Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism. By L.Diedrich, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2024. 150 pp. $10 (paperback); $4.95 (ebook). ISBN: 978‐1‐45297122‐3

Diedrich argues that illness is central to US politics, illustrates how this illness politics is enacted on social media and situates her work within a broader movement for disability justice. This is quite an achievement considering Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism could fit into your pocket. The book's narrative is structured around six hashtags which emerged between the 2016 US presidential election and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first two chapters, #SickHillary and #TrumpIsNotWell, reveal the centrality of illness to US electoral politics. In particular, Diedrich demonstrates how the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns drew from and perpetuated ableist attitudes regarding what it means to be fit for political office. After considering a mainstream media politics that ‘weaponises weakness and limits our image of what makes a leader’ (p. 49), Diedrich dedicates most of the book to presenting counternarratives to this ableist ideology. Like the hashtags she describes, her book encapsulates a politics of illness and disability activism, visibility and justice. Although she never explicitly states this, it is clear that Diedrich views social media as predominantly a visual space. She is attentive to the ‘visual tactics’ (p. 45) utilised to associate Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton with moral and physical weakness. This includes a practice of looping and editing video footage and then sharing it as robust evidence for a particular ailment. Diedrich calls this phenomenon ‘diagnosing by gif’; videos are said to reveal hidden dysfunction, and in doing so create a spectacle of stigmatising illness. Much of the politics Diedrich describes concerns the visibility of illness and disability. In the case of health activism, social media is reframed as a powerful way for disabled people to be seen. She describes how images of the #ADAPTandRESIST protests in 2017 against cuts to the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid ‘enacted a highly visible disabled counter-public that punctured ableist attitudes about disability, care, access and freedom’ (p. 53). Crucially, she adds to a movement that aims to ‘crip’ the image of the activist and present hashtag activism as a meaningful form of protest. She argues that #CripTheVote, which began as a Twitter campaign in 2016, strengthened democracy and made disabled people visible in US politics. When discussing #CripTheVote, Diedrich presents hashtags as a means to draw together a decentralised web of political ideas into one ‘disabled chorus’ (p. 79). This is an evocative image of solidarity and community enacted through social media, a chorus which can be unified whilst traversing different localities and times. However, this texture of social media is rarely discussed in the book. Diedrich often refers to ‘social media’ as if it is a homogenous entity, rather than a diverse set of practices which come in many different formulations not least a variety of platforms. She describes hashtags as ‘portals’ into illness politics, and for most of the text this is how she treats them—as doorways to frame her analysis. But of course, as she notes herself, hashtags are not simply portals; they do encapsulate a politics but they are also a means for it to be spread, communicated and transformed. The lack of specificity in the text about which configurations of social media she is referring to may have been overcome by providing some details of her methods. I wanted to know more about how she, as a researcher, moved through social media. To what extent was she an observer or a participant? I was interested in how the particularities of social media platforms shaped her interaction with illness politics. I was interested in how the hashtags she describes, and her analysis of them, stayed focused on US politics whilst inhabiting global online spaces. The analysis of social media using methods from humanities and the social sciences is a relatively new area of research, and thus it is the responsibility of researchers in this area to examine the potential and the limitations of (what we may call) ‘hashtag ethnography’ (Bonilla and Rosa 2015). Illness Politics and Hashtag Activism provides a clearly defined sketch of US illness politics and invites readers to question how it relates to sexual, racial and class politics. Hashtags are used to frame the narrative but this is a book predominantly about illness politics, rather than social media itself. It may be of interest to activists or researchers looking for an introduction to disability or illness politics, and Diedrich's detailed footnotes provide windows from which to explore more. The text is refreshingly clear, concise and accessible and articulates a passionate case for exposing the ableism inherent in political discourse and counteracting it with alternative visions of society. Sally Cross: writing–original draft (lead). The author has nothing to report.