Queer Liaisons: Challenging Carceral Logics in HIV Education

• In Event: 51.033 - HIV/AIDS in 21st Century Education and Research

Abstract

According to the Center for HIV Law & Policy (CHLP), in 29 states in the U.S., a person who is HIV positive can be prosecuted for failing to disclose sero-status to a sex partner. The person may also be liable for sharing needles, donating organs, or otherwise “exposing” others to bodily fluids. Six states may require people convicted of HIV-related offenses to register as sex offenders. The laws apply even if the sex is consensual and legal, the accused person wore a condom, or the complainant was not infected. 
 
Seven states enhance charges or sentences for other sex offenses, including sex work, if the defendant is HIV-positive. Missouri’s HIV criminalization statute categorizes transmission of HIV, or just exposing someone to HIV, as attempted murder. Spit can be conceived as a deadly weapon - assault with a deadly weapon - even though HIV cannot be passed through saliva. In Arkansas, it is a misdemeanor to get a doctor’s checkup or have your teeth cleaned without disclosing positive status. Relying on “junk science” or no public health foundation, practices of HIV criminalization deepen in our current context. 
 
While relatively low rates of prosecutions - CHLP counts prosecutions in 22 states in the past 10 years and as of 2016, the International Lesbian and Gay Association reported at least 104 HIV-related prosecutions – these laws function to reproduce fear, to regulate HIV as individual not collective, and to define HIV within the domain of the criminal legal, not public health, system. HIV criminalization exacerbates what geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called “group-differentiated vulnerabilities” to criminalization, imprisonment and premature death. 
 
The consequences are clear: Criminalization makes HIV more deadly. The laws discourage people from getting tested, because you’re only liable if you know your status, and from volunteering the names of former sex partners to clinics, for fear of being accused or prosecuted. Mainstream educational health discourses and health advocacy and educational movements have been reluctant to challenge the “marrying” of a criminal legal framework with “junk science.” However, through an analysis of the increasing facets of the criminalization of HIV transmission in the US, this research explores why challenging the carceral turn in HIV prevention is central to creating meaningful educational health discourses.

Author

• Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University