Description
This history of eighties AIDS activism in the West is largely narrated through a nation-based framework. The most prominent radical activist network, ACT-UP, is treated as a social movement whose primary targets were domestic institutions that forestalled the development of effective HIV/AIDS treatment. This paper argues that this narrow, domestic framing has led to a misrecognition of the movement’s history, political ideology, and goals. It begins by situating AIDS activism within the context of the neoliberal reorganization of the world economy, the universalization of the nation state, and the attendant transformation of immigration controls in Western states. The HIV/AIDS epidemic was instrumentalized to facilitate many of these developments, for instance, by legitimating the privatization of sexual life through the gentrification of urban space and the criminalization of migration for those living with HIV. These developments hit racialized immigrant populations the hardest. It was within this context that many AIDS activists were radicalized. This paper turns to the anti-border politics of ACT-UP, exploring its actions on behalf of Haitians who were denied entry to the US on the basis of their HIV status. It seeks to recover the obscured historical relationship between radical sexual politics and the neoliberal border regime.
