Risk and Resistance

How did women come to be seen as 'at-risk' for HIV? In the early years of the AIDS crisis, scientific and public health experts questioned whether women were likely to contract HIV in significant numbers and rolled out a response that effectively excluded women. Against a linear narrative of scientific discovery and progress, Risk and Resistance shows that it was the work of feminist lawyers and activists who altered the legal and public health response to the AIDS epidemic. Feminist AIDS activists and their allies took to the streets, legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts to demand the recognition of women in the HIV response. Risk and Resistance recovers a key story in feminist legal history – one of strategy, struggle, and competing feminist visions for a just and healthy society. It offers a clear and compelling vision of how social movements have the capacity to transform science in the service of legal change.

• Provides the story of the feminist AIDS movement, a largely untold story of HIV/AIDS history
• Brings together Science and Technology Studies, Feminist Theory, and Critical Legal Theory to understand social movement activism in the context of AIDS
• Shows how social movements use law and science to bring about legal and social change