Family Action Network: Steven Thrasher on the Collision of Equity and Disease
In his first book The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide, preeminent LGBTQIA+ scholar, social critic, and journalist Steven W. Thrasher offers a powerful and crucial exploration of one of the most pressing issues of our times: how viruses expose the fault lines of society.
Having spent a ground-breaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Thrasher has come to understand a deeper truth at the heart of our society: that there are vast inequalities in who is able to survive viruses and that the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology alone. Told through the heart-rending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating the novel coronavirus, HIV, and other viruses, Thrasher brings the reader with him as he delves into the viral underclass and lays bare its inner workings.
Thrasher holds the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg chair at Northwestern University’s Medill School, the first journalism professorship in the world created to focus on LGBTQIA+ research. He is also a faculty member of Northwestern’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing.