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Abstract
This essay critically engages challenges made against the federally mandated deferral policies which prohibit “men who have sex with other men” from donating blood. I argue that “passing” and “protest” are dialogically dependent on one another as two separate but related tactics of resistance. Drawing on interview materials from men who have both “passed” and “protested,” the essay explores the implications of this dialogical tension for understanding stranger-relationality, enacting civic identity, and disciplining queer bodies.
This essay was derived from the author's dissertation, Citizenship in Vein: Queer Identity and the Stigma of Banned Blood
This essay was derived from the author's dissertation, Citizenship in Vein: Queer Identity and the Stigma of Banned Blood
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Robert Ivie, John Lucaites, Robert Terrill, Tom Foster, Isaac West, and the two anonymous reviewers for their generous feedback
Notes
This essay was derived from the author's dissertation, Citizenship in Vein: Queer Identity and the Stigma of Banned Blood
1. For an extended history of blood donation see Douglas Starr, Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1998).
2. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 76.
3. Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 10.
4. Allen, Talking to Strangers, 41.
5. American Red Cross, September 11, 2001: Unprecedented Events, Unprecedented Response. A Review of the American Red Cross’ Response in the Past Year (2002), 16.
6. David Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 25.
7. Ronald Bayer, “Blood and AIDS in America: Science, Politics, and the Making of an Iatrogenic Catastrophe,” in Blood Feuds: AIDS, Blood, and the Politics of Medical Disaster, ed. Eric A. Feldman and Ronald Bayer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25.
8. See U.S. Food and Drug Administration, FDA Workshop on Behavior-Based Donor Deferrals in the NAT Era (transcript, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, March 8, 2006), 87.
9. Each year about twelve million units of blood are donated to America's supply—and approximately ten units of HIV-positive blood pass undetected, causing two to three cases of infection. Lifting the current ban could result, at most, in one to two additional cases of HIV a year. However, this is the highest number estimated and a strong possibility exists that no contaminated transmissions would result.
10. Although the committee reaffirmed its support in 2007, the year 2000 was the last time the issue of relaxing the ban was brought before the BPAC. Emphasis mine.
11. See the explanation on the Red Cross homepage at http://www.redcross.org.
12. The complex relationship between HIV, science, and nationalism has been explored in a number of texts, including: Thomas Yingling, AIDS and the National Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); Cindy Patton, Inventing AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1990); Paula Triechler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
13. Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of ‘Accidental Napalm’,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 60.
14. Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America's Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
15. For discussions of identity politics see Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 1–20; Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 21–66; Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995); R. Anthony Slagle, “In Defense of Queer Nation: From Identity Politics to a Politics of Difference,” Western Journal of Communication 59 (1995): 85–102.
16. There are probably men who admit to being gay and leave the blood center quietly because of shame, embarrassment, and anger.
17. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 199.
18. Robin Kelley, ‘“We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80 (1993): 111.
19. In concentrating on queer men, I do not intend to undermine the support and subversive actions of those who do not identify as such. Many heterosexuals, lesbians, and bisexual women do not support these policies.
20. Charles E. Morris III, ‘“The Responsibility of the Critic’: F. O. Matthiessen's Homosexual Palimpsest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 263.
21. Dr. Michael Busch told a 2006 workshop sponsored by the FDA that blood centers only deal with one or two HIV positive donations a year and those usually come from heterosexuals. Since the implementation of nucleic acid testing (NAT) in San Francisco, there have been “four really proven HIV transfusion transmissions missed by mini-pool NAT.” Busch said:
I just wanted to point out that none of these were MSM, or acknowledged MSM. Two of them were women with heterosexual infection and one was a male who, on follow-up extensive interview, denied MSM activity. So, what is getting through now is not related to MSM.
FDA, Workshop on Donor Deferrals, 202–3.
22. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 122.
23. Anna Spradlin, “The Price of ‘Passing’: A Lesbian Perspective on Authenticity in Organizations,” Management Communication Quarterly 11 (1998): 598.
24. Corinne Blackmer, “The Veils of the Law: Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen's Passing,” College Literature 22 (1995): 63.
25. Elaine K. Ginsberg, “Introduction: The Politics of Passing,” in Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 2.
26. Amy Robinson, “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 721. See also Charles E. Morris III, “Pink Herring and the Fourth Persona: J. Edgar Hoover's Sex Crime Panic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 228–44.
27. Ginsberg, “Introduction: The Politics of Passing,” 2.
28. Among other places, passing remains a necessity in many sport cultures. It is also a necessity in many immigrant cultures and religions. Lest passing be dismissed as no longer vital to queer life, one need only revisit the 2004 elections, when eleven states passed amendments banning gay marriage. In those states where the votes against gays and lesbians were especially high, queers continue to live in a volatile world where being out and proud is not always an option.
