Journal of Critical Race Inquiry Volume 12, Number 1 (2025) pp. 61-63 BOOK REVIEW: Got Blood to Give: Anti-Black Homophobia in Blood Donation, by OmiSoore H. Dryden. Fernwood Publishing, 2024. Book Review Author: Zainab Khalid Queen  s University 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.   REVIEW: GOT BLOOD TO GIVE  62  The elision of Marco  s Blackness through this race neutral portrayal belies the antiBlack 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   REVIEW: GOT BLOOD TO GIVE  63  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.