Transforming Contagion: Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations

Transforming Contagion

Transforming Contagion

Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations

Edited by Breanne Fahs, Annika Mann, Eric Swank, and Sarah Stage

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fahs, Breanne, editor. | Mann, Annika, editor. | Swank, Eric, editor. | Stage, Sarah, editor.

Title: Transforming contagion : risky contacts among bodies, disciplines, and nations / Breanne Fahs, Annika Mann, Eric Swank, Sarah Stage.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017033863 | ISBN 9780813589596 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813589589 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813589602 (epub) | ISBN 9780813589619 (mobi) | ISBN 9780813589626 (Web PDF)

Subjects: | MESH: Communicable Diseases—history | Communicable Diseases—epidemiology | Sociological Factors | Communicable Disease Control—history

Classification: LCC RA643 | NLM WC 11.1 | DDC 616.9—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033863

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2018 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Individual chapters copyright © 2018 in the names of their authors

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Contents

Introduction: Contagion as Unruly Subject

Breanne Fahs, Annika Mann, Eric Swank, and Sarah Stage

Part I. Quarantine/Exposure

Chapter 1. A Proper Contagion: The Inoculation Narrative and the Immunological Turn

C. C. Wharram

Chapter 2. Before the Cell, There Was Virus: Rethinking the Concept of Parasite and Contagion through Contemporary Research in Evolutionary Virology

Annu Dahiya

Chapter 3. Social (Ir)Responsibility: Vaccine Exemption and the Ethics of Immunity

Rachel Conrad Bracken

Chapter 4. Radiophobia and the Politics of Social Contagion

Majia Nadesan

Part II. Flesh/Spirit

Chapter 5. Isn’t Contagion Just a Metaphor? Reading Contagion in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year

Annika Mann

Chapter 6. Contagious Accumulation and Racial Capitalism in Late Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

Justin Rogers-Cooper

Chapter 7. Performance and the Contagious Swirl of Dramatic Tradition: Performative Revision and Subversion

Patrick Maley

Part III. Madness/Reason

Chapter 8. Viral Murder: Contagious Killings and Epidemic Beliefs

Marlene Tromp

Chapter 9. Am I a Psychopath?

Sadie Mohler

Chapter 10. Cult of the Penis: Male Fragility and Phallic Frenzy

Michelle Ashley Gohr

Part IV. Revolution/Bureaucracy

Chapter 11. Fear of the Diseased Immigrant: Contagion, Xenophobia, and Belonging

Louis Mendoza

Chapter 12. Prophylactic Policing and the Epidemiology of Dissent in the Soviet-Era Baltic States

Edward Cohn

Chapter 13. Sexual Politics and Contagious Social Movements

Eric Swank

Chapter 14. Words on Fire: Radical Pedagogies of the Feminist Manifesto

Breanne Fahs

Acknowledgments

Notes on Contributors

Index

Introduction

Contagion as Unruly Subject

Breanne Fahs, Annika Mann, Eric Swank, and Sarah Stage

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, plague once again swept through Europe. It returned in 1630 to Venice, a city that had already been ravaged by the disease some sixty years earlier (1576) and had lost almost one-third of its population. The plague, stark in its frighteningly rapid, painful symptoms—including the sudden development of high fever, swollen lymph nodes, black blotches, carbuncles, and delirium, often resulting in the appearance of dying victims screaming and running wildly through the streets—also had a shockingly high mortality rate, as more than 70 percent of its victims habitually succumbed to the infection (Porter 2000). In response to these seventeenth-century visitations, French physician Charles de Lorme invented as a means of self-protection the beak doctor garment: a full head-to-toe protective covering, complete with a birdlike mask, spectacles, and a long leather gown worn from neck to ankle. This garment was believed to act as a protective barrier between doctors and their dying victims, preventing the spread of the plague via either touch or breath. As it became more frequently used, however, the beak doctor became itself a terrifying sign of imminent death, of the dangerous proximity of other bodies (Boeckl 2000). But over the following centuries, as plagues became more infrequent, the beak doctor has become one of the most popular costumes chosen by revelers during the Carnival of Venice. Worn during celebratory festivities, amid the clamor of partygoers and merrymakers, the presence of the beak doctor no longer inspires the need for self-protection but is instead a celebrated face within the crowd. Today, the ubiquitous plague mask appears during the Venetian carnival as an unabashedly welcome symbol, divorced from its original use. Tourist shops display plague masks in the windows, and happy children try them on and giggle.

