How did women come to be seen as ‘at-risk’ for HIV? In the early years of the AIDS crisis, scientific and public health experts questioned whether women were likely to contract HIV in significant numbers and rolled out a response that effectively excluded women. Against a linear narrative of scientific discovery and progress, Risk and Resistance shows that it was the work of feminist lawyers and activists who altered the legal and public health response to the AIDS epidemic. Feminist AIDS activists and their allies took to the streets, legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts to demand the recognition of women in the HIV response. Risk and Resistance recovers a key story in feminist legal history – one of strategy, struggle, and competing feminist visions for a just and healthy society. It offers a clear and compelling vision of how social movements have the capacity to transform science in the service of legal change.
Aziza Ahmed’s scholarship examines the intersection of law, politics, and science in the fields of constitutional law, criminal law, health law, and family law.
Before joining Boston University School of Law, Ahmed was professor of law at University of California, Irvine School of Law. She also taught at Northeastern University School of Law. She has served as visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School, Bennett Boskey Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, visiting scholar at the Harvard Law School Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, and Law and Public Affairs fellow at Princeton University.
Professor Ahmed’s scholarship has appeared in journals including University of Miami Law Review, American Journal of Law and Medicine, Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, Boston University Law Review, and American Journal of International Law.
Ahmed is the author of the book Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS, published by Cambridge University Press, and coeditor of the forthcoming handbook, Race, Racism, and the Law, published by Edward Elgar Publishing with Guy-Uriel Charles. She has recently published a co-edited volume The Routledge Companion on Gender and COVID-19 with Linda McClain.
Prior to teaching, Professor Ahmed was a research associate at the Harvard School of Public Health Program on International Health and Human Rights. She came to that position after a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellowship where she worked with the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS. Professor Ahmed was a member of the Technical Advisory Group on HIV and the Law convened by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and has been an expert for many institutions, including the American Bar Association and UNDP.
Professor Ahmed earned a BA from Emory University, a JD from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, and an MS in Population and International Health from the Harvard School of Public Health.
“Risk and Resistance is a beautifully-written, meticulously-researched, and compellingly-argued book. It is poised to shift understandings of the relationship between law and science in a way that is truly groundbreaking. I expect that this wonderful book will inspire an entire literature devoted to uncovering the activism that worked to unsettle scientific truths.”
“Aziza Ahmed’s Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS rectifies a long-standing injustice: the erasure of the role of women in the transformation of science, law and policy in the midst of the HIV epidemic. Popular narratives of the AIDS crisis too often obscure the origins of the fight against the disease in the feminist health movement and the central part of women living with AIDS and their advocates in shaping the response to what would become a global pandemic. This is a groundbreaking work of scholarship – but also a sorely needed ‘bearing witness’ in the public sphere to the contribution of a generation of women to ending a modern plague.”
“Risk and Resistance is a tour de force. It is the book that was missing from the catalogue about HIV/AIDS and the catastrophic health, legal, and political crises in its wake. In beautiful prose and rich story-telling, Aziza Ahmed corrects the historical record, rewriting women and crucial, feminist activism into the folds of a devastating era in global history. With this book, Professor Ahmed has penned a pathbreaking contribution to law and feminist theory.”
“A definitive, dramatic history of feminist activist struggle against the medical establishment’s understanding of AIDS and the terrible policies it led to. A brilliant reconstruction of a successful social movement that doesn’t paper over its internal conflicts.”
“Aziza Ahmed has chronicled with exquisite detail and compassion how feminists from diverse backgrounds, some of them scientists and lawyers committed to using the very best evidence, collaborated across race and class to change the course of history and ensure that we would have an accurate understanding of how the AIDS epidemic affected women. This book underscores how wrong assumptions can lead to bad public health policy – and why we need a strong advocacy community to partner with scientists and health care leaders to ensure that all receive equitable care and treatment.”
“Risk and Resistance: How Feminists Transformed the Law and Science of AIDS is a moving and meticulous study about the grass-roots activists who made visible women’s plight during a time when AIDS treatment and funding were entirely focused on men. The initial definition of AIDS as ‘a gay men’s disease’ led to long-term distributional injustices: the exclusion of women from clinical trials, from disability benefits, and even from being counted in the statistics of its devastation. Aziza Ahmed has crafted a magnificent genealogy of specific organizational strategies that linked individual women into powerful communities of patients, medical researchers, service providers, and litigators. Their advocacy reframed not merely responses to the AIDS crisis but to all subsequent epidemics including COVID. This book is the chronicle of hard-fought interventions that redirected the course of legal and medical history and that transformed social outcomes to the betterment of all.”
“At a moment when public trust in expertise is failing, and public health crises are pitched battles, Risk and Resistance offers both historical insight and conceptual clarity. It is essential reading for anyone interested in how law, science, and social movements shape who is allowed to survive—and under what conditions.”
“Risk and Resistance successfully shows how law, science, and epidemiological claims are developed through contemporary political and economic contexts.”
“Activists weren’t just challenging policy. They were challenging the way scientific knowledge was being produced. They understood that if women were excluded from research, their needs would continue to be ignored in treatment and policy.”
“[Ahmed] highlighted the fact that feminism has not always been a distant ideal, but an active form of engagement. The trends she traced, and the activism that was needed to change them, show how activism has historically reshaped public health policy.”
“The way intersectionality and identity politics are framed in practice seems to create tensions within large movements as different political ideologies, priorities, or perceptions of privilege and division can make it harder to organize collectively toward a common goal. How did early feminists build these broad and united coalitions? And I think more specifically, what lessons can we implement today so that kind of modern movements could rally around a common goal?”
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