René Esparza

René Esparza

Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Faculty Affiliate, Department of History
Director of Graduate Studies
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  • Washington University
    MSC 1078-0137-02
    One Brookings Drive
    St. Louis, Missouri 63130

René Esparza researches how space, migration, and public health shape the racial and sexual politics of the modern United States. His work examines how institutions such as urban planning, public health, and immigration policy produce unequal forms of citizenship, belonging, and exclusion, with particular attention to queer and trans communities of color.

Esparza is the author of From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS (University of North Carolina Press), which argues that public health and urban redevelopment worked together to reshape LGBTQ politics and deepen racial inequality during the AIDS epidemic. His current book project, Exiled and Excludable: Queer and Trans Cuban Refugees and the Making of U.S. Sexual Citizenship, reinterprets the 1980 Mariel Boatlift as a pivotal moment in the history of U.S. immigration, refugee policy, and LGBTQ politics.

An interdisciplinary historian working across Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, urban history, and public health, Esparza teaches courses on the history of sexuality, queer and trans studies, public health, queer of color critique, and the politics of race, space, and migration. He holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS

From Vice to Nice: Midwestern Politics and the Gentrification of AIDS

By René Esparza
Gentrification: the unexpected consequence of AIDS
 
Shifting the focus of AIDS history away from the coasts to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, this impressive book uncovers how homonormative political strategies weaponized the AIDS crisis to fuel gentrification. During the height of the epidemic, white gay activists and politicians pursued social acceptance by assimilating to Midwestern cultural values. This approach, René Esparza argues, diluted radical facets of LGBTQ activism, rejected a politics of sexual dissidence, severed ties with communities of color, and ushered in the destruction of vibrant queer spaces.

Drawing from archival research, oral histories, and urban studies from the 1970s through the 1990s, Esparza illustrates how the onset of the AIDS epidemic provided a pretext for further criminalization of perceived sexual deviance, targeting sex workers, “promiscuous” gay men, and transgender women. More than the criminalization of people and behaviors, this time period also saw increased targeting of urban venues such as bathhouses, adult bookstores, and public parks where casual, anonymous encounters occurred. Cleansing the city of land uses that undermined gentrification became a protective measure against AIDS, and the most marginalized bore the brunt of the ensuing surveillance and displacement. From Vice to Nice illuminates how, despite purporting seemingly progressive values, LGBTQ Midwestern politics of conformity leveraged the AIDS crisis to further instigate racial and sexual exclusion and fundamentally alter the urban landscape.

PRAISE:

“With clear and graceful prose, Esparza delivers a forceful critique of the politics of sexual freedom and bodily autonomy in Minneapolis. A fresh contribution to queer studies and urban history.”—Jonathan Bell, editor of Beyond the Politics of the Closet: Gay Rights and the American State since the 1970s

“A necessary retelling of the AIDS crisis that illustrates how political leaders and urban developers in 1970s–90s Minneapolis criminalized and racialized the sick and the dying for the sake of future profit. A masterful analysis.”—Lisa Marie Cacho, author of Complex Innocence: Defending Defiant Victims of Police Killings