Technologies of Blood: The Biopolitics of Asylum

Abstract

This chapter focuses on incarceration and forced sterilization of HIV-positive Haitian refugees at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. The chapter shows how Haitian refugees’ blood became the site of international anxieties in the Caribbean over legal sovereignty, biopolitics, citizenship, AIDS, and reproductive rights. Hannabach reads US asylum law and the HIV antibody blood test as confession technologies that seek to parse “good, truthful” desirable bodies from “bad, deceptive” bodies threatening to contaminate the body politic. Further, the chapter shows how American immigration prisons form a “penal archipelago” that harnesses race, sexuality, class, and gender norms to bolster US empire.