Locas in the Heartland: Queer and Trans Cuban Refugees and the Recalibration of the U.S. Straight State
Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026 | 5:00 - 6:30 p.m. | 513 Fayerweather
During the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, gay rights organizations estimated that up to 25,000 queer and trans Cubans arrived in the United States, making Mariel arguably the largest migration of sexual and gender minorities in modern U.S. history. This talk follows their journeys from refugee camps in the upper Midwest to LGBTQ sponsorship networks across the country, showing how Cold War humanitarianism collided with immigration laws that continued to classify homosexuals as excludable. Rather than marking the end of sexual exclusion, Mariel reshaped the terms of U.S. sexual citizenship by privileging cisnormative legibility as a condition of refugee incorporation and consigning gender-nonconforming refugees to detention, institutionalization, and prolonged legal limbo.
René Esparza is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS and is currently completing Exiled and Excludable: Queer and Trans Cuban Refugees and the Making of U.S. Sexual Citizenship.
Guinea Pig Kids: AIDS Denialism and the Politics of Motherhood
Thursday, Nov. 19, 2026 | 5:00 - 6:30 p.m. | 413 Fayerweather
In the late 1990s, HIV-positive mothers across North America began refusing antiretrovirals for themselves and their children. They argued that doctors and scientists did not know better than they did how to take care of their children’s health—that their innate knowledge as mothers mattered just as much as expert knowledge. This talk examines the reasons for their rebellion against state and medical authority, using it as a window into understanding the politics of the natural parenting movement from the perspective of a group of straight women who felt tainted by their association with a “gay disease.”
Lindsay Zafir is an Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The City College of New York and the author of the forthcoming State of Denial: AIDS and the Rise of the Disinformation Age. She is also the co-founder and co-director of the ACORN Oral History Project, which documents the history of the community organizing group ACORN.