In this talk, Chávez discusses border and belonging rhetorics in the early days of the AIDS pandemic and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. She will discuss her recent book, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance, wherein she shows how HIV/AIDS became an opportunity to enact what Chávez calls "alienizing logic," which is the foundational logic that defines US national belonging. In particular, Chávez articulates the ways that alienizing logic rhetorically manifested in calls to quarantine people living with HIV/AIDS inside the US and ban those outside from coming in. In the second part of the talk, she considers how disease again became an opportunity to enact alienizing logic as found in rhetoric about asylum seekers at the southern US border during the COVID-19 pandemic.
