Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism, 2024, Diedrich

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How illness on social media reveals the struggle forcare and access against ableism and stigma IllnessPolitics and Hashtag Activism explores illness and disabil...
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Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism​

Lisa Diedrich
Series: Forerunners: Ideas First
Copyright Date: 2024
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Pages: 150
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Table of Contents​

Front Matter (pp. [I ]-[viii])

Table of Contents (pp. [ix]-[x])

Introduction: #IllnessPolitics (pp. 1-12)
THIS BOOK EXPLORES illness and disability in action on social media, analyzing several popular hashtags as examples of how illness figures, conceptually and strategically, in recent U.S. politics. I demonstrate how illness politics (or #IllnessPolitics, as I have used the term on social media) is informed by, intersects with, and sometimes stands in for, sexual, racial, and class politics. This project is connected to a growing body of work that explores forms of health activism and disability and illness politics as central, not peripheral, to both mainstream and radical politics,¹ as well as work on the dynamic intersection of media...

1. #SickHillary (pp. 13-32)
ILLNESS IS A key, if undertheorized, aspect of how we do politics now. We saw illness politics at work throughout the long and grueling 2016 presidential campaign. I first became interested in how illness politics circulated on social media with the many stories about Hillary Clinton’s health (#HillarysHealth and #SickHillary on social media, to name just two hashtags driving the circulation of stories)—rampant speculation, mainly among those already not supporting her, that she was hiding a secret illness (Parkinson’s, traumatic brain injury, epilepsy all circulated as possible diagnoses), which, if revealed, so the story went, would make most Americans...

2. #TrumpIsNotWell (pp. 33-50)
IN BOTH THE 2016 AND 2020 CAMPAIGNS, Trump, too, was diagnosed as unfit for office. If the weak Obama and sick Hillary illness narratives conjured an older eugenics logic that Trump himself adhered to and promulgated, initial attacks on Trump’s fitness in the run-up to the 2016 election and after drew on a newer narrative—that of the personality disorder. Disability activists and scholars rightly expressed concern that diagnosing Trump’s bad behavior as mental illness was stigmatizing to people who suffer from mental illness. And yet, in a fascinating reversal of stigmatization, or perhaps as a sign of Trump’s own...

3. #ADAPTandRESIST (pp. 51-70)
MY FIRST TWO CHAPTERS focused on illness politics as a tactic of electoral politics used to discredit candidates for political office. I showed how the deployment of the hashtags #SickHillary and #TrumpIsNotWell, and related media and social media coverage, influenced the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020. I now shift my analysis from illness politics as a component of electoral politics and as focused on individuals running for office to an analysis of hashtags used by disability activist groups whose aim is to counter the shame and stigma surrounding illness and disability and create opportunities for sick and disabled people...

4. #CripTheVote (pp. 71-90)
IN THIS CHAPTER, I turn to how disability activists have sought to challenge—or “crip”—the commonplace image of the figure of the activist in the streets protesting loudly and proudly, defiant, and disobedient. Conceptually and in practice, #CripTheVote provides a counterimage to the disabled activist in the public square or in the halls of Congress, as we saw in the last chapter. #CripTheVote began as a hashtag and has operated solely as an online campaign, primarily using Twitter to organize chats on a wide range of disability-related issues. Like ADAPT, #CripTheVote is interested in creating the conditions of possibility...

5. #TimeForUnrest (pp. 91-104)
IN THIS CHAPTER, I take up the multiple temporalities of a specific chronic disabling condition—myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) or chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)—through an analysis of ME/CFS experiences and events as documented in Jennifer Brea’s film Unrest (2017)¹ and on social media via ME/CFS-related hashtags. Brea’s film shows illness and illness politics as operating biopychosocially across different spaces and temporalities, including on social media, which becomes a site of a kind of embodied assembly where people gather while remaining at home and in their own beds. In her book on precarity and public assembly, Notes Toward a Performative Theory...

Ongoingness: #LongCOVID (pp. 105-116)
MY CONCLUSION doesn’t so much end the conversation as point to ongoing conversations about illness and illness politics through the lens of the emergent condition long Covid. I began this book by looking at #IllnessPolitics as an ableist form of electoral politics, focusing on campaigns and hashtags to discredit Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. I then shifted focus from hashtags directed at individuals running for office to several recent enactments of illness and disability politics organized by and for disabled and chronically ill people to counteract ableism and stigma and to build...

Acknowledgments (pp. 117-120)

Back Matter (pp. 121-124)
 
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Lisa Diedrich's Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism provides a timely account of the two things that its title promises: Through five brief, readable chapters, it explores (1) the ways that American politics is articulated through illness and (2) the ways that activists use social media ecologies to develop political movements. The first prong shows how politics, even beyond disability politics or health policies, gets routed through discourses of abled and disabled, sick and healthy—a natural continuation of her earlier work in Indirect Action (2016) and Treatments (2007). The second prong takes a deeper dive into disabled and chronically ill activism through an examination of contemporary American illness activism on social media and beyond. The chapters are roughly organized as case studies, with the opening two discussing the first dimension, and the latter three discussing the second. Taken together, the book presents a big-picture account of the discursive construction of illness politics, as well as the ways that activists engage and push back against notions that disability makes one inherently weak and (politically and socially) incapacitated. Of note, the book is accessible to a wide variety of readers, hence an excellent choice for undergraduate courses.

The first two chapters discuss illness politics in mainstream American political discourse. Diedrich takes two examples: Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and the hashtag #SickHillary, and Donald Trump's 2020 campaign and the hashtag #TrumpIsNotWell. While these political figures stand at the opposing ends of a bipartisan political system, Diedrich shows that the perception that "illness and disability are disqualifying" (19) pervaded the public imagination in both cases. Her point of departure is Susan Sontag's notion of "illness as metaphor." Diedrich departs from [End Page 143] Sontag, however, in arguing that there is no such thing as illness discourse pure of the sticky politics that surround it. The right-wing and in particular alt-right conspiracy theories attempted to discredit Clinton for having a kind of supposed, yet hidden, illness, micro-examining footage of her collapsing or experiencing difficulty walking. The hypothetical diagnosis varied widely among these groups, from brain damage to Parkinson's to foot drop, but the vagueness surrounding these explanations demonstrates the power of illness stigma to label one politically unfit. Diedrich then turns to Trump. Trump is an interesting case of illness politics, because, as Diedrich shows, he was both a peddler and "victim" (if we can say that) of it. Trump famously mocked a disabled reporter, but liberals also attempted to discredit Trump for being mentally ill. Disability activists and scholars, Diedrich argues, "rightly expressed concern that diagnosing Trump's bad behavior as mental illness was stigmatizing to people who suffer from mental illness" (33). And yet, surprisingly, Trump experienced a different sort of illness stigma than did Clinton, not least due to gender dynamics and Trump's own cult of personality. In an argument reminiscent of Emily Martin's (2009) observations about mania and male executives, Diedrich writes that "such powerful if unpleasant personalities have been linked to success, especially in the business world" (33).

Diedrich then moves to talk about illness politics not as a discursive construction but as activist praxis. She discusses direct actions by the grassroots organization ADAPT (which stands for American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today, but has since moved far beyond that narrow goal). While these actions took place "in real life," Diedrich argues that they were designed to create a media spectacle of disability, spread through the hashtag #ADAPTandResist. At a 2017 die-in in front of then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's office, ADAPT activists protested the attempted repeal of the Affordable Care Act and performed the vulnerability of their bodies by refusing to vacate the building—forcing cops to drag them out. This countered ableist assumptions of disabled people as politically weak-willed, as we saw in the example of #SickHillary above.

Diedrich then moves to the #CripTheVote campaign leading up to the 2016 election, and the #TimeForUnrest campaign to advocate for people with myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) that began around 2017. The overarching argument in these two chapters, especially, demonstrates that online activism does not just stay online. As Faye Ginsburg and...
 
Chapter on ME/CFS said:
Brea’s film shows illness and illness politics as operating biopychosocially across different spaces and temporalities
Click to expand...
It's actually explicitly pushing back against the biopsychosocial models and the systems that abuse it to deny and dismiss illnesses they are not interested in, mainly for political reasons, so this is an odd framing. The text otherwise contains no mention of biopsychosocial, so this looks like an editor taking some liberties to inject the approved narrative.
 
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