presented themselves as ‘victims’ in any straightforward sense or placed the blame squarely on the men who likely infected them, including men who had not disclosed. Instead, the women’s narratives revealed themes of “mutual vulnerability” and far more ambivalent allocations of responsibility. The tendency to position women who become infected with HIV as ‘victims’ obscures the complex realities of gender and sexual practice.
