Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance (review)

In Banning Queer Blood, Jeffrey Bennett succeeds marvelously in narrating the conundrum of "men who have sex with men" (MSM), who at work, in social life, and in patriotic political talk are collectively hailed into the sacrificing ritual of blood donation, yet who are also wholly dispermitted from and thus perpetually fail this ritual of citizenship. What keeps in place a policy that is unevenly supported by current scientific capabilities and undermined by current safety procedures at blood donation centers? Keenly diagnosing why the blood ban controversy has receded from the forefront of queer politics, Bennett calls for its reinvigoration as a front for activist work. Yet he wisely refuses to center this issue singularly, instead carefully framing reinvigorated blood ban activism as one component of a larger "progressive cultural critique" (x). Across several scenes of discourse and through a series of illuminating and often painful examples, Bennett demonstrates how deep social codings about homosexuality, otherness, and gifting enable "interpretive frames" (88) about blood donation that significantly shape conditions of everyday life, everyday health, and everyday death.

Chapter 1, "Queer Citizenship and the Stigma of Banned Blood," opens with a remarkable narration of the first days after September 11, 2001, during which blood donation was extolled as a fundamental ritual of post-catastrophe citizenship as well as the nation's figurative and literal healing. Here, Bennett places "quotidian sites of civic performance" (1–2) like blood donation centers within the broader context of two histories: one of blood donation and one of the limits of queer citizenship in the United States. Rather than affirming the disparate efficacies of gay rights–inflected and queer-inflected rhetorics, Bennett takes a strong position against the sort of civil rights rhetoric that dominates other topics like same-sex marriage and gays and lesbians in the military, favorably citing scholars who claim that "rights" rhetoric is "disempowering" and "almost apolitical" (14). Bennett outlines the politics of science and notes disjunctures between what science knows and what policies governmental agencies enact.

The second chapter, "Articulating Abjection: Negating Citizenships of Sacrifice and Reproduction," also opens with a captivating story about a sexually active gay man's taunting letter to the Canadian Blood Services (CBS) reporting his habitual blood donations and expressing his critique of the CBS's discriminatory policy. This story both anticipates Bennett's discussion of protest rhetoric in a later chapter and introduces the complicated, troubling use of sanitizing monogamy as a means for defending the "right" of MSMs to donate blood. In its effort to map cultural histories of disease and homosexuality, this chapter follows work by Cindy Patton, Paula Treichler, Susan Sontag, and Sander Gilman.

Chapter 3, entitled "AIDS Memory, Medicinal Prudence, and the Construction of Social Denial," poses the very important question: How do we remember AIDS? Overwhelmingly, public memory studies have persuaded us that contemporary meanings are necessarily linked to and shaped by preferred stories of our past, and that by assessing whose stories gain traction, we learn about power. After a brief and eloquent statement about the limited artifacts in the archives of memory about AIDS in the United States, Bennett turns his attention to an analysis of two documentaries. The first, And the Band Played On, is an expected (and sound) choice; the second, Red Gold, is less familiar but an equally sound text. Two features especially recommend this chapter. Generally, Bennett further contributes to our understanding of the politics of knowledge and knowing, arguing that these two documentaries, as ostensible accounts of things as they are, troublingly position gay men as abundantly knowledgeable and ambivalently ethical. Additionally, Bennett produces a sustained investigation of the positions of women and the dynamics of gender within blood donation discourses.

Perhaps the chapter most familiar, in topic and approach, to readers of Rhetoric & Public Affairs is "Diseased Citizenship and the Rhetoric of Scientific Deliberation." Bennett analyzes transcripts of meetings and a workshop of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration...