AIDS and the Crisis of American Empire

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel examines HIV/AIDS as a lens to understand and critique the crises of U.S. empire, both past and present. Drawing on the conference theme, "Late Stage American Empire?," we position HIV/AIDS as a critical site where imperial violence, neoliberalism, and settler colonial logics converge, exposing the structural inequities and care crises foundational to the American project. From the epidemic’s early years in the 1980s to the present day, HIV/AIDS has not only laid bare the racialized, classed, and gendered dimensions of neglect and dispossession but has also catalyzed transformative modes of care, resistance, and worldmaking from the margins of empire.
The papers on this panel interrogate HIV/AIDS through the interconnected frameworks of coloniality, neoliberal governance, and biopolitical abandonment. Esparza examines the radical care practices of queer Indigenous organizers in the Twin Cities during the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the 1980s through the 1990s. Batza traces the exclusion of heartland histories from our current understanding of HIV/AIDS history to colonial roots, neoliberal aims, and continued erasure. Bhaman explores the connections that AIDS workers forged across borders through an examination of emergent transnational networks of sex-worker organizing and the discourse surrounding commercial sex policing and public health in India and New York City. Hobson analyzes how HIV/AIDS prison activists shaped the prison abolition movement, which gained strength at the end of the 1990s as the U.S. consolidated global power predicated domestically on the convergence of mass incarceration and social abandonment.

Collectively, these papers emphasize the necessity of framing HIV/AIDS not only as a public health crisis but also as a geopolitical phenomenon shaped by the entanglements of empire, settler colonialism, and neoliberalism. They ask: How has the U.S. empire, in its late stages, managed HIV/AIDS as part of its biopolitical machinery? In what ways do the histories of HIV/AIDS illuminate the intimate violences of empire, and how might they inform visions of decolonial futures?
By centering the intersections of care, dispossession, and resistance, this panel advances the conference's call to reimagine American Studies from the standpoint of empire’s peripheries. It highlights how the HIV/AIDS crisis offers critical insights into the operations of U.S. empire while foregrounding the insurgent practices and imaginaries that have emerged in response. Especially in light of the recent executive order receding funding for PEPFAR, the links between AIDS and American Empire demand further examination and critique. From Puerto Rico to Haiti, from Indigenous territories to urban queer enclaves, the histories and afterlives of HIV/AIDS offer rich terrain for theorizing an "American Studies otherwise" in an era of ongoing catastrophe and emergent possibilities.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Radical Care in the Margins: Queer Indigenous Resistance to Settler Colonialism and HIV/AIDS in the Twin Cities - René Esparza, Washington University in St. Louis

• Erasure, AIDS, and the lasting legacies of Colonialism in the Heartland AIDS crisis - Katie Batza, University of Kansas

• From HIV to the PIC: How AIDS Activism Shaped Prison Abolition - Emily Hobson, University of Nevada-Reno

• Saving Our Own Lives: Transnational AIDS Organizing at the Turn of the Century - Salonee Bhaman, New York University

Chair

• Julio Capo, Florida International University

Biographical Information

Salonee Bhaman is a Faculty Fellow at New York University’s program in Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement (XE) and was previously the Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s and Public History at the New York Historical. She is also a member of the New York City-based gender justice group the Asian American Feminist Collective and produces queer history for public audiences with the Close Friends Collective. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of gender and sexuality, migration, law, and social movements in the twentieth century. She received her PhD in History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Yale in 2023. Her research has been generously supported by the Mellon Foundation, USC’s ONE Archives, the Phil Zwickler Memorial Grant, and the Jefferson Scholars Foundation at the University of Virginia. Her writing has appeared in The Radical History Review, The American Historical Review, The Boston Review, and The Washington Post among other venues.

Katie Batza is an Associate Professor and Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas. Batza's research explores the intersection of sexuality, health, and politics in the late 20th-century United States. Their most recent book, AIDS in the Heartland, is in the production pipeline with the University of North Carolina Press. Batza’s first book, Before AIDS, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in February 2018 and explores gay health activism in the period before AIDS. Katie also has published on the history of lesbians and the fertility industry, mapping queer health history, and neoliberalism. Collaboration across fields, mixed methods, oral history, and public humanities are hallmarks of Batza's broader research agenda as is evidenced by their completion of a walking tour and podcast project on reproductive justice in Boston, several cross-disciplinary analyses of access to healthcare for gender non-conforming and disabled individuals, and their role in the National Park Service’s LGBTQ initiative, contributing a chapter to the National Park Services LGBTQ theme study.

René Esparza is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the racial and sexual politics of urban space, particularly as these dynamics relate to public health. He is the author of From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS (forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press) which examines how privacy-centric approaches to HIV prevention in the 1980s coincided with the “cleaning up” of low-income neighborhoods and the policing of communities of color in the upper Midwest. Esparza’s second major project surveys the transnational nature of Latinx queer activism, comparing how the politics of racialization and the inequalities of U.S. citizenship, legacies of colonialism, and policies of immigration law have shaped the experiences of various Latinx queer diasporas, including Cuban, Mexican, and Puerto Rican. He is published in GLQ, Radical History Review, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, among others. He holds a PhD and MA in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Emily Hobson is an Associate Professor of History and Gender, Race, and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR), and a past chair of UNR’s Gender, Race, and Identity department. She received her PhD and Master’s degree from the University of Southern California in American Studies and Ethnicity and her BA from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges in History and Literature. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2025-26) and the National Humanities Center (2024-25) as well as the One Archives Foundation, Smith College, the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CUNY), the University of California Santa Barbara, and other sources. Emily is the author of Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (2016) and co-editor, with Dan Berger, of Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973-2001 (2020). Articles from her research on the history of HIV/AIDS activism by, for, and with people incarcerated in the United States have appeared in the Radical History Review, QED, Sinister Wisdom, The Abolitionist, and Truthout, among other venues. Emily serves the American Studies Association as a member of the National Council (2023-2025) and the 2025 Program Committee.