The Life and Death of Ryan White
eBook - ePub

The Life and Death of Ryan White

AIDS and Inequality in America

  1. 216 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Life and Death of Ryan White

AIDS and Inequality in America

About this book

In the 1980s, as HIV/AIDS ravaged queer communities and communities of color in the United States and beyond, a straight white teenager named Ryan White emerged as the face of the epidemic. Diagnosed with hemophilia at birth, Ryan contracted HIV through contaminated blood products. In 1985, he became a household name after he was barred from attending his Indiana middle school. As Ryan appeared on nightly news broadcasts and graced the covers of popular magazines, he was embraced by music icons and well-known athletes, achieving a curious kind of stardom. Analyzing his struggle and celebrity, Paul M. Renfro’s powerful biography grapples with the contested meanings of Ryan’s life, death, and afterlives.

As Renfro argues, Ryan’s fight to attend school forced the American public to reckon with prevailing misconceptions about the AIDS epidemic. Yet his story also reinforced the hierarchies at the heart of the AIDS crisis. Because the “innocent” Ryan had contracted HIV “through no fault of his own,” as many put it, his story was sometimes used to blame presumably “guilty” populations for spreading the virus. Reexamining Ryan’s story through this lens, Renfro reveals how the consequences of this stigma continue to pervade policy and cultural understandings of HIV/AIDS today.

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Yes, you can access The Life and Death of Ryan White by Paul M. Renfro in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Medicine & Medicine Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. List of Illustrations
  7. Abbreviations
  8. A Note on Terminology
  9. Introduction
  10. 1. Blood and Blame
  11. 2. Normal Activities
  12. 3. AIDS Victim Now a Celebrity
  13. 4. The “Country Hicks” of Kokomo
  14. 5. The Funeral
  15. 6. In Ryan’s Name
  16. 7. Whose CARE?
  17. Epilogue
  18. Acknowledgments
  19. Chronology
  20. Notes
  21. Bibliography
  22. Index