Blood has long been considered to possess a dual nature. For one, blood is regarded as both a bodily material that sustains functions necessary for human life and an object with metaphorical meanings associated with the circulation of identities, relationships, life and death. By following the rhetoric of blood banking, in which blood becomes an currency-like object that can be deposited and withdrawn, Richard Titmuss’s The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, a fundamental work on blood since its publication in 1970,Footnote 1 conceptualises blood to be both a commodity and gift – that is, both a tradeable object and a token of the altruist behaviour of donating blood. By extension, situating the cultural politics of blood in relation to medicine, media and militarism, Cathy Hannabach’s Blood Cultures: Medicine, Media, and Militarisms complicates multiple binaries to suggest that, given blood’s mobility among different social registers, its meaning also encompasses the political. Hannabach resists the claim that metaphoric blood practices are fictive, ideological and cultural, while material blood practices are real, objective and scientific, as well as the claim that the two are independent of each other (6). Instead, in Blood Cultures, she complicates that alleged dual nature by opening up an intellectual space in which blood becomes a domain of inquiry: a way of conceiving relationships among bodies, illnesses, sexualities, desires, kinships, nationalities and the operations of biopolitics.
Although reflecting on the history of blood in the context of the US from the twentieth century to the first decade of the twenty-first, Blood Cultures neither offers a grand narrative or holistic historical perspective of blood, nor is it interested in tracing historical origins in order to give blood a full account. On the contrary, Hannabach contributes to current blood studies by engaging Foucault’s biopolitics as an analytical framework for investigating how the technology of blood has become entangled with the development of medicine, media representations and American military endeavours. In doing so, Blood Cultures imbricates various topics by examining the racial and sexual politics of blood drive activism (Chapter 1) and of mapping American national boundaries (Chapter 2), by directing particular attention to Haitian refugees’ blood as subject of international anxieties over issues related with legal, national and reproductive aspects of the United States (Chapter 3). Importantly, in considering blood’s complexity by engaging eugenicist anxieties and medical practices, Hannabach conceptualises blood as ‘a medico-military surveillance technology’ used as a tool for constructing the American empire and in which ‘technologies of law and medicine are intertwined with the desire to control which bodies can cross which border’ (68). Consequently, blood played a significant role in shaping nationalism during the Cold War, in which people became subject to biopolitical logics that conceived bodies as possible targets of both medical and military technologies of sabotage (Chapter 4). In that light, blood could be understood as a technology of self in the Foucauldian sense: one that helps to invent, regulate and produce subjectivity.
In addition to complicating the binary between language and the real (or material), Hannabach articulates the relationship between blood and cartography, which links blood to land in ways that map it in bodies and identities across national borders. For example, when tracing the ways of understanding Patient Zero, the first HIV patient in the United States, Hannabach engages materials from science journals and novels to contend that the cross-national movement of Patient Zero represents an embodiment that unites bodies, blood and sex with infected land in ways that reflect a blood-based notion of American national identity. In that sense, the role of blood is similar to that of maps in constructing American national boundaries and tracing the ways in which land and blood have been mapped in American citizenship law, art, medicine and social justice activism (37).
Another of Hannabach’s contributions emerges in her efforts to engage science, technology and society studies and feminist scholarship in such a way that, when conceiving technologies of blood (Chapter 3), she insightfully examines how Haitian refugees’ blood has become a site of international anxieties over legal sovereignty, biopolitics, citizenship and reproductive rights. Referring to blood tests, she explains that the state uses the HIV antibody test as a screening device, one that both detects and produces legitimate and illegitimate migrant bodies. Blood therefore becomes a key site for negotiating intersecting anxieties regarding citizenship, gender, sexuality and race, around which legal and medical technologies intertwine to produce potentially deceptive bodies that are scrutinised for deviance (85).
Toward her work’s close, Hannabach turns to investigate how national anxieties over communism, queerness and nuclear warfare have been mobilised by analysing two films – the 1973 public health film The Return of Count Spirochete and Matt Reeves’s 2010 film Let Me In – in an attempt to explore how queer possibilities lurk in the films, in which blood, sex, race and kinship are complicated (Chapter 4). Importantly, regarding how the films address the anxiety of blood purity, she suggests a critique that the boundaries of the American nation-state, the human body and categories of race, gender, sexuality, class and citizenship have proven that we have always been impure.
While Blood Cultures is not the first effort in theorising the nature of blood, Hannabach’s approach to the substance – her endeavours to engage Foucault’s biopolitical analysis of power, as well as feminist and queer scholarship, and to incorporate various materials from official archives, science journals and popular genres – nevertheless shows the ways in which blood operates to segregate qualified and disqualified populations at multiple scales of the truth regime. An important work contributing to current blood studies, Blood Cultures not only details how blood can be mobilised to hurt, marginalise and even kill, but more importantly allows readers to consider the configuration of biovalues and bioethics in the context of the US during the last two centuries. As Hannabach notes, since blood can be both power and resistance, it is therefore neither a fixed category nor a given, but a phenomenon that entangles as well as disentangles multiple social practices.