29. Shompa Lahiri, “Performing Identity: Colonial Migrants, Passing, and Mimicry between the Wars,” Cultural Geographies 10 (2003): 411.
30. Catherine Squires and Daniel Brouwer, “In/Discernible Bodies: The Politics of Passing in Dominant and Marginal Media,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 287.
31. Helene Shugart, “Performing Ambiguity: The Passing of Ellen Degeneres,” Text and Performance Quarterly 23 (2003): 30–54; John M. Sloop, “Disciplining the Transgendered: Brandon Teena, Public Representation, and Normativity,” Western Journal of Communication 64 (2000): 165–89; Squires and Brouwer, “In/Discernible,” 283–310.
32. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 122.
33. To avoid totalizing, I do not mean to imply that all men have similar motives when passing or protesting.
34. See, for example, Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1984; original work published 1966).
35. FDA, Workshop on Donor Deferrals, 329.
36. Andrew Keegan, “FDA Meeting Revisits Ban on Gay Blood Donors,” Southern Voice, March 10, 2006, http://www.sovo.com/2006/1-10/news/national/fda.cfm (accessed June 14, 2007).
37. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992; original work published 1984), 5.
38. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 121.
39. The interviews were undertaken according to a plan approved by the IRB at Indiana University (#03-7891). Volunteers were found by posting announcements on several e-mail listservs. All of the interviews were completed by me in person or by telephone, and each took approximately forty-five minutes to complete. The names of the respondents have been changed. While there was a core set of questions, the interviews were open-ended so that the respondents could best characterize their experiences of the donation policies and their feelings towards agencies that mandate the ban. Unlike many university studies, the majority of these men were not students. As such, their ages, geographic locations, and attitudes towards blood, sexuality, and HIV varied. As the men offered their information, it became apparent that altruism, not civil disobedience, largely guided their practices. This guided me back to materials about passing and protesting. Especially in relation to passing, the men's responses alter the ways in which these tropes have traditionally been understood in the literature.
40. Allen, Talking to Strangers, 29.
41. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 75.
42. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
43. Institute of Medicine, HIV and the Blood Supply: An Analysis of Crisis Decision Making, ed. Lauren Leveton, Harold C. Sox, and Michael Stoto (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1995), 111, 122.
44. The blood ban is probably given little attention in either the popular or the queer presses because it is offered scant attention by major LGBT organizations. Being closely associated with AIDS and not an explicit “civil right,” the issue of blood donation is often seen as culturally taboo.
45. Scott, Domination, 188.
46. This will come as little surprise to those familiar with Michele Foucault's work on discipline. However, one should not assume that simply because some men withheld from donation that their previous donations were less useful in challenging cultural assumptions about the safety of their blood. Neither does it suggest that all of the men in this study stopped donating. On discipline, see: Michele Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995; original work published 1979); John M. Sloop, Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary U.S. Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); Nadine Ehlers, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Defying Juridical Racialization in ‘Rhinelander v. Rhinelander,’” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1 (2004): 313–34.
47. On the “don't ask, don't tell” policy see: Gregory M. Herek, Jared B. Jobe, and Ralph M. Carey, eds., Out in Force: Sexual Orientation and the Military (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Wilbur Scott and Sandra Carson Stanley, eds., Gays and Lesbians in the Military: Issues, Concerns, and Contrasts (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994).
48. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity: Henry James's ‘The Art of the Novel’,” GLQ 1 (1993).
49. Lahiri, “Performing Identity,” 412.
50. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 7.
51. On the relationship between hierarchy, identification, and scapegoating, see Kenneth Burke's “The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle” in Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 191–220.
52. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 147–54.
53. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
54. Joey Diguglielmo, “Blood Boiling Over Ban,” Washington Blade, April 7, 2007, http://www.washingtonblade.com/2007/4-27/view/actionalert/10498.cfm (accessed July 8, 2007); “New Hampshire Students Protest Gay Blood Ban,” 365gay.com, April 22, 2005, http://www.365gay.com/newscon05/04/042205blood.htm (accessed June 14, 2007); Steven Bodzin, “Students Tap New Vein of Gay Issue,” Los Angeles Times, July 10, 2005, http://www.aegis.com/news/lt/2005/lt050704.html (accessed June 14, 2007); Marie-Jo Mont-Reynaud, “Banned from the Blood Bank,” The Stanford Daily, May 25, 2006, http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2006/5/25/bannedfromthebloodbank (accessed June 14, 2007).
55. “Students Protest Ban on Gay Blood,” Advocate.com, October 19, 2006, http://www.advocate.com/print_article_ektid37683.asp (accessed June 14, 2007).