Out of the silence: women protesting the AIDS epidemic, 1980-2020

For women in the United States, the fight against AIDS has for the past forty years been a fight for autonomy, equality, and rights. During this period, activists have not only had to deal with the health crisis of the AIDS epidemic, but have had to battle with the US government and the pharmaceutical industry over the question of who is deserving, who is responsible, and who counts in the epidemic. These questions were particularly important in the 1980s, a decade during which ideas about who deserved welfare and support were at the top of the political agenda. Since then, the treatment environment has changed, but women’s struggle to make themselves count as human beings, free from prescriptions about their bodies and lives, has continued to drive their activism in the twenty-first century. This thesis traces the aims and actions of women struggling for autonomy, equality, and rights in the wake of the AIDS epidemic across a range of scenarios in the United States. It also centres women’s fight for autonomy, equality, and rights in the AIDS epidemic within a series of other major historical developments from the 1980s to the present day; namely, abortion politics, the culture wars, the carceral state, and the US healthcare market. It shows that the efforts of the women in this thesis to carve out an autonomous space was not only a right in theory, but became a matter of life and death in the wake of the epidemic. Moreover, this thesis argues that the origins and evolution of activism in the twentieth and twenty-first century United States lie within a persisting tradition of women organising for control over their bodies and lives.