Graduation Year
2025
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Reader 1
Andrew Aisenberg
Reader 2
Westenley Alcenat
Terms of Use & License Information
Abstract
This thesis investigates the detention of HIV-positive Haitian refugees at Guantánamo Bay in the early 1990s as a case study of medicalized racism and U.S. imperialism. It explores how U.S. public health policy, immigration law, and Cold War-era foreign interventions converged to criminalize and confine Black Haitian bodies, constructing them as threats to national security and public health. By analyzing primary testimonies and media coverage alongside the works of scholars such as Paul Farmer and Naomi Paik, the project reveals how racialized conceptions of disease and subversion informed discriminatory practices that disproportionately targeted Haitian refugees. Furthermore, it examines how the refugees, despite being imprisoned and pathologized, engaged in powerful forms of bodily resistance – most notably through hunger strikes – that challenged their dehumanization and asserted their agency. This work situates their struggle within broader narratives of racial colonialism, biopolitics, and transnational resistance.
Recommended Citation
Oringer, Isabelle E., "CONSTRUCTING BODIES OF SUBVERSION AND RESISTANCE: THE CARCERAL QUARANTINE OF HIV-POSITIVE HAITIAN REFUGEES AT GUANTANAMO BAY UNDER U.S. IMPERIALISM" (2025). Scripps Senior Theses. 2629.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2629
