"We’re Not Trying to Convince Us": Science, Gay Identity and the Struggle for Credibility in UK Blood Donor Activism

• In Event: Unpacking Expertise - II: Authority, Politics, & the State

Abstract

Blood donor activists in the UK have consistently challenged policy that prohibits men who have sex with men (MSM) from donating blood since the rule’s inception in 1983. Campaigners – who are typically gay or bisexual men – are working to expose the perceptibly homophobic implications of MSM blood donor deferral criteria and to suggest how this policy is scientifically or technologically unfounded. Yet, in attempting to re-politicise what policy-makers have claimed to be the value-neutral landscape of MSM deferral and to establish the ‘freedom to donate’ within a gay rights frame, donor activists have had to navigate accusations that their claims are too political, insincere or misplaced within the ‘objective’ sphere of biomedical policy. These accusations circulate the sexual identity embedded in blood donor activism and serve to undermine the ‘truth’ of donor activist claims, recalling David Halperin’s suggestion that “homosexual identity operates as an instant disqualification” in the “sexual politics of truth.” Moreover, as relative outsiders to biomedicine, these conflicts operate in parallel to activists’ wider struggles for credibility across a lay/expert divide.

In this paper, which draws on interviews with individuals who have been involved in UK blood donor activism since 2011, I will explore how donor activists manage apparent epistemological uncertainties surrounding ‘gayness’ in the biomedical sphere. In particular, I examine how activists enrol the language of science and scientific ‘objectivity’ as a way to mitigate the epistemic de- privileging of gay and bisexual men’s claims about blood donor policy and, in turn, suggest how notions of epistemic credibility and political respectability are entangled in donor activism. By examining the tight coupling of what Steven Epstein considers the politics of knowledge and the politics of sexuality in this way, I hope to illuminate an under-interrogated heteronormativity that operates in or alongside scientific epistemology and constrains gay life and gay politics.

Author

• Benjamin Joseph Fleminger Weil, University College London