Tainted Trust: The 2024 UK Infected Blood Inquiry and Biocapitalist Exploitation

And yet again people are on the losing end of industrialized tissue economies, this time made public after victims successfully fought for a Parliamentary Inquiry that was announced in 2017, began in 2018, and finished hearing evidence in 2023, releasing an interim report. Over three thousand individuals who were unwittingly infected with HIV and hepatitis C by contaminated blood products between 1970 and the early 1990s have been found to have died so far, with rough estimates of over thirty thousand total infected, an almost impossible-to-guess numbers, given that records were lost or destroyed, possible ways of passing on these viruses, necessary diagnosis, the stigma attached to some of these particular viruses, and other factors.

This first public reckoning with the tainted blood scandal of the 1980s just now reached the highest levels in the UK, and many here are probably asking the same question: how could this have happened? How did a few people put lives at risk in Canada, China, France, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Portugal, United Kingdom, and the United States? The first part of the answer is…

Let it Bleed: Blood, Drugs, and Trump’s ImaginNation

“Yeah, we all need someone we can bleed on
Yeah, and if you want it, baby, well you can bleed on me.”

– Mick Jagger/Keith Richards

So this blog is about blood, but these days it seems that to talk about blood constantly involves talking about the Donald J. Trump, President of the United States. This at once very obvious and very odd, but I think there is an actual reason that blood keeps coming up these days, and it has to do both with material blood, blood symbolism,the President’s idea of how drugs and the nation relate, and the Rolling Stones.

Inaugural Gore: Blood and the Birth of a Presidency?

Today, January 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump was sworn in as President of the United States. His inaugural speech offered surprisingly few novel thoughts, instead echoing stump speeches of his campaign. Some of the perhaps grander moments of the speech aimed for a lofty nationalism as the umbrella for a unified US. Politics aside, the bloody images in the speech offer a surprisingly clear vision of how Trump conceives of the nation.

Bleeding Blue: Police Work and the Bodily Fluid

Charlotte: a woman smearing blood on a police riot shield. (September 21, 2016, photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

Elise Greene was charged with assault on a government officer and vandalism, according to a Charlotte NBC station report, for smearing blood on officers. This seems a drastic response to a gesture that protests police violence by materializing the pain caused by this violence in the form of blood. But blood in the world of police officers is anything but a simple matter. Police work and blood are intimately connected, and I want to lay out some major aspects of this connection in order to not only explain the facts behind the police punishment for bleeding on officers, but also the connection between police work and vulnerable populations.

Blood on the Dance Floor: Hemonation and the Pulse Club

seeking refuge in music

Michael Jackson’s songs seem to tell of a different world sometimes, of the 1990s postmodern party, a time that seems somehow long ago, that now seems peaceful, where people didn’t get shot all the time…

Bloody Art: Menstrual Artists, Trump, and the Material Image

Since my last discussion of this topic over a month ago the anger over Trump’s misogyny has not subsided. While few likely voters were swayed and probably no opponent convinced by his derogatory views on women, some have channeled their anger into something more than a tweet.

https://twitter.com/ameliajoparish/status/641485727616921600

Trump’s Bloody Nose: Men and Assorted -struations.

What Trump Sees? (Source: Pinterest, Aela Gholizadeh)

What we see.

I think it was Bubba Jefferson, Thomas’ lesser-known brother, who said that the tree of GOP primaries has to be watered with the tears shed for a candidate who drops out because of what he says about blood and women. And that is still true today.

Kidding aside, Trump’s blood comment should give us pause. In case you are lucky and still avoid the void of avoidable news, you may not have heard that GOP Presidential hopeful and front-runner Donald Trump received some pointed questions about his past comments about women (all disparaging, many shaming their bodies, some directly suggesting that submitting to sexual intercourse with Trump would be a good idea). FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly read some of his comments back to Trump, asking if he considers this in conflict with his electability for the office of the Presidency. And from there it went from bad to worse…

And Their Children’s Children: Sippenhaft, Blood Feuds, and other Political Incentives

The seemingly never-ending confrontation between the U.S. and Iran appears to bring out some of the most unpredictable and hostile behavior and some of the most painful grand-standing by pundits and politicians alike.

Association Fallacy Diagram. (Source: commons.wikimedia.org)

The letter sent by 47 U.S. Senators dismissing political negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program has led some to brand the authors as traitors, others to hail them as patriots. Freshman Senator Tom Cotton (R) of Arkansas seems to have a leading role in drafting the letter. Of course this piece is not about Senator Cotton, but about the fraught political nature of blood and blood metaphors. I want to use this opportunity and consider a theme that squats underneath another text Senator Cotton drafted about Iran. This ugly and ancient political idea illustrates the strangeness of political conceptions regarding Iran.

Senator Cotton’s 2013 withdrawn amendment gives me an excuse to revisit one of the most painful political uses of blood: Sippenhaft, or kin liability.

[Off Topic] Detroit: Beneath the Skin

I beg your indulgence for a post not about blood, but about another body studies topic, skin, and about how our associations with body parts reveal our formative cultural conditioning, even despite ourselves.

In a recent article at The Atlantic, Rebecca Golden writes movingly of her battle with her body weight disability and ponders the implications of surgically losing pounds of skin in Detroit. She considers the city’s roots in the fur trade, the money that came for skins, and the city that seems to have vanished with its factories and finds hope in the thought that losing the skin may just be another thing to get through, just like the collapse of Detroit manufacturing..

From my vantage point, there are two problems with her piece, two blind spots that need addressing, one concerning the present, one the past, that mark the piece as coming from an important personal place, but also from a place that side-steps some crucial problems.

Let’s see what Kid Rock has to do with any of this…(don’t worry, he’s only a by-note)

Blood Majority? Transfusion, Language, and the Law in the Age of Hobby Lobby

Both the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby Opinion and Dissent point a warning finger at Jehovah’s Witnesses’ stance on blood transfusion. But what do we mean when we talk about religious objections to blood transfusion like those of the Jehovah’s Witnesses? What does this specific objection regarding blood show us about how we might want to think about the intersection of law and bodies?

You should read my whole piece on Jehovah’s Witnesses and blood transfusions below, but…