“Technologies of Blood: Asylum, Medicine, and Biopolitics.” Cultural Politics 9, no. 1 (2013): 22–41.
ABSTRACT: In this article, Cathy Hannabach analyzes the gender, racial, sexual, and national ideologies at play in the incarceration of HIV-positive Haitian refugees at the Guantánamo Naval Base from 1991 to 1993. Focusing on legal and medical technologies—specifically asylum law and blood medicine—as sites of biopolitical contestation, Hannabach examine the process by which these Haitian refugees’ blood became the site of international anxieties over legal sovereignty, biopolitics, citizenship, and reproductive rights. This article places the asylum process and the HIV antibody blood test alongside one another as intertwined technologies of confession that seek to parse “good, truthful” desirable bodies from “bad, deceptive” bodies threatening to contaminate the body politic. Hannabach argues that penal institutions, military practices, legal frameworks, and medical testing braid together through blood, to construct the US nation-state in a transnational frame and in deeply gendered, sexualized, and racialized ways.
