Acknowledgments

In all my work, I have sought to think illness and politics together. This has been a conceptual and formal challenge. As part of the University of Minnesota Press’s Forerunners series, which publishes shorter books of “thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead,” Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism continues this work. This shorter, more accessible format was nonetheless a long time coming. Many people and places helped me do this work, and I am grateful for numerous collaborations and provocations over the years.

I first presented material that would eventually become this book at the Artificial Life: Debating Medical Modernity symposium at UC Riverside. I thank Juliet McMullin for the invitation and camaraderie over the years. More recently, I presented some of this work as part of the Conceptualizing Vulnerability Zoom roundtable organized by Pramod K. Nayar, who is the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. I am also grateful to Lisa Käll and Kristin Zeiler at Stockholm University and Nythamar de Oliveira at Pontifical Catholic University, Porto Alegre, Brazil, for invitations to present related work.

Many intellectual spaces have been generative for my thinking, including the online medical history blog Nursing Clio, which published an early version of chapter 2. Thanks especially to editors Laura Ansley and Jacqueline Antonovich for their encouragement and enthusiasm. I also published an early version of chapter 5 as part of a Front Matter section on the topic of protest for Literature & Medicine. That journal has long been a source of support for my work, and I especially want to thank editor Michael Blackie and managing editor Anna Fenton-Hathaway for their vision and care. It has been a pleasure to serve on the editorial board of Literature & Medicine for many years with so many amazing colleagues, including Catherine Belling, Tod Chambers, Rita Charon, Sayantani DasGupta, Rebecca Garden, Anne Hudson Jones, Ann Jurecic, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Thomas Long, Juliet McMullin, Kirsten Ostherr, Lorenzo Servitje, Maura Spiegel, Susan Squier, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Jaipreet Virdi, and Priscilla Wald.

At Stony Brook, collaborating with Nancy Tomes, Karen Lloyd, Andy Flescher, and Susan Scheckel on the Critical Health Studies/Pandemic Narratives project has been a source of pleasure amid the harsh realities of the pandemic. It is with great sadness that I remember my dear colleague and friend Adrián Pérez-Melgosa, who in both his work and life modeled practices of healing and resiliency.

I have had the great good fortune to work with Leah Pennywark at University of Minnesota Press on this project. I am so grateful for her enthusiastic and generous support and guidance throughout this process. As always, Anne Carter has been a calming force through the production process. And thanks to Mike Stoffel for his careful copy editing.

Thank you to the anonymous reader who offered thoughtful comments, especially in understanding that the turn from electoral politics to sick and disabled activism is the heart of this project, which seeks to showcase the multiple spaces and temporalities of illness and disability politics. I am grateful to and awed by sick and disabled activists doing political work in a variety of ways. I want to give a special shout out to Alice Wong, who is a force on social media—smart and incisive in her critiques of ableism and warm and welcoming in her creation of online community for disabled people and their allies. She may be the best coiner of hashtags I know. One of my favorites is #SuckItAbleism, a hashtag she started to point to the absurdity of plastic straw bans to stem the tide of climate change. I also thank Alice and artist Micah Bazant for permission to reproduce the Crip the Vote image Bazant created in collaboration with Alice.

As this book was going to press, new stories about illness politics kept arising. Although I engage briefly with the illness politics surrounding John Fetterman’s successful run for election to the U.S. Senate, I was not able to give that story the attention it deserves. Yet, the stories and images keep coming. We see Senator Fetterman choke up in a hearing with disability activists when he showed how his phone’s transcription tool helps him to communicate with others. GIFs of Mitch McConnell freezing up during press conferences have circulated widely on social media. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign seems based primarily on an ableist illness politics. Not to mention the New Yorker’s October 2 cover by cartoonist Barry Blitt, “The Race for Office,” showing Trump, McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden using walkers to compete in a road race. I mention these here and now to suggest both the timeliness and ongoingness of this project, and to encourage further investigations and conversations into how illness politics operates in the present.

I am grateful for the unwavering support of my family. My dad and his partner Shirl Pessl, ever curious and creative. My brilliant sisters, Andrea Diedrich Kumar and Dawn Diedrich, and their partners, Vikram Kumar and Joe Foley. My amazing niblings, Nikhil and Sona Kumar and Jack Boyette, instill hope for a bright future. In memory of my mother, Fran Diedrich, who was steadfast not showy in her support of me and my sisters.

In this book, as with illness, ongoingness both happens to us and is something we do that opens new possibilities and ways of life. As always, I am indebted to Victoria Hesford for reminding me of the pleasures and possibilities of ongoingness. As I was finishing the book, we had to say goodbye to our best pup Cyril, who trained us to play and love better for thirteen years. A month after we adopted him, he was diagnosed with Addison’s disease, which is a chronic but treatable condition. After Cyril’s diagnosis, I began reading about Addison’s, including about how John F. Kennedy kept his diagnosis of the illness secret in the 1960 presidential election. Thus, in many ways, our experience with Cyril’s Addison’s was the beginning of this book on illness politics.