The HIV/AIDS pandemic evoked anxieties that were tied to Kuwait’s particular histories of gendered citizenship and dislocations of globalized labor. In 1986, the Kuwaiti Ministry of Health began conducting blood tests to identify people living with HIV among specific categories of noncitizen residents. The Ministry of Health reported the first noncitizen to test positive for HIV in Kuwait in November of 1986. He was immediately deported. Starting in 1988, all incoming noncitizen residents had to be tested for HIV after arriving in Kuwait and before they could receive their iqāma, or residency permit. The local press reported a string of deportations in the wake of these policies. By 1994, blood tests were identifying a much larger number of people who were HIV-positive, and the Minister of Health announced that 135 noncitizens had been deported. Kuwaiti citizens, in contrast, were not automatically tested for HIV on returning home from abroad, although they did have to undergo HIV testing before starting employment or obtaining a marriage license. Such policies of biomedical surveillance in response to HIV/AIDs were not unique to Kuwait, the Gulf, or the Middle East; the United States, for example, barred the entry of people living with HIV from 1987-2010. Moreover, in Kuwait, to the best of our knowledge, HIV/AIDS has not reached epidemic levels. But in the midst of global discussions of HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s, anxiety surrounding Kuwait’s integration into transnational networks of travel and tourism brought tensions over gender roles, citizenship, sexuality, and infidelity to the forefront of public discourse. These anxieties converged on the blood tests for HIV that authorities used to police access to the nation and on national pride in the fact that Kuwait, unlike some of its neighbors, did not depend on imported blood. Drawing on local newspapers, public health campaign material, and state-sponsored publications on Islamic interpretations of HIV/AIDS, this presentation explores how citizens and noncitizen residents of Kuwait articulated these anxieties in the context of waiting—waiting to be infected, waiting for a national outbreak, waiting in quarantine, and, for noncitizens who tested positive for HIV, waiting to be deported. By the mid-1990s, this process of anticipating and taking concrete legal measures to prevent a future epidemic resulted in the medicalization of social and political patterns of gender inequality, nativism, and differential citizenship.