We begin this collection with a brief history of the plague mask because it demonstrates some of the key concerns of our collection, which explores the ways that contagion—that which touches together bodies and realms that are habitually held separate, at once provoking fear, panic, and the need for self-protection or governmental control—can, and often does, transform into something else entirely. As threats come to seem antiquated, what once was terrifying can become celebratory or even frivolous. And while this transformation might describe many divergent historical phenomena, we believe contagion continues to fascinate both scholars and those beyond academia because it embodies an especially durable and ambivalent process of contact, replication, and transformation. As displayed on our cover, the plague mask makes one portion of that process especially visible: what once materially protected the body and served as a tangible announcement of the invisible dangers of crowded urban locations becomes a symbol of jubilation, a decorative mask commodified and sold to tourists who wish to become Venetian for an evening.

As the plague mask reveals, that which once signaled the threat of bodily transformation instead provides a jubilant, albeit sanitized, version of it. But what the plague mask might still conceal are the ways fears surrounding other forms of contagion might still structure behaviors in more sinister ways, necessitating ever more intrusive methods of medical and social control. For while twenty-first-century carnival attendees may enjoy wearing the plague mask for a night, no longer fearing the touch or breath of other revelers, they might fly home amid worries about catching an infectious disease like SARS from fellow passengers or cringe as online hate speech proliferates on their computer screens. Contagion and beliefs about its power never seem to be eradicated; always unpredictable, contagion continually casts new shadows of doubt, picking off once healthy locations and forging connections among seemingly distal things, bodies, and places.

Transforming Contagion: Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations addresses an issue that has been provocative for at least the three hundred years that are spanned in its pages: the risky contacts imagined and enacted through and by contagion. By conceptualizing contagion in the widest possible terms—as matter and affect, language and practice, tangible and abstract—our collection explores contagion as a transhistorical, interdisciplinary site of anxiety and possibility, examining those contagions postulated to spread from bodies as well as those rooted in political practice, psychological exchanges, social movements, the classroom, and the circulation of literary texts or of memes on social media. The social and individual reactions that interest us most in this volume are not only the anxieties embodied within the experience and study of contagion but also the mechanisms through which contagion serves dual and often contradictory purposes; it is at once a tool and an impediment for social justice, as it invites complicated discourse about individual and collective risk and often overlays those conversations with mass hysteria, fear-based xenophobia, and dichotomous understandings of us and them. It inheres at once in the most grossly material and visual and then habitually vanishes into the most abstract—into feelings, screens, and language. Contagion opens up possibilities for revolution and resistance, disruption and overthrow, just as it also inspires political repression and forecloses these possibilities; it shows our best and our worst qualities simultaneously. Consequently, contagion is a rich terrain in which we explore the possibilities of these modes of spread and the insidious workings of power within contagious transmission. This volume is a boundary-smashing, intersectional, feminist, and decidedly interdisciplinary collection of risky contacts across seemingly impermeable boundaries. It moves through a range of forms, countries, time periods, contexts, and contacts to reveal contagion as an unruly subject of inquiry, one that habitually jumps borders and disregards social and intellectual barriers.

