Download or read book Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism written by Lisa Diedrich and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How illness on social media reveals the struggle for care and access against ableism and stigma Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism explores illness and disability in action on social media, analyzing several popular hashtags as examples of how illness figures in recent U.S. politics. Lisa Diedrich shows how illness- and disability-oriented hashtags serve as portals into how and why illness and disability are sites of political struggle and how illness politics is informed by, intersects with, and sometimes stands in for sexual, racial, and class politics. She argues that illness politics is central—and profoundly important—to both mainstream and radical politics, and she investigates the dynamic intersection of media and health and health-activist practices to show the ways their confluence affects our perception and understanding of illness.