Lecture Addresses How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS

'Dead but not disabled.' With that eerie slogan, feminist activists in the AIDS crisis slammed the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as women were dying faster than the bureaucracy recognized their illness.

This protest is at the heart of Professor Aziza Ahmed's new book, and her lecture on how feminists forced science and law to finally diagnose women with HIV.

Students, faculty and friends gathered in Stony Brook University's Humanities Institute on March 2 for Ahmed's lecture, "Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Sciences of AIDS," part of the Sir Run Run Shaw lecture series.

Ahmed, a professor of law and N. Neal Pike Scholar at Boston University School of Law, traced the timeline of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s to the feminism of today.

Throughout the lecture, Ahmed detailed the activism led by figures like Katrina Haslip, which successfully advocated for the inclusion of conditions like invasive cervical cancer in the CDC's narrow definition of AIDS. This led to increased diagnoses and better welfare benefits for women affected.

"Social movements fight to transform science, unsettle scientific consensus in service of legal change and to push for greater access to resources and healthcare," Ahmed said. She emphasized that these women completely upended what was known about the disease at the time.

The event was co-sponsored by the departments of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, History, and Sociology; Program in Public Health, School of Social Welfare, Alan Alda Center for Communicating Scienceand the Center for Changing Systems of Power.

Joanna Wuest, assistant professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, explained that the lecture was a perfect representation of the mission within the College of Arts and Sciences. "Her work bridges the divide between the sciences and humanities by showing how law and science are often deeply intertwined," she said. "That insight is so crucial for those of us who strive to make science and medicine more democratic and inclusive."

Ahmed, who co-founded and co-directs the Boston University Program on Reproductive Justice, found that looking into the politics of the CDC was not, at first, a popular idea. Her legal scholarship, as well as her book, traces how feminist lawyers and activists pushed agencies, showing that what counts as a medical "fact" is often negotiated through law and politics.

As part of the Sir Run Run Shaw series, her lecture highlighted the fact that feminism has not always been a distant ideal, but an active form of engagement. The trends she traced, and the activism that was needed to change them, show how activism has historically reshaped public health policy.

"If there's anything to take from this history, it's that who speaks, who gets counted and who is willing to fight over those categories can completely change the course of an epidemic," Ahmed said.

The College of Arts and Sciences has many lecture seriesthroughout the year to bring scholars and students together across disciplines. Ahmed's talk demonstrated how a collective is able to amplify voices that are often underrepresented.

-Lily Miller