Results by title

Frames blood donation as a performance of civic identity closely linked to the meaning of citizenship

In Banning Queer Blood, Jeffrey Bennett frames blood donation as a performance of civic identity closely linked to the meaning of citizenship. However, with the advent of HIV came the notion of blood donation as a potentially dangerous process. Bennett argues that the Food and Drug Administration, by employing images that specifically depict gay men as contagious, has categorized gay men as a menace to the nation. The FDA's ban on blood donation by gay men served to propagate the social misconceptions about gay men that continue to circulate within both the straight and LGBT/Queer communities.

Bennett explores the role of scientific research cited by these banned-blood policies and its disquieting relationship to government agencies, including the FDA. Bennett draws parallels between the FDA's position on homosexuality and the historical precedents of discrimination by government agencies against racial minorities. The author concludes by describing the resistance posed by queer donors, who either lie in order to donate blood or protest discrimination at donation sites, and by calling for these prejudiced policies to be abolished.





 

A coming-of-age memoir for modern times, Bleeder is the incredibly compelling tale of author Shelby Smoak. A hemophiliac, Smoak discovered he had been infected with HIV during a blood transfusion at the start of his college career. This devastating and destabilizing news led Smoak to see his world from an entirely new perspective, one in which life-threatening illness was perpetually just around the corner. Set in the 1990s along the North Carolina coast, Bleeder traces Smoak’s quest for love in a world that feels increasingly dangerous, and despite a future that feels increasingly uncertain. From the bedroom to the operating room, and from one hospital to the next, Smoak seeks out hope and better health. Winner of a PEN American Center award for writers living with HIV, Smoak, whose work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, constructs this unforgettable story of life and love against insurmountable difficulties in breathtaking, tightly drawn prose.

A few short years after HIV first entered the world blood supply in the late 1970s and early 1980s, over half the hemophiliacs in the United States were infected with the virus. But this was far more than just an unforeseeable public health disaster. Negligent doctors, government regulators, and Big Pharma all had a hand in this devastating epidemic.
 
Blood on Their Hands is an inspiring, firsthand account of the legal battles fought on behalf of hemophiliacs who were unwittingly infected with tainted blood. As part of the team behind the key class action litigation filed by the infected, young New Jersey lawyer Eric Weinberg was faced with a daunting task: to prove the negligence of a powerful, well-connected global industry worth billions. Weinberg and journalist Donna Shaw tell the dramatic story of how idealistic attorneys and their heroic, mortally-ill clients fought to achieve justice and prevent further infections. A stunning exposé of one of the American medical system’s most shameful debacles, Blood on Their Hands is a rousing reminder that, through perseverance, the victims of corporate greed can sometimes achieve great victory.