Social Production of Political Crisis: Reflections from the 1980s HIV/Blood Wars

Constance Nathanson, Columbia University
Henri Bergeron, Sciences Po

HIV contamination of the blood supply produced a political crisis in France in the early 1990s with ripples that continue to this day (e.g., embrace of the “precautionary principle” leading to rapid suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid-19). Comparative cross-national research comparing the emergence and ramifications of this crisis in France with the absence of crisis in the US confronted with the identical circumstances of blood contamination contributes to theorizing the social production of crisis and illuminates the circumstances under which crisis does or does not follow upon a potentially disruptive event. Grounded in sociological theories of organization, social movements, and the interaction of science and society and based on extensive archival research in France and the US, the authors propose a series of hypotheses to account for the stark difference in these countries’ response to the HIV/blood affair. In part these differences were cultural—France’s more powerful mythology around the meaning of blood along with sharp differences between the two countries in normative perspectives on the values of material success and technological innovation. But they were also political and organizational. Social production of crisis requires organizational and political space for its agents to operate. In the US that space was preempted, first by the early organization and political savvy of gay men and, second, by a health care crisis precipitated by the absence of universal health care in the face of a raging epidemic. In France, gay men’s organizations were weak to non-existent and health care was universal, leaving space for victims of toxic blood to organize, creating a political crisis to which the French government was ultimately forced to respond.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 188. Pandemics and Society