Women/Lesbian/Prison/Trans? Categories of Mobilization in the Campaign to Change the Definition of AIDS

From 1989 through 1993, a coalition of activists fought to convince the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to expand its diagnostic criteria for AIDS and through this to compel the Social Security Administration to grant more people, particularly women, access to AIDS-related health care, services, and benefits. The ultimately successful campaign, led by the Women’s Caucuses of ACT UP and known as Change the Definition, was both a policy fight over medicine and social welfare and a cultural struggle over women’s and lesbians’ racialized, classed, and sexual relationships to AIDS. Change the Definition complicated and destabilized the categories of women as a collectivity and lesbian as an identity and did so especially by confronting the connections between AIDS and incarceration. The campaign foregrounded the leadership of women living with AIDS, lesbians, and incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women and changed the meaning of these groups by defining them as overlapping. Change the Definition, by linking women and lesbian to prison and HIV as contextual categories of mobilization rather than fixed identities, rearticulated women and lesbian as subjectivities of deviance rather than respectability, difference rather than sameness, and risk rather than safety. In so doing, it proved generative for queer politics and the politics of prison abolition. The categories of mobilization put forth by Change the Definition offer a model for analyzing feminist and other social movements and can be generatively read through a trans analytic.