"Viral Citizens: The Coloniality of HIV/AIDS in Puerto Rico" by Adriana Maria Garriga-Lopez

Adriana Maria Garriga-Lopez

Deposited 2010

Abstract
What is the relationship between the HIV/AIDS epidemic and Puerto Rico's political status as an Unincorporated Territory of the United States of America? This doctoral dissertation investigates HIV/AIDS as a socio-political problem in Puerto Rico and elucidates some of the effects of US colonialism in Puerto Rico as they relate to HIV/AIDS. This text traces multi-emergent configurations of sovereignty and state power in the political structure of governance on the island as they manifest within contemporary Puerto Rican society on the racialized, gendered, and medicalized bodies of the abjectly ill or addicted, the sexually stigmatized, and the socio-economically marginalized, producing an account of the modalities of bio-power that (re)produce ‘viral citizenship’. I argue that the political system in place over the last one hundred and twelve years has had profound and widespread consequences for Puerto Rico's ability to address the particularities of AIDS epidemiology among Puerto Ricans and on the efficacy of research on and social services for those living with or at high risk for HIV/AIDS on the island. This dissertation is particularly concerned with understanding the ways in which people living with HIV/AIDS (and/or who are assumed to be at high risk for HIV infection) negotiate the political and social stakes they must claim in order to attain health care, social services, counseling, and access to prevention resources and treatment. Thematically, poverty and violence are guiding threads for the dissertation, and I argue against the conceptual and institutional separation of categorical ‘populations’ insofar as it serves to obscure the relations and commonalities between those who populate different imaginaries of ‘risk’ groups, making them appear as consolidated and mutually exclusive identities. These reified categories obfuscate the larger social conditions that undergird the experiences of people at high risk of HIV infection or living with HIV/AIDS in favor of apportioning aid and assistance according to specific categories of identity. This dissertation scrutinizes discourses of population and community in terms of their use, both, as strategies of resistance, collaboration, and political mobilization, and as foils for the enforcement of normative collective and individual behaviors through the application of administrative taxonomies.