Chavez to Speak on HIV-Positive Immigration Ban as Part of Southern Colloquium on Rhetoric

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Karma Chavez

The Department of Communication at the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences will host Karma Chavez, associate professor of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas, as part of its distinguished lecture series from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 5,in J.B. Hunt Room 144.

Chavez's public lecture titled, "National Common Sense, Conservative Coalitions and the Rhetoric of the HIV-Positive Immigration Ban," will serve as the keynote for the Southern Colloquium on Rhetoric, a seminar co-sponsored by the Department of Communication, the Gender Studies Program, and the Humanities Program.

Chavez will discuss her latest book manuscript, AIDS Knows No Borders, with a focus on the first federal law that banned HIV positive people from immigrating to the United States. Analyzing the rhetoric surrounding the ban (which ended in 2010), Chavez will discuss how it was grounded in public fear of racial minorities, and exacerbated by rigid views of gender and sexual propriety, along with beliefs that AIDS came from outside the borders of the United States. Her presentation will explore how the ban was passed through a rhetoric of "national common sense."

Chavez's research program focuses on the rhetorical practices of groups marginalized within existing power structures, and the rhetoric produced by powerful institutions about marginalized people. She is the author of one book, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013), and has co-edited two volumes, Text and Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (Penn State University Press, 2016), and Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies (SUNY Press, 2012).