Risky Contacts: Contagion among the Disciplines

Contagion and the Humanities

Over the past several decades, contagion has become an ever-increasing topic of interest for humanities scholars, provoked not only by the AIDS crisis and subsequent fears over further global pandemics (SARS, Ebola, Zika) but also by the global economic crises triggered by the collapse of the U.S. housing market in 2008 and the increasing impetus to work across traditional disciplinary boundaries. But taking up contagion as a potentially material, emotional, and/or linguistic phenomenon requires that humanities scholars first grapple with perhaps the most famous constraint upon that scholarship itself: in Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (1990), she argues that metaphors of contagion tend to proliferate, and in so doing, render even noncontagious diseases (such as cancer) morally contagious, a framing that only increases the suffering of those who are ill. Thus Sontag stridently argues that the ethical work of the critic is to demystify disease, especially the damaging metaphor of contagion. In the close to three decades following Sontag’s admonition to distinguish between contagion as a metaphor and contagion as an infectious disease, however, scholars exploring contagion have formed an important part of a theoretical reorientation, perhaps loosely termed the New Materialism(s), which, in registering interdependent relationships among language, matter, bodies, objects, and technology, obliterates exactly those distinctions. Arising out of pathbreaking scholarship in the fields of feminism, affect theory, science studies, and media theory—notably in the work of Donna Haraway (1991), Eve Sedgwick (2003), Bruno Latour (2005), and Karen Barad (2007), among many others—the heterogeneous theories that comprise the New Materialisms conceptualize affect, matter, and technology in ways that make strict divisions between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, and language and the real untenable. Scholars investigating contagion have contributed meaningfully to this theoretical turn, as their collective work reveals contagion to be a phenomenon that unsettles precisely because it has always traversed, if not outright refused, such divisions.

Indeed, much of the last decades of humanities scholars’ work on contagion has aimed to historicize what one scholar terms the epistemological anxiety inherent in the term contagion (Beecher 2005, 248). That is, historians of medicine have established that contagion originates first in the Latin (contagio/um), where it literally denotes to touch together (Nutton 2000; Pelling 2001). But although contagio and contagium were widely used from the second century BCE onward, these terms did not yet refer to an ontological, exopathic theory of disease—a theory of disease as a specific entity that invades the body from the outside. Instead, contagion could equally refer to specific diseases, to processes of reproduction and horticulture, to processes of dyeing (a primary denotation of infection), and to other processes of contamination, such as the communication of corrupt morals (Nutton, Pelling). Hence literary scholars who have approached the term contagion in far-flung historical periods have grappled with the way the term carries or connotes meanings that might appear purely figural, or metaphorical, to contemporary readers (Carlin 2005). In particular, scholars of the early modern period through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have explored contagion’s continued utility (alongside developing medical definitions of contagion as generative seminaria, infectious corpuscles, and, finally, germs) to explain imaginative and affective processes that might occur in a crowd, in the theater, or when reading print, particularly poetry or a novel (Fairclough 2013; Floyd-Wilson 2013; Gilman 2009; Shuttleton 2007). In so doing, scholars have also in many cases reaffirmed Sontag’s claims that contagion’s conceptual lability and habitual proliferation are also that which has allowed figures of contagion to be routinely and easily deployed against particular bodies and practices, particularly those marked as abject. This includes women (Cole 2016; Wagner 2013), minority religious groups, foreigners, and the working class (Gil Harris 2004; O’Conner 2000; Tromp, Bachman, and Kaufman 2016), as well as LGBT people (particularly the practices of gay men during the AIDS crisis; see Treichler 1999). But at the same time, scholarship on the history of contagious diseases like the plague has refined theoretical claims, such as those put forth by Georgio Agamben (1998), Michel Foucault (2003), and Roberto Esposito (2008), about modern biopolitics—particularly biopower, or power exercised by the state over biological processes—by demonstrating how contagious diseases visibly displace such sites of power and provide opportunities for contesting political structures (Barney and Scheck 2010; Hammill 2010).

