From Sickness to Badness: Michigan HIV Law as a Site of Social Control.

Abstract

In the state of Michigan, people infected with HIV are required by law to disclose their HIV-status to their partners before engaging in sexual contact. Failure to do so is a felony, punishable by up to four years in prison. Like statutes in 32 states with HIV-specific criminal statutes, Michigan’s law does not require that the sexual contact pose a risk of HIV transmission. Indeed, despite scientific advances in treating and managing HIV disease, prosecutions for nondisclosure have continued unabated and appear to be on the rise. My dissertation explains this paradoxical trend by arguing that Michigan’s HIV disclosure law does not serve to control HIV as a virus but rather to identify it as a moral infection requiring interdiction and punishment. To make this case, my dissertation tackles three interrelated issues. In Chapter 2, I analyze how local health officials employ epidemiological surveillance technologies (such as contact tracing) in order to enforce the larger “health threat to others” statute, which includes the felony nondisclosure law but also confers upon public health authorities additional powers for controlling HIV-positive individuals. In Chapter 3, I analyze how legal actors transform HIV into a criminal matter in a court of law by framing nondisclosure as murderous and HIV-positive defendants as reckless killers – even in cases where the sexual contact alleged posed no risk of transmission. Finally, in Chapter 4, I examine disparities in conviction outcomes to show that heterosexuals bear the brunt of the law’s application – particularly black men and white women. While many proponents of HIV legal reform have argued that HIV-specific criminal laws are bad for public health, I conclude by arguing that the way state actors respond to these cases does not suggest that they are primarily interested in promoting public health. Their patterned reliance on punitive and moral discourses – as well as their ignorance and dismissal of scientific evidence – suggests that their understanding of these cases is tainted by stigma and morality. These ethical dimensions bear only a tenuous relationship to public health and medical evidence: their logic does not depend on science.