Karma Chávez

Chávez’s scholarship is primarily informed by queer of color theory and women of color feminism. Methodologically, she is a rhetorical critic who utilizes textual and field-based methods. She is interested in studying social movement building, activist rhetoric, and coalitional politics. Her work emphasizes the rhetorical practices of groups marginalized within existing power structures, but she also attends to rhetoric produced by powerful institutions and actors about marginalized folks and the systems that oppress them (e.g., immigration system, prisons, etc.).

In 2013, she published my first book, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities, which examines coalition building at the many intersections of queer and immigration politics in the contemporary United States. In 2019, she published a book of interviews she conducted related to Palestine while hosting a radio show on WORT-FM in Madison, Wisconsin. That book is called Palestine on the Air. 

She has co-edited two volumes, Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method and Standing in the Intersection: Feminist Voices, Feminist Practices in Communication Studies. Two co-edited volumes are forthcoming: Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation (with Eithne Luibhéid, U of Illinois Press) and Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (with Kyla Tompkins, Aren Aizura, Aimee Bahng, Mishuana Goeman, and Amber Musser, NYU Press). 

Her new book, The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance will be released from the University of Washington Press in spring 2021. The Borders of AIDS centers citizenship and immigration status to tell a story about how HIV/AIDS became an opportunity for powerful people in the US to enact “alienizing logic” against migrants, Black folks, and others. It also shows how people fought back.

With M. Adams, she is working on a collection of essays about their community-university collaborations in Madison, Wisconsin called, After Ferguson: Black, Queer, Feminist Experiments Against Police and Jails. Links to copies of most of her academic writing are here.