The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (Decolonizing Feminisms) - Softcover

Chávez, Karma R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0295748974 ISBN 13: 9780295748979

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 2021

Synopsis

Winner of the 2022 Book of the Year Award, sponsored by the Latina & Latino Communication Studies Division of the National Communication Association Winner of the 2022 Diamond Anniversary Book Award, sponsored by the National Communication Association Unpacks the exclusionary politics of AIDS and traces little-known coalitions among affected communities As soon as US media and politicians became aware of AIDS in the early 1980s, fingers were pointed not only at the gay community but also at other countries and migrant communities, particularly Haitians, as responsible for spreading the virus. Evangelical leaders, public health officials, and the Reagan administration quickly capitalized on widespread fear of the new disease to call for quarantines, immigration bans, and deportations, scapegoating and blaming HIV-positive migrants—even as the rest of the world regarded the US as the primary exporter of the virus. In The Borders of AIDS, Karma Chávez demonstrates how such calls proliferated and how failure to impose a quarantine for HIV-positive citizens morphed into the successful enactment of a complete ban on the regularization of HIV-positive migrants—which lasted more than twenty years. News reports, congressional records, and AIDS activist archives reveal how queer groups and migrant communities built fragile coalitions to fight against the alienation of themselves and others, asserting their capacity for resistance and resiliency. Building on existing histories of HIV/AIDS, public health, citizenship, and immigration, Chávez establishes how politicians and public health officials treated different communities with HIV/AIDS and highlights the work these communities did to resist alienation.

About this title

About the Authors

Karma R. Chávez is professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (Washington, 2021), Palestine on the Air (Illinois, 2019), and Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Illinois, 2013). She is also the coeditor of several books, including Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU, 2021) and Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation (Illinois, 2020).

Piya Chatterjee is professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Scripps College. She is the author of A Time for Tea: Women, Labor and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Duke, 2001) as well as the coeditor of The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (Minnesota, 2014) and States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia (New Delhi: Zubaan Press, 2009).

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0295748974
• ISBN 13: 9780295748979
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264