Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism
My new book, Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism, is coming out in the spring from University of Minnesota Press. You can preorder it here and get 40% off the print edition using the code MN90850. It’s part of the Forerunners: Ideas First series, which publishes “short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead.”
Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism explores illness and disability in action on social media, analyzing several popular hashtags as examples of how illness figures in recent U.S. politics. Lisa Diedrich shows how illness- and disability-oriented hashtags serve as portals into how and why illness and disability are sites of political struggle and how illness politics is informed by, intersects with, and sometimes stands in for sexual, racial, and class politics. She argues that illness politics is central—and profoundly important—to both mainstream and radical politics, and she investigates the dynamic intersection of media and health and health-activist practices to show how their confluence affects our perception and understanding of illness.