The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance

Karma Chávez is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Mexican American & Latino/a Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013) which examines coalition building at the many intersections of queer and immigration politics in the contemporary United States. In her talk, Dr. Chávez discusses topics from her forthcoming book, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (University of Washington Press, 2021). She centers citizenship and immigration status to tell a story about how HIV/ AIDS became an opportunity for powerful people in the US to enact alienizing logic against migrants, Black folks, and others; and how people fought back

What’s wrong with signs that say “Latinxs for Black Lives”?

Many Latinxs, especially from younger generations, have come out strongly in support of the movement for Black Lives. For many, they’ve approached this activism from a model of Black-Brown solidarity. But where does this model leave Afro-Latinxs? In this episode we interrogate the question: what is wrong with those signs that say Latinxs for Black Lives

Engendering the Prefigurative: Feminist Praxes That Bridge a Politics of Prefigurement and Survival

Prefigurative politics are typically understood as experiments in living, laboring or provisioning that are alternatives to ‘what is’ and prefigure ‘what could be.’ This paper rethinks prefigurative politics, which scholars have often approached by emphasizing their economic and political structures, not the transformation of social relationships and power in these experiments. Despite this scholarly trend, many collectivities organizing around a politics of survival engage in prefigurative practices. In fact, in the process of resisting domination, they are re-imagining social relationships and power. In this paper, we draw on women of color feminist theory to explore the tensions of practicing principled politics and social justice in the deeply compromised spaces of struggle for those groups that act in the radical in-between of prefigurative politics and the politics of survival. By analyzing a reproductive justice organizing project called ‘We are BRAVE’ as a case study, we re-imagine prefigurative politics through three central elements: relationality, self-determination, and intersectionality

Queer Politics in China: A Conversation with "Western" Activists Working in Beijing

status: publishe