In 2020, SARS-CoV-2 burst onto the scene in the United States, representing what seemed sure to be a break with normal operations and thrusting a spotlight onto American healthcare. Five years later, rather than receiving a glaringly necessary overhaul (or even the continuation of benefits offered in 2020 to alleviate the burdens of the pandemic), the state of American healthcare remains abysmal and threatens to devolve even further. Proposed cuts and changes to Medicaid—the largest source of health insurance in the U.S. as the primary insurer for ~80 million people—have the potential to disrupt care for already underserved populations. Healthcare for trans people, particularly trans kids, faces unceasing attacks. Public health institutions and research are being gutted, and pandemic preparedness is repeatedly undercut.
Americans’ anger with their healthcare system reached a fever pitch in December 2024, when the CEO of United Health Group was executed in the middle of a New York City street. Then a rare thing happened: the general American public came together to express effusive joy, informed by collective dissatisfaction, rage, and disillusionment. With an estimated 41% of Americans shouldering some form of medical debt, people are recognizing the connection between arbitrary healthcare costs, insurance denials, and the steeply rising salaries of healthcare executives. Something has to break.
My debut poetry book, cells, fully differentiated, out now from Noemi Press, is an account of an existence subjected to, shaped by, and never fully certified by the American healthcare system. Drawing on my experiences as a disabled person living in the liminality of non-diagnosis, cells explores the role of neoliberal capitalism in the formation of, the care for, and the quotidian experience of chronic illness. The book depicts phone arguments with insurance companies, illustrates the endless tug-of-war for credibility and legibility, struggles with the way pathologization is deployed as metaphor, and grapples with what it means to deal with failing health in a failing state.
In this reading list, I highlight books that depict the impacts of neoliberal capitalism and fascism on our collective health, reflect on encounters with Western healthcare systems, and call for a popular movement towards healthcare for all. The ten books that follow range from theory to poetry to memoir, yet find commonality in their emphasis on possibility and action. More than simply calling out the bureaucracies and processes designed to provide us with the minimum while extracting the maximum, these books illuminate paths forward and offer strategies for organizing against capitalist exploitation, harnessing the power of the people, and finding strength in solidarity.
Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant
Written by the hosts of the podcast Death Panel (itself an excellent collection of “texts” that serve as a balm in the current moment and provide instruction for action), Health Communism declares both that capitalism is inherently incompatible with health, and that health is fundamental to capitalism. As the book begins, “Health is capitalism’s vulnerability.” Adler-Bolton and Vierkant define the “surplus class” as those who are labeled as a burden, or a drain, on the economy, including but not limited to the chronically ill, the disabled, the unemployed, and the elderly. Building upon Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of organized abandonment, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant describe the “extractive abandonment” that operates to systematically render the surplus class disposable (that is, exposed to conditions that enable premature death) and, simultaneously, extract capital from us.
But Adler-Bolton and Vierkant have robust proposals for fighting back. Their history of the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK) provides a model for organizing and ideology. They call for the centering of the surplus class in our movements. In explicitly naming the alternative to health capitalism, Health Communism offers a clear path forward for the left and confers on us the power to demand health liberation.
Capitalism and Disability by Marta Russell, ed. by Keith Rosenthal
This collection of essays unpacks the political economy of disability, arguing that disability is a social category primarily constructed through its relation to labor. By dividing potential workers into “the able-bodied” and “the disabled,” capitalism coerces disabled people out of waged work and instead extracts value by treating the disabled body as a commodity, and its need for care as a source of profit. Russell points out that not only do meager benefits and the continued neoliberal destruction of the social safety net coerce workers into productivity for fear of becoming disabled, austerity and bureaucracy also operate to withhold welfare and keep disabled people in a state of precarity. Ranging from U.S. imperialism to eugenics to institutionalization, Russell employs Marxist analysis to explore what so many Americans know firsthand—the intimate connections between health, disability, and one’s ability to work.
The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant
In The Next Shift, Winant describes the striking transformation of Pittsburgh’s economy from steel to healthcare, arguing that this transformation is no accident and is a direct result of the increased care needs of blue-collar workers. In contrast to the strong unions of the steel industry and their labor wins, Winant emphasizes the “mass low-wage private-sector employment” imposed upon the majority of healthcare workers, workers who are as important as they are underpaid and exploited.
While Pittsburgh is a stark case study, the processes that Winant describes have been enacted all over the States, and thus The Next Shift offers a crucial assessment of what the rise of the healthcare industry means for healthcare workers, patients, and caregivers alike.
The Undying by Anne Boyer
In conversation with an array of thinkers and patients, Anne Boyer’s memoir, The Undying, depicts her experience with triple negative breast cancer and seethes against the vast societal and gendered connotations of the condition. With a studied cynicism towards the institutions she interfaces with, Boyer writes of “drive-by mastectomies,” chemotherapy medications that cost more than yearly salaries, and the unremitting requirement of work during sickness. She reflects, “When reading historical accounts of breast cancer, I am often struck by a world on which profit hadn’t taken such a full and festering hold.”
For Boyer, the origins of her cancer are haunting. Boyer leverages this into revolutionary anger: “Immobilized in bed, I decide to devote my life to making the socially acceptable response to news of a diagnosis of breast cancer not the corrective ‘stay positive,’ but these lines from Diane Di Prima’s poem ‘Revolutionary Letter #9’: ‘1. kill head of Dow Chemical / 2. destroy plant / 3. MAKE IT UNPROFITABLE FOR THEM to build again.’” More plainly, Boyer writes, “I would rather write nothing at all than propagandize for the world as it is.”
Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert by Sunaura Taylor
In Disabled Ecologies, Sunaura Taylor revisits a land that has had embodied impacts on her —its toxicity the likely cause of her genetic condition—despite the fact that she has not lived on it for decades: a Superfund site on the south side of Tucson, Arizona. Considering her birthplace as exemplifying a “disabled ecology—[a network] of disability [created] when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered,” Taylor investigates the history of the contaminated aquifer. A key component of that history was the formation by local residents, many of them Mexican American, of the group Tucsonans for a Clean Environment (TCE, named after a key toxin in the aquifer), which aimed to unearth the truth of the violence enacted upon them and to fight for justice, reparations, and the decontamination of their land.
Forming an instructive theoretical basis for an “environmentalism of the injured,” Disabled Ecologies is a beautifully written, captivating feat of archival work. Utilizing the networks of disability created by the U.S. military industrial complex, the book proposes ways we might leverage our interconnectedness on local and global levels to resist.
The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability by Jasbir Puar
In this crucial intervention into disability studies, Jasbir Puar emphasizes that the source of much global disability and illness can be tied to the concept of “the right to maim,” or the asserted right of the state to enact mass debility on populations as a form of enforced precaritization. Defining “debility” as a “slow wearing down,” Puar highlights how neoliberal capitalism and U.S. imperialism, work and war, use debilitation tactically to incapacitate and capacitate racialized populations and thereby control them. Through discussions of the impacts of the U.S. war machine and Israel’s exercising of both “the right to maim” and “the right to kill” on Palestinians, Puar argues for a framework of disability that transcends pride and identity discourses. Instead, Puar names debility as a mechanism of state violence and takes that, rather than the push for acceptance of difference within neoliberal systems, as a launching point for disability scholarship, organizing, and activism.
Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health by Micha Frazer-Carroll
In Mad World, Micha Frazer-Carroll locates the Madness/Mental Illness “epidemic” squarely within capitalism, highlighting “how the world drives us Mad, how the world comes to categorize us as Mad, and then, how the world responds to our Madness.” Drawing from principles of the disability justice movement, Frazer-Carroll deconstructs the asylum, diagnosis, carcerality, and the sickening impacts of labor exploitation, with thoughtful attention to the way linguistic formations operate within these systems of oppression. She foregrounds the lived experience of Mad people, calling for us to “uproot our assumptions and centre knowledge ‘from below’—which often contradicts that of charities, medical institutions, and other professional experts.” Frazer-Carroll argues against disavowal, attesting to the necessity of solidarity in delivering us into a liberated future.
Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition by Liat Ben-Moshe
In Decarcerating Disability, Liat Ben-Moshe thoroughly disproves the popular notion that the deinstitutionalization of asylums, beginning in the 50s, paved the way for increased incarceration of disabled and Mad people. Instead, Ben-Moshe identifies deinstitutionalization as the largest decarceration movement in US history and suggests that it can offer essential lessons for prison abolition movements. Decarcerating Disability provides a much-needed assessment of the intricate relationships between disability and carceral abolition, illuminating histories and knowledges in service of abolition movements.
The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven Thrasher
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues and the threat of H5N1 escalates, Thrasher’s analysis of the “viral underclass”—the class for whom instability and structural inequity combine to heighten vulnerability to pathogens—is obviously urgent; but then, as Thrasher illustrates, it has been for decades. A scholar of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Thrasher depicts the disproportionate impacts of viruses on already precarious populations, making the point that this vulnerability is not inherent but manufactured. The book is structured around what Thrasher terms “social vectors,” or forms of oppression that magnify the harms caused by viruses, such as racism, capitalism, borders, and the liberal carceral state. Through empathetic reporting, Thrasher argues against the popular narrative of “patient zero” and the pathologization of people who contract viruses, while emphasizing that viruses are not nefarious, malevolent agents—viruses are an inevitable feature of our environment. Given the boundary-defying nature of viruses, Thrasher envisions them as evidence of human and interspecies connection and interdependence, and suggests our learnings from viruses can aid us in creating “a new ethic of care.”
If God is a Virus by Seema Yasmin
Drawing from her time reporting on the largest Ebola epidemic in history, Seema Yasmin’s poetry collection explores the permeability of the relationship between humans and viruses while challenging the authority of medical and public health institutions to dictate these relationships. Repeated “WHO said” poems deftly call into question the communications of a global health authority and contrast these with the lived experience of patients and healthcare workers.
Invoking an epigraph from Marwa Helal, “poems do work journalism cant,” Yasmin uses a plurality of forms to navigate these systems and questions; her poems take the shape of surveys, bingo cards, phylogenetic trees, and forms that purport to translate the language that patients use to describe their suffering. Yasmin takes her vast array of experiences—as poet, as journalist, as medical doctor—and transforms them into a groundbreaking poetics.