Further, exploring contagion after the so-called bacterial revolution—when in the late nineteenth century, Robert Koch successfully identified the germs causing anthrax and tuberculosis and Dmitri Josipovitch Ivanovsky identified those even smaller phenomena, viruses—humanities scholars have emphasized that these discoveries did not serve to confine contagion to a purely biomedical definition (Bashford and Hooker 2001; Nixon and Servitje 2016). Instead, those definitions were themselves unavoidably shaped by existing cultural narratives. Most notably, as Priscilla Wald (2008) has demonstrated, the dominant twentieth-century narrative of contagious disease (what Wald terms the outbreak narrative), which tracks the discovery of new contagions and their eventual containment by heroic epidemiological researchers, is generated as much from the pages of pulp journalism and midcentury departments of sociology as it is from virology itself. Concomitantly, scholars working in the field of medical humanities have argued that attention to the narratives created by those who are ill can challenge established medical narratives about disease as well as modes of reading dominant in literary criticism itself (Jurecic 2012). Meanwhile, scholars such as Peta Mitchell (2012) have argued for contagion’s continued relevance beyond biomedicine as both a theory of metaphor and a theory of the reproduction of memes. Ultimately, then, as the editors of the most recent Endemic have argued, contagion can be understood as endemic to twenty-first-century culture, where it continues to operate outside biomedicine both as a primary paradigm for conceptualizing social cohesion as well as its unavoidable collective dangers (Nixon and Servitje 2016).

Contagion and the Social Sciences

Scholars in social sciences, like their colleagues in the humanities, have had to contend with, and fight back against, the notion that contagion is the domain of the natural sciences (biology, biomedicine, epidemiology, etc.). For if humanities scholars have traced beliefs in affective contagion (e.g., contagious passions or emotions) in divergent historical periods, scholars across the social sciences have illustrated that emotional processes in the present are in many cases explicitly contagious. Scholars in the social sciences have explored how contagion functions as a social phenomenon, one that leaps across boundaries to reveal the interconnectedness of people as they move, work, and live together.

The concept of contagion in the social sciences has been applied to a wide range of topics across psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other social science fields. Psychologists use the term emotional contagion to address the ways people consciously and unconsciously catch the emotions of others. Notably, emotional states as temporary as a fleeting feeling (e.g., a happy emotion at a party) and as long-lasting as years-long depression can move from person to person (Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock 2014). People feel motivated to regulate their emotions or match their emotions to others based on their social relationships (Huntsinger et al. 2009; Tamir 2016). Social psychologists studying emotional contagion have found that smiles influence relationships between coworkers (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2006) and that narcissism is transmitted between teenagers (Czarna et al. 2015). Further, emotional contagion has gendered qualities, as men, far more than women, try to block the conscious and subconscious transmission of sadness, fear, and love from others (Doherty et al. 1995).

Social contagion has also been shown to influence a variety of seemingly noncontagious aspects of people’s lives—that is, contagion exists for things we typically believe are individual choices not subject to social influence. Social contagion can include fatness (i.e., those with fatter or thinner friends tend to also be fatter or thinner), smoking, cooperative versus noncooperative states of mind, and happiness (Nicholas and Fowler 2013). More dangerously, intergroup biases (including racism and sexism) can also be infectious, transmitted verbally and through nonverbal cues (Weisbuch and Pauker 2011). Ironically, psychologists have been able to establish how feelings of loneliness and isolation are transmitted in conversations between people in large social groups (Cacioppo, Fowler, and Christakis 2009). These studies highlight the ways that contagion enters territory not typically read as contagious, infecting seemingly nonsocial processes with the potential for social exchange and border-crossing.

As an extension of social contagion, social scientists have also outlined the ways in which emotional contagion can impact political activism and political solidarity. Political scientists and sociologists have taken up the idea of contagious affects in the analysis of political activism and social movements. These studies explore how door-to-door political canvassing sways the voting intentions of citizens (Nickerson 2008); how families and close friendships cultivate political sympathies (Burns, Schlozman, and Verba 2001); and how participation in environmental, antiracist, and abortion protests often comes from a personal request to protest (Walgrave and Wouters 2014). The process of diffusion and spread is also crucial to the study of group processes and political struggles. For example, sociologists have addressed how certain goals and tactics spread across cities, states, and nations in feminist (Edwards 2014), black liberation (