This chapter traces the influence of Christianity on politics and society in the first two centuries of the American experiment. It offers an overview of the religion in the original colonies, the religious revivals associated with the First Great Awakening, the role of Christianity shaping the United States Constitution, the Second Great Awakening in an era of westward expansion, religious diversity, and the theological debates surrounding slavery and the Civil War.

Chapter 1 takes Gertrude Stein’s visit to the recently incorporated “Indian Territory” of Oklahoma as an opportunity to reread her geographical histories of the United States from a point in Native space. It contrasts Stein’s love for state lines with the writings of Yankton Dakota writer Zitkála-Šá. Her autobiographical essays of the early twentieth century contain shadow maps of Očhéthi Šakówin, or The Great Sioux Nation. They complicate Stein’s excitement over how the airplane makes patchwork earth look like an official US map. By reading contrapuntally between Stein and Zitkála-Šá, this chapter considers autobiography as a contested genre of cartographic literature. In response to technics of automated transport, the form was retooled by Stein and Zitkála-Šá in ways that make the overlap of US geography and Native space visible as a differential space.

Chapter 5 begins by reading Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House as an experiment in cinematic projection, a phantasmagoric erasure of the means of projection. I compare Cather’s cartographic romance to that of Robert and Frances Flaherty’s Moana of the South Seas, the first film to be called “documentary.” Both the Flahertys and Cather mark US national space against the anachronism of the remote island. Spinning this view around, I tell the story of Fialelei, who served as producer and translator for the Flahertys in Sāmoa. She also accompanied them to the United States, and her voyage embodies the Samoan principle of the Vā, or “space-between.” This Oceanian counterpoint provides a new position for studying the role of cinematic fantasy in isolating the “primitive” from “civilized,” and projecting the former onto the “insular.”

This chapter traces the history of Roman Catholicism in American politics and society, beginning with an overview of the tenets of the Catholic faith. The chapter then discusses historic tensions and division between Protestants and Catholics, tracing patterns of assimilation and eventual acceptance of Catholicism into American civil religion.

The growing numbers of women living with HIV begged a question: Why and how were women contracting HIV? Chapter 4, “Sex Bargains,” tracks the emergence of a new logic that centered heterosexual sex as the site of women’s vulnerability. Focusing in on the interpersonal negotiation before surrounding sex had a powerful effect: It obfuscated the role of structural responses to the epidemic, from housing to harm reduction, and instead focused public health interventions on individual behavior. This chapter follows an influential debate between law and economics scholars and feminist activists on the question of the sex bargain.

This concluding chapter, “Governing the Unknown: Legal–Scientific Settlements,” offers a new framework to describe the momentary stabilization of scientific facts in and through lawmaking: legal–scientific settlements. From these legal–scientific settlements emerge a range of distributional consequences that have material effects on people’s lives and shape the ability of individuals to survive and thrive despite public health crises.

Chapter 3, “Experiments in Risk: Women and Clinical Trials,” follows feminist advocates as they set out to use the law to mandate the inclusion of women in clinical trials. With the advent of HIV treatment, people with HIV began to survive longer. A new problem emerged: Women were being excluded from clinical trials due to a 1977 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) guideline concerned about the impact of experimental drugs on women’s reproduction and the fetus. Not only did this mean that women could not access experimental treatments, it also resulted in confusion around how to treat women with HIV. Feminists began to advocate for a change in the FDA guidance which was excluding women from clinical trials. In keeping with the broader demands in the feminist movement at the time, feminists asserted that women should be able to choose to enroll in trials despite potential exposure to risks. Buoyed by ideas of choice and bodily autonomy, feminist AIDS activists were able to undo the FDA’s reticence to enroll women in clinical trials altering scientific research in HIV and beyond.

This introduction lays out a core argument of the book: that social movements mobilize law and legal institutions to unsettle expert consensus and alter the distribution of material resources. This chapter describes how feminist activists concerned about women and AIDS sought to reset public health practice on surveillance, diagnosis, risk, and treatment to effectuate feminist goals, including access to public health resources and welfare benefits.