Risk and Resistance – How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS

Risk and Resistance is a beautifully-written, meticulously-researched, and compellingly-argued book. It is poised to shift understandings of the relationship between law and science in a way that is truly groundbreaking. I expect that this wonderful book will inspire an entire literature devoted to uncovering the activism that worked to unsettle scientific truths.
Khiara M. Bridges – Professor of Law, UC Berkeley School of Law and author of Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization

[This book] rectifies a long-standing injustice: the erasure of the role of women in the transformation of science, law and policy in the midst of the HIV epidemic. Popular narratives of the AIDS crisis too often obscure the origins of the fight against the disease in the feminist health movement and the central part of women living with AIDS and their advocates in shaping the response to what would become a global pandemic. This is a groundbreaking work of scholarship – but also a sorely needed ‘bearing witness’ in the public sphere to the contribution of a generation of women to ending a modern plague.
Gregg Gonsalvez – Associate Professor, Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, Yale School of Public Health

Risk and Resistance is a tour de force. It is the book that was missing from the catalogue about HIV/AIDS and the catastrophic health, legal, and political crises in its wake. In beautiful prose and rich story-telling, Aziza Ahmed corrects the historical record, rewriting women and crucial, feminist activism into the folds of a devastating era in global history. With this book, Professor Ahmed has penned a pathbreaking contribution to law and feminist theory.
Michele Bratcher Goodwin – Linda D. & Timothy J. O’Neill Professor, Georgetown Law School

Aziza Ahmed has crafted a magnificent genealogy of specific organizational strategies that linked individual women into powerful communities of patients, medical researchers, service providers, and litigators. Their advocacy reframed not merely responses to the AIDS crisis but to all subsequent epidemics including COVID. This book is the chronicle of hard-fought interventions that redirected the course of legal and medical history and that transformed social outcomes to the betterment of all.
Patricia Williams – Distinguished Professor of Law and the Humanities, Northeastern University School of Law

Aziza Ahmed has chronicled with exquisite detail and compassion how feminists from diverse backgrounds, some of them scientists and lawyers committed to using the very best evidence, collaborated across race and class to change the course of history and ensure that we would have an accurate understanding of how the AIDS epidemic affected women. This book underscores how wrong assumptions can lead to bad public health policy—and why we need a strong advocacy community to partner with scientists and health care leaders to ensure that all receive equitable care and treatment.
Judy Norsigian, Co-founder, Our Bodies, Our Selves & Byllye Avery, Founder, National Black Women’s Health Project

A definitive, dramatic history of feminist activist struggle against the medical establishment’s understanding of AIDS and the terrible policies it led to. A brilliant reconstruction of a successful social movement that doesn’t paper over its internal conflicts.
Duncan Kennedy – Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, Emeritus, Harvard Law School

A definitive, dramatic history of feminist activist struggle against the medical establishment’s understanding of AIDS and the terrible policies it led to.
Duncan Kennedy – Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, Emeritus, Harvard Law School

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.

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About the Author

Aziza Ahmed’s scholarship examines the intersection of law, politics, and science in the fields of constitutional law, criminal law, health law, and family law.

Conversations Elsewhere

Aziza Ahmed is a guest on the podcast Taboo Trades, where she speaks with Kim Krawiec about Risk and Resistance.

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Book Talk: Risk and Resistance

About the Author

Conversations Elsewhere