Mapping HIV-related figures of risk in Europe’s blood donation regime

Abstract

Grasping blood donation as contested grounds for enacting notions of belonging, responsibility and citizenship, this article analyses the role of donor deferral policies in the emergence of a European blood donation regime. We demonstrate how shifts in the moral economy of blood donation that followed from the outbreak of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemic led to the prioritisation of donor deferral policies in efforts to enhance blood safety across Europe. We propose the notion ‘figures of risk’ – condensed figurations of those understood to pose risks of HIV infection to themselves and to others – to describe the categories of persons implicated in changing European donor restriction policies. We explore how the Council of Europe’s annually revised Guide to the preparation, use and quality assurance of blood components, first published in 1992, came to legitimise and sustain increasingly contested deferral practices, which have produced shifting groups of persons as European ‘figures of risk’. Qualitative analyses of the Guide’s 19 editions reveal 3 dimensions through which these figures have become increasingly stabilised over time: in terms of their ontology, temporality and risk-related exceptionality. We conclude by asking how collectivising figurations of donors, framed through literature on ‘profiling’, shape notions of European citizenship.