AIDS and the Sexuality of Law

AIDS and the Sexuality of Law investigates the role that HIV/AIDS has played in the legal construction of sexuality. AIDS and its metaphors have been judicially enlisted to patrol the boundaries of heterosexuality, producing flawed understandings of HIV/AIDS and sexuality. The proliferation of this flawed knowledge through judicial discourse has had a profound impact on the way sexuality is understood. Even more fundamentally, closer analysis exposes the ironic processes of the law whereby material reality, ignorance, and belief interact to replace unknowns with 'social facts.' The book concludes optimistically, arguing that there is political value in uncertainty.

This book will broaden our view of the relation between law, science, and sexuality. The author takes us away from the typical subjects of queer legal scholarship - particularly constitutional litigation on privacy, the military, and marriage - and into the world of the adult theater, the workplace, and the prison in order to illustrate complex conceptual linkages between act and identity, science and the law, politics and epistemology. A pleasure to read. - Martha Merrill Umphrey, Amherst College.

AIDS and the Sexuality of Law is an ambitious work in which the author assumes the risks of exploring the constitutive role of uncertainty in appellate-level AIDS cases. This is a convincing exploration of the rhetorical means by which the mechanisms of the closet are strengthened - through legal blindness to scientific evidence and by strategic avoidance of scientific uncertainties. Rollins has made an original contribution to the analysis of legal discourse.

- Rosemary J.Coombe, Canada Research Chair in Law, Communication, and Cultural Studies, York University

This is a groundbreaking book. By reading ironically the operations of the 'closets' in the jurisprudence of AIDS, Rollins shows us how cultural knowledge about sexuality operates to render silences, elisions, and the 'unknowable' into potent political forces.

- Paisley Currah, Associate Professor of Political Science, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York

JOE ROLLINS, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Queens College, City University of New York. He has published in law and sexuality and is a contributing author in the Encyclopaedia of AIDS and Creating Change. He is a member of the Board of Directors, Centre for Lesbian and Gay Studies and lives in Queens, New York.