Description: "Danya Glabau follows parents and activists as they fight for allergen-free environments, accurate labeling, the fair application of disability law, and access to life-saving medications for food-allergic children in the United States. At the same time, she shows how this activism also reproduces the culturally dominant politics of personhood and responsibility, based on an idealized version of the American family, centered around white, middle-class, and heteronormative motherhood. Food Allergy Advocacy raises important questions about who controls illness activism"--
Review Quotes:
"Examining the politics of protecting children with food allergies in the United States, Food Allergy Advocacy opens up a conversation between food allergy, whiteness, and disability to untangle contemporary health politics. It importantly brings feminist STS and disability studies to this understudied but widely cared about concern."--Michelle Murphy, author of The Economization of Life
"Food Allergy Advocacy is a fascinating investigation of the complexities underlying our understanding of allergies in the United States. Through a rich ethnography of people's experiences with allergies and with advocacy for better recognition and treatment, it focuses on the downloading of care and responsibility to manage food allergies onto families. In doing so, Danya Glabau not only illustrates the highly gendered, racialized, and heteronormative assumptions that configure allergy science and treatment, she also argues that allergy advocacy itself ends up reinforcing this problematic reproductive politics rather than challenging it. An essential read for anyone interested in the intersection of healthcare, patient advocacy, and technoscience."--Kean Birch, co-editor of Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism
"This is an exploration into the realities of food allergy care like no other. A great read for all who work, or plan to work, with allergy patients and their families and who want a deeper understanding of the major issues of care and advocacy for such patients' improved support."--CHOICE
"An ambitious research project that offers smart insights and a welcome contribution at the intersection of multiple disciplines."--Mobilization
"Danya Glabau's Food Allergy Advocacy provides an excellent, novel analysis of the lives of children with food allergies, their caregivers, and food allergy advocates."--American Ethnologist