BOOK REVIEW: Got Blood to Give Anti-Black Homophobia in Blood Donation, by OmiSoore H. Dryden.
Got Blood to Give
Anti-Black Homophobia in Blood Donation
How does blood build borders? And whose blood counts? OmiSoore H. Dryden’s BlaQueer
investigation of the blood donation system in Canada invokes the social life of blood—a
fluid that gives life to flesh and, as Dryden methodically illustrates, to homonational white
supremacy rooted in anti-Blackness. Through a historically informed discourse analysis
around Canada’s blood system as a “contemporary technology of nation-building” (22), the
book provides key contributions to the study of power, race, nation, citizenship, sexuality
and gender. Dryden builds on the work of Black queer scholars such as Christina Sharpe,
Katherine McKittrick, Saidiya Hartman, Audre Lorde and Cathy Cohen to reveal how race
filters blood through narratives of purity, disease and civic duty.
Dryden transports her readers to Canada’s first public blood donation clinics,
established by the Canadian Red Cross Society during WWII as part of wartime efforts to
“save” injured soldiers through blood donation. For Dryden, the blood donation system’s
foundational militaristic nationalism is central to more recent constructions of the
“homonational good-gay blood subject” (69) as the ideal donor. This proper subject
emerged against the backdrop of the tainted blood scandal of the 1980s, which led to an
outbreak of HIV and Hepatitis C in Canada. The Krever Commission’s 1997 gay blood ban
birthed a new blood agency, Canadian Blood Services (CBS), further entrenching the
stigmatization of MSM as a source of tainted blood. Dryden’s BlaQueer analytical
intervention into more recent homonationalist safe blood discourses on MSM inclusion
brilliantly exposes how the recuperation of the (white) gay male citizen’s blood—from
“bringing death to giving life” (68)—is specifically a product of anti-Black homophobia and
transphobia.
In Chapter 3, Dryden focuses on LGBTQ advocacy from organizations such as
nonprofit Egale, the publication Xtra, and the Canadian Federation of Students to
underscore how efforts to repeal the gay blood ban relied on sexual exceptionalism and
race neutrality. One particularly compelling example is Dryden’s analysis of the Canadian
Federation of Students’ campaign using their fictional character Marco, a Black gay man
who is monogamous, healthy and just wants to donate blood to save his sister. The
portrayal of Marco as a monogamous gay man who is also a family man with altruistic
instincts squarely places him within the narrative of the good-gay Canadian subject and
ideal donor, espousing the same sense of civic duty mobilized to garner national security
through wartime blood donations.
The elision of Marco’s Blackness through this race neutral portrayal belies the anti-
Black homophobia that Dryden guides her readers to understand as the critical node that
cleaves deviant bodies and blood from the body politic. Pointing to blood safety protocols
as metrics of cultural contagion rather than strictly biological transmission, Dryden
analyzes the 4H of HIV/ AIDS transmission—homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs and
most notably Haitians—as a technology of national borders wherein African and African
diasporic blood marks the limits of the nation. Activism aimed at de-stigmatizing (white)
gay blood remained silent on the far more pervasive and enduring ban on African blood.
This silence not only reflects the erasure of BlaQueer diasporic blood and the simultaneity
of racialized queerphobia, but as Dryden argues, such claims to respectability concentrate
surveillance so that the racialized sexuality of BlaQueer and trans people “is deemed too
transgressive to be anything other than irredeemable, monstrous and forever tainted” (69).
A careful analysis of activist rhetoric surrounding the repeal of the gay blood ban reveals
the irony of employing racial analogies based in the United States—of sitting at the back of
the bus—to sanitize Canada’s own racist history and establish a “colourless” sexuality that
ultimately erases the presence of BlaQueer and trans people.
What truly sets Dryden’s work apart is her ability to weave the political, historical,
medical and legal with the visceral. Blood stories, as Dryden names them, are crucial
windows into what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife of slavery” (45). These violent
encounters with blood illuminate a quotidian cruelty that poignantly illustrates Dryden’s
engagement with Christina Sharpe’s observations of the “everyday mundane horrors” (88)
that make up the anti-Black/ anti-African dehumanization and AfriQueer-phobia of white
supremacist Canada.
As a reader, I am especially drawn to the blood stories that open each chapter. Most
densely concentrated in the introduction, these stories range from personal experiences
and historical accounts of extreme racial violence, to the mixing of blood to cement kinship,
the testimony of a white gay man who confessed to lying on CBS blood donor
questionnaires to donate blood, and the experience of menstruating for the first time. Each
story moves the reader, much like blood moves, to contemplate the biomateriality and
violence of blood as a conduit of power shaping social life. These short vignettes most fully
exemplify Dryden’s definition of “blood as text” (13). Though a more traditional approach
to studying blood donation might expect these blood stories to speak directly to donation,
only one of Dryden’s does so. Instead, she touches on that cluster of veins that expands the
scope of what blood is and what it does when it leaks from the racialized body—be it
through mob violence and police brutality, for the medical purposes of (selective, surveilled
and regulated) donation, or through gendered and sexed bodily functions. In particular, her
meditation on blood as a measure of both purity and pain speaks to the diverse colonial
and imperial contexts in which blood matters and orders social life.
Dryden’s most powerful contribution is an ontological intervention into the study of
blood through her theorization of Black queerness and transness as contagion. She
observes that, within Western HIV epidemiology, disease is always framed as originating
“elsewhere” (89), outside the space and place of the nation. In Chapter 4, Dryden posits that
the CBS questionnaire she critically analyzes is a continuation of colonial logics of tropical
medicine, which developed to protect European settler interests. The questionnaire’s
inclusion of questions specifically about travel to “Africa”—treated as a singular location,
rather than a vast continent of 54 diverse countries—along with stereotypical imagery of
acacia trees and elephants assumed to invoke nostalgia, and the distinct phrasing of sexual
activity as “sexual contact” (87), all echo this colonial legacy. Here, disease is firmly situated
and naturalized in the African body as bestial, pre-civilizational, living “in dirt, side by side
with animals and vegetation” (87). Disease, once exorcised as outside the nation, is then
sutured to the bodies of populations deemed deviant threats to blood safety—and thus to
the nation itself. In this framing, Haitians, sex workers, drug users and gay men are not only
held responsible for the cause and spread of disease, but, as Dryden writes, “their bodies
are positioned as the vessel in which the virus originated” (68). In other words, the
ontological equation of the “queered (always contagious) other” (85) results in certain
bodies becoming the disease that endangers the (white) nation. Dryden traces these
ontological configurations of the body as disease back to seventeenth-century slave codes
on racial hygiene, the one-drop rule, and anti-miscegenation laws to demonstrate how
contemporary blood technologies and blood donation remain a “site through which
segregation is operationalized” (92).
The coda to Dryden’s work moves the reader’s focus to her 2017 research project
#Gotblood2give, funded by CBS and Health Canada—the only funded project ever to center
the experiences of Black gay, bisexual, cis and trans men and to emphasize the importance
of Black, African and Caribbean people in MSM blood donation. This part of the book is
particularly illuminating for racialized scholars researching race, as it offers a reflective
commentary on methodology. Dryden shares the extreme challenges she faced conducting
this research as a BlaQueer scholar facing misogynoir in the science and medical fields. She
recounts the annoyance, resistance and open hostility to her project from fellow recipients
of the MSM Research Grant Program due to its focus on race rather than “only gay blood”
(94). And crucially, her admission that these experiences significantly delayed the
completion of her book is affirming for racialized scholars who are, ironically, grappling
with the same structural violence they are studying. Even as Dryden states, “No one wants
to relive violent experiences” (96), her grace and clarity in presenting at least some of this
violence allows readers to draw connections to the literal sickness that white supremacy
inflicts on racialized others. This is underscored by her invocation of civil rights activist
Fannie Lou Hamer’s words—“sick and tired of being sick and tired” (48)—as emblematic of
BlaQueer and trans experiences.
While Got Blood to Give focuses on blood donation and blood donors, its theoretical
contributions provide fruitful avenues for further investigations on blood and blood
technologies. A BlaQueer analytic offers critical insights into the experiences of blood
donation recipients, the role of blood in the entanglements of coloniality and capitalism
within pharmaceutical industrial complexes, and other sites of what Dryden calls the
“extractive politics of blood” (7). This book is highly recommended to students, scholars,
public health policymakers and healthcare providers alike because of its ability to
illuminate the racializing and dehumanizing technologies embedded in scientific and
medical advancements.
— Zainab Khalid, Journal of Critical Race Inquiry Volume 12, Number 1 (2025) pp. 61-63