"Struggling Right Along With You": Precarity and the Power of Medical Crowdfunding Campaign Narratives

Medical fundraisers—which feature patients or caregivers seeking funds for medical care, procedures, other needs—are ubiquitous on social media, and US-based GoFundMe.com is one of the most popular platforms. The rise platforms like GoFundMe as forms care triage notoriously intertwined with failures U.S. healthcare system. crowdfunding campaigns in span diverse topics, invoke a wide range moral discourses, are affected deeply by race, gender, class, religion, (dis)ability. Drawing insights from discourse analysis ten “trending” hosted 2019, I argue that participatory narratives (because organizers, beneficiaries, donors can interact within campaign space) rely upon an individualizing deservingness to create reciprocal ties biosocial communities care. As politico-moral projects, at once reflective responsive normalized precarity. Crowdfunding spaces which idealized neoliberal citizen-subjects produced valorized collaboratively through discursive work organizers donors, limiting (and enabling) our imaginaries community