A conversation about In Her Hands: Women’s Fight Against AIDS in the United States (2022)

In Her Hands examines the various strategies women have utilized to fight for recognition as individuals vulnerable to and living with HIV/AIDS across multiple settings since the 1980s. Taking a new chronological and thematic approach to the study of the US epidemic, it explores five arenas of women’s AIDS activism: transmission and recognition, reproductive justice, safer sex campaigns for queer women, the carceral state, and HIV prevention and treatment. In so doing, it moves the historical understanding of women’s experiences of AIDS beyond their exclusion from the initial medical response and the role women played as the supporters of gay men. Asking how and on what terms women succeeded in securing state support, In Her Hands argues that women protesting the neglect of their health-care needs always risked encountering punitive intervention on behalf of the symbolic needs of fetuses and children – as well as wider society – deemed to need protecting from them.

Emma Day is a historian of the twentieth century United States specialising in the intersections between sexuality and gender and medicine and disease. Her first book, In Her Hands: Women’s Fight Against AIDS in the United States (California, 2023), explores the interplay between women’s health activism and political action in shaping the AIDS epidemic in the US. She is currently working on a new project which examines the making of medical knowledge on the reproductive and non-reproductive body in the twentieth century US.

Hannah Elizabeth’s research explores how HIV-affected people built and maintained families in Edinburgh, influencing national and international policy and practice through daily acts of love, care, and activism between 1981–2016. Hannah uses ‘family’ broadly, to mean communities of friends, lovers and relatives. It asks to what extent were meanings of ‘family’ and ‘activism’ changed by HIV-related care work and the changing landscape of health and social care, and what extent did reproductive politics and childcare change as HIV+ individuals had, or sought to have, children.

, this seminar is free to attend but booking is required.