Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History

First Advisor

Meyerowitz, Joanne

Abstract

This dissertation puts gender and sexuality at the center of transnational contests over the meaning of biomedical citizenship in the late 20th century. State of Denial tracks the loose coalition of gay activists, HIV-positive mothers, libertarians, scientists, and South African officials that formed around the idea that AIDS is caused by promiscuous sex, poverty, and drug use, including antiretrovirals, rather than HIV. AIDS denialism emerged amidst a radical transformation in the boundaries of expertise, spurred by the women’s health, gay liberation, and alternative medicine movements; New Left counter-culturalism and anti-capitalism; right-wing anti-statism; the rise of the internet; and the politics of AIDS itself. Denialists seized new means of communication—from gay weeklies to electronic message boards to social media—to form a transnational movement challenging the authority of biomedicine and the state to regulate gendered, sexed, and racialized bodies and to determine the truth of the epidemic. They claimed their own expertise rooted in their bodies and experiences, raising larger questions about who counts as an expert and who gets to decide. Scholars of science denialism in the US have rightly blamed conservative think tanks and big business for fostering skepticism of scientific facts, but the history of AIDS denialism shows that the failures of liberal institutions like the state, the media, and biomedicine also played a key role in seeding the ground for misinformation to take hold. Denialists criticized these institutions for their legacies of colonialism, racism, and heteropatriarchy; their capture by corporate interests (particularly Big Pharma); and their inadequate response to AIDS. It is no accident that denialism first emerged within the movement for medical self-empowerment among gay men with AIDS; like AIDS activists, denialists insisted on their own expertise in the face of a medical and political establishment hostile to gay survival. But as the pandemic wore on, denialists became increasingly inflexible and paranoid. They attacked AIDS activists for colluding with the state and pharmaceutical industry, even as they partnered with conservatives who wanted to diminish the perceived influence of a “gay lobby” on the government and scientific establishment by defunding AIDS research. AIDS denialism, I argue, was able to knit together groups with competing political interests because of a broad and growing mistrust of liberal institutions, particularly the state, in the late 20th century.

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