This chapter explores how biocitizenship works to maintain national borders and relegate certain populations—in this case, immigrants with HIV/AIDS—to death. Although immigrants are not citizens, they and their biological conditions are placed under perhaps more scrutiny than those with citizenship status, making the framework of biocitizenship an appropriate one for understanding how decisions regarding how immigrants with HIV/AIDS should be treated were made and also how people responded to aspects of those decisions. To provide this exploration, this chapter examines the controversy, protests and boycott surrounding the 6th International AIDS Conference (IAC) held in San Francisco in 1990 to demonstrate an often uncommented upon aspect of biocitizenship: its necropolitical functions.
HIV/AIDS and International AIDS Conference 2008