"Got Blood to Give simultaneously poses two questions. It is as much of a question for us—do we got blood to give?—as it is a question of whether the blood we got would be accepted if given."
Got Blood to Give simultaneously poses two questions. It is as much of a question for us—do we got blood to give?—as it is a question of whether the blood we got would be accepted if given.
This book is a practice of epistemic disobedience in the study of blood and the practice of donation. My goal is to question the hegemonic assumptions we often take as natural, normal, or scientific, consider these assumptions in relation to the wider world of thought and experiences, and contemplate the impact on local and global conditions.
I have been thinking and actively writing about Black and BlaQueer and trans people, blood, and donation since 2000, but this book is not an end result. Over the decades I have changed and learned more about these intersecting and interlocking conjunctural moments. It has been an intellectual and activist journey worth cultivating, one that has helped me deepen my understanding of the relationship between theory and practice. It is my hope that the blood stories in this book will promote dialogue and reflection on the concepts, principles, and actions that are foundational to donor liberation and blood justice. I hope you are encouraged to develop insights, identify patterns, and reflect critically on your life experiences with blood and donation.
Blood arranges differing yet simultaneous regulatory moments that shape the body, construct identities, and determine belonging. My BlaQueer femme body comes into being through blood stories of kinship, racialization, anti-Black violence, and donation. Even while I have developed a familiarity with and a knowing of my own blood, there are still moments when the sight, presence, and introduction of blood (mine or others’, fluid or metaphor) is a surprise. These blood experiences work conjuncturally in my becoming, each dependent on the other for a more nuanced construction of my blood-body identity(ies) and my (still in process) blood sense of self. Blood products and stories about their use exist alongside personal stories and experiences with blood as well as national state policies and laws based on determination of blood status. We all have identities that blood has already formed for us.
The fetishization of science and its tools for measurement and analysis are neither removed from nor separate from the racial politics governing Black life in Canada. The donor screening questions demonstrate how policing of sex, sexuality, gender, and race impacts Black queer and trans life in Canada. Taken as a whole, the donor criteria raise a question: Who is left if all the people to whom these questions apply are barred (even temporarily) from donating blood? The weight of these questions does not gesture to the possibility of creating a safe blood supply. Instead, it highlights the deep complexity of attempts to do just that. The narratives captured within these questions articulate a particular understanding of sexed, gendered, and racial normalcy through citizens with life-giving blood. These questions are an attempt to control sexual contact—to dictate the normal—through the shame of being “tainted” (too queer, too Black, too sexual), and therefore possibly too contagious to donate blood. The questions that censure engaging in casual sex, mixing sex and money, and not knowing a partner’s sexual history collectively signify the “bringing of death” measured in the blood supply. These questions, then, are not merely an attempt to secure “safe” blood, and they are not primarily about the safety of blood. Instead, they construct an othered subject who is beyond the boundaries of the proper (moral, conventional) performance of citizenship and thus outside the realm of acceptable gayness. In so doing, these questions speak to a fluidity of bodies, identities, experiences, and situations that ebb and flow and therefore cannot be controlled.
These questions, then, are not merely an attempt to secure “safe” blood, and they are not primarily about the safety of blood. Instead, they construct an othered subject who is beyond the boundaries of the proper (moral, conventional) performance of citizenship and thus outside the realm of acceptable gayness.
Popular conceptions consider HIV-0 to be endemic to the African body. Blood tainted with HIV-0 stands in as a racial identity; it signals violence (specifically death), and this violence (through tainted blood) spreads. The maintenance of this narrative by Canadian Blood Services illustrates how anti-Black racism is perpetuated through blood and blood donation. Africa and African people, and people of African descent, remain dangerous entities. Blood and sexuality continue to map the terrain and territories of colonial and imperial power while coding the body, which, in turn, codes the blood. British feminist queer of colour scholar Sara Ahmed states, “When the body of another becomes an object of disgust, then the body becomes sticky…. This is how bodies become fetish objects:… feelings of disgust stick more to some bodies than others, such that they become disgusting, as if their presence is what makes ‘us sick.’ The turn through Blackness to imagine a new Black and BlaQueer and trans politic would untether blood narratives and examine what is revealed when different modes of unbelonging are engaged. The language of blood becomes a regulatory system that continues the “making” of good-gay blood donors and bad-queer blood threats. Through my interrogation of blood narratives, I distill the blood stories that have been used to construct knowledge of blood, gay blood, and BlaQueer and trans people’s blood. Narratives of blood overflow with meaning that produces incompatible, conflicting, and incoherent knowledge. Far from being neat and tidy, blood—as material, matter, and meaning—is fluid and scattered, and therefore its encounters are messy, unruly and complicated.
Narratives of blood overflow with meaning that produces incompatible, conflicting, and incoherent knowledge. Far from being neat and tidy, blood—as material, matter, and meaning—is fluid and scattered, and therefore its encounters are messy, unruly and complicated.
Through contemporary blood donation protocols, blood remains a site through which segregation is operationalized and discursive practices of blood facilitate a signifying practice, animating technologies of the state that determine and influence the conduct of people and their ways of being. Perceptions of blood and body reveal historical and contemporary realities that impact and inform nation-building, community development, and social structures. As sociologist Dorothy Nelkin states, “How people think about blood reflects their views about the competence of their institutions, the integrity of their leaders, and the meaning of their social world.” The donor questionnaire generates data to inform decisions about the individual, their blood-body, and the status of their donation (safe or tainted). The protocols of donation continue to push the connectivity between a diversity of people relying on a perceived biomedical “race” difference in blood (including the work in rare blood typing). Underlying, framing, and structuring this are the BlaQueer-phobic informed symbolics of blood captured in scientific truths about the biomateriality of blood.
Through contemporary blood donation protocols, blood remains a site through which segregation is operationalized and discursive practices of blood facilitate a signifying practice, animating technologies of the state that determine and influence the conduct of people and their ways of being.
Our blood has stories to tell, and we are told stories about blood. Globally, blood is a story that is built—whose blood counts, whose blood spills and whose blood is of use. The history of blood donation practices in Canada speaks to the larger blood story of anti-Black racism, evident since the country’s founding. Through storytelling, theorizing and discourse analysis, Got Blood to Give examines how anti-Black homophobic nation-building policies became enshrined in blood donation systems.
OmiSoore H. Dryden, a Black queer femme academic and the foremost scholar on Canadian blood donation practices, examines contaminated blood crises in the 1980s and 1990s, Canadian Red Cross Society, and Canadian Blood Services. She contextualizes contemporary homonationalisms, medical anti-Black racism, homophobia and transphobia in blood-related practices, connecting blood stories with health disparities affecting Black and Black queer populations.
From a BlaQueer disasporic theoretical lens, this book uses narrative as method to show how healthcare systems continue to propagate anti-Blackness.
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