Everything under my skin: The tragic in the vulnerabilities of HIV positive people in Portugal

The figures of the vulnerable people are many and diversified. These figures are also encountered in Portugal. They are people with hidden voices and faces. They emerge in the public arena covered by a skin that notoriously announces their presence. Among the strange figures that tangibly foretell the presence of vulnerable beings, this text makes a sociological analysis following the critical operations made by HIV positive people taking as a starting point the diverse perspectives that make up their involvement with the world. Some mobilize themselves in causes that affect them and face various difficulties which run into their lives and into the lives of those also infected and affected by the disease. They fight with their bodies and everything under their skin is a means and an end to promote their causes in order to have their own human rights truly recognized. On the other side of the mirror, the organizations that support these movements are seen by HIV positive people as tools to make live and real, and to advertise, their denunciations of the ways they are disregarded, since the rule that does not allow, in democracy, the injustice at its worse, in its worst extreme forms, does not work and, through interposed voices, they claim the acknowledgement of their rights as beings that belong to a common humanity. But whatever the circumstance for the monitorization of these experiences, either HIV positive people that publicly expose themselves or HIV positive people that do not publicly reveal their presence in the city, they express their suffering, at a distance or presentially, through the coating of their bodies. The tragic in their skins throws them into experiences of unaffectedness of themselves and of others in this modernity that sees itself as an enlarged liberality.