Indirect Action: Schizophrenia, Epilepsy, AIDS, and the Course of Health Activism

(Paperback)

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Lisa Diedrich explores how and why illness was so significant to the social, political, and institutional transformation beginning in the 1960s through the emergence of AIDS in the United States. Indirect Action places illness in the leading role in the production of thought during the emergence of AIDS, ultimately showing the critical interconnectedness of illness and political and critical thought

Reviews

"Complex yet disarmingly candid, Indirect Action queers the process of history itself, offering a politics of indirectness that is still action, of remembering that doesn't overshadow. Lisa Diedrich is skilled at presenting a turn of thought or analytic term with extraordinary precision and historical weight."Catherine Belling, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

"Moving through several sites that link illness, thought, and political action, Indirect Action is an engaged, vital, and generative critical practice. Lisa Diedrich demonstrates that when we take a longer view of complex phenomena, we discover the occluded origins and overlooked factors leading to their emergence."Susan M. Squier, Pennsylvania State University

"Beautifully crafted, Indirect Action helps us to see how present activism, specifically health activism, might be done differently. Lisa Diedrichs gift is her ability to capture the transversal view without losing sight of this important argument: There is enormous power in indirect action."Lisa Cartwright, University of California, San Diego

"Diedrich offers crucial new methodological resources and a rich and compelling counterarchive of theory, activism, and cultural practice that has the potential to unsettle and reorient our approach to understanding health and illness as both historical and urgently ongoing sites of political struggle."Disability Studies Quarterly

Author Bio

Lisa Diedrich is associate professor of womens and gender studies at State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is the author of Treatments: Language, Politics, and the Culture of Illness (Minnesota, 2007).