By Jeffrey A. Bennett

In Banning Queer Blood, Jeffrey Bennett frames blood donation as a functionality of civic identification heavily associated with the that means of citizenship. despite the fact that, with the arrival of AIDS got here the concept of blood donation as a almost certainly harmful strategy. Bennett argues that the nutrients and Drug management, by way of using pictures that in particular depict homosexual males as contagious, has labeled homosexual males as a threat to the kingdom. The FDA's ban on blood donation by way of homosexual males continues to be in impact and serves to propagate the social misconceptions approximately homosexual males that flow inside either the immediately and homosexual groups today.

Bennett explores the position of medical study mentioned by means of those banned-blood rules and its disquieting courting to govt enterprises, together with the FDA. Bennett attracts parallels among the FDA's place on homosexuality and the ancient precedents of discrimination via executive firms opposed to racial minorities. the writer concludes by means of describing the resistance posed via queer donors, who both lie for you to donate blood or protest discrimination at donation websites, and through calling for those prejudiced rules to be abolished.


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Extra resources for Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance

Sample text

Chapter 5 employs interviewing research to explore the ways queer men view their place in the ritual of giving blood. Men who both “passed” to contribute blood, as well as those who protested when turned away, were interviewed. Together, these two groups of men demonstrate a dialogical mode of resistance that offers support for expunging the deferral measure. When read collectively, these interviews show that contaminated queer blood is not slipping into the system. Drawing on the analytical details of the pages that precede it, the concluding chapter calls for a reconstitution of the blood-ban debate, asserting a reconfiguration of the framework traditionally utilized to understand queer citizens and blood donation.

Not only does it carry with it enormous symbolic 38 Articulating Abjection import, but it is a ritual that is made readily accessible for people to enact. Donations are regarded as transmutable acts that most citizens can perform, because they cost nothing, are barely time consuming, and can be done in any number of locations. ”48 Briefly, the necessity of dissociating sacrifice from monetary impurities will be revisited. Sanitized from the discursive structure of economics, blood sacrifice can function as a metaphor of national purity.

In recent years queer students at a university where I conducted interviews for this book, for example, have been asked to run aspects of blood drives, such as volunteering to hand out cookies, in place of acting as donors. Their marginalization, centrally featured at the ritual site, exempli- Queer Citizenship 21 fies the contempt collection agencies have for their civic capabilities and sacrifices. QUEERING THE RHETORIC OF THE BLOOD BAN The themes outlined in this chapter, which resurface throughout the text, are informed by many voices in the humanities.

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Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, by Jeffrey A. Bennett
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