Christina B. Hanhardt
Christina B. Hanhardt is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies and an affiliate of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Consortium for Race, Gender, and Ethnicity. Her research and teaching focus on the history of post-WWII U.S. social movements and cities, with particular attention to the politics of sexuality and punishment. Christina is the author of the book Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Duke, 2013),which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in LGBT Studies and honorable mention for both the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize and its Lora Romero Prize. She is co-editor (with Dayo F. Gore) of a special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly on gender, sexuality, and state power, and she has also published in Radical History Review, GLQ, QED, Women and Performance, Social Text, Theory & Event, Labor, and the Journal of American History, among other journals. Additional writing has appeared in the books Policing the Planet, Keywords in American Cultural Studies, and Communities and Place; the National Park Service’s LGBTQ Heritage Theme Study, and the exhibition catalogues Transition Times: Remembering Anti-Carceral Resistance in the Tenderloin and Tulips: Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled “Left Out,” which engages debates in queer theory and politics to track the history of stigma in U.S. left social movements since the 1960s.
Collected Work
“‘Dead Addicts Don’t Recover’: ACT UP’s Needle Exchange and the Subjects of Queer Activist History”
At the start of the 1990s the New York chapter of the activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was essential to the continuation of needle exchanges, which provide clean syringes to injection drug users without disapprobation or discipline and have been shown to reduce rates of HIV transmission. ACT UP’s participation in needle exchange was part of an effort to build connections between political actors, especially across race and class lines, as the group sought a more expansive understanding of who was affected by HIV/AIDS. These efforts have been largely overlooked in the recent attention to ACT UP’s legacy. This article asks what the history of ACT UP’s needle exchange might tell us not only about the history of HIV/AIDS and public health but also about the ideals of health and recovery in defining the subjects, forms, and historiography of queer activist history.
“Broken Windows at Blue’s: A Queer History of Gentrification and Policing”
This essay uses the 1982 police raid of a gay bar in New York City's Time's Square to outline how LGBTQ political movements engaged with and were transformed by law-and-order politics that helped enable large projects of urban gentrification. It notes how a process of political struggle led to predominant a gay politics that abandoned police violence as an issue in favor of the fear of street violence from strangers, aligning with certain militant liberal conceptions of neighborhood safety that suited more narrowly the class interests of professional white gay men.