Erasure, AIDS, and the lasting legacies of Colonialism in the Heartland AIDS crisis

• In Event: AIDS and the Crisis of American Empire

Abstract

This paper will examine the construction of “the white heartland imaginary,” the imagined home of ideal citizens of the United States, as a tool deployed by politicians, mainstream media, and business and religious leaders of the 1980s to discipline and erase those who failed to conform. An extension of the rhetoric used to forcibly seize land and attack Native cultures and existence in the 18th and 19th centuries, the white heartland imaginary reifies and idolizes a white Christian heteronormative working class ideal. The intentional construction of an imagined region, with poorly defined borders and from which the white heartland imaginary emanates, served several political ends: it allowed for a cultural narrative that sold and hastened the shrinking and shredding of social safety nets; it offered an american ideal that could be slightly removed from the stain of slavery and anti-black racism, at least in theory if not in practice; and it provided a perfect foil to coastal big cities embroiled with racial tensions, poverty, and HIV/AIDS.

Of course, despite the political power of the white heartland imaginary, it could not escape the heartland reality in which social safety nets were critical, racism existed, and HIV infected even those residents far removed from the big coastal cities. This paper juxtaposes this reality with the imaginary, tracing the efforts and effects of erasure and resistance not only in the history of HIV/AIDS in the region, but in the history of AIDS itself. Through this process, the exclusion of heartland histories of HIV/AIDS from the existing literature reveals itself as another iteration of erasure and vestige of colonialism.

Drawn from oral interviews, cultural anaysis and archival research, this paper explores the links between the erasure of heartland HIV/AIDS histories to the lasting legacies of colonialism. With these links illuminated, I then interrogate the ways in which we can continue or disrupt these legacies through the telling of histories about HIV/AIDS in the heartland and explore the potential to tease out decolonial futures.

Author

• Katie Batza, University of Kansas