We are No Longer Invisible

Abstract

: Sickle cell discourses are not merely descriptions of medical matters but contentious sites that invoke rhetorical arguments to support racialized medical borders, human difference, and ontological essentialism. In this essay, I examine the way that those stricken by Sickle Cell Anemia appropriate the disease to advocate for their voice and visibility. I disclose how the construction of SCA as a black disease becomes a contested terrain which is often a “cultural centering on identity and dignity.” At odds is how the body is inscribed with a set of meanings in its association with blackness, the woeful ignorance that’s pervasive in the medical community of those who treat sickle cell patients and the indomitable will of the warrior to survive regardless. I c onsider the “warring ideals in one dark body,” urgings to be seen and heard. These manifest as performances of resistance, acts of resilience, and ways of asserting agency to maintain a semblance of humanity in the midst of situations that are anything but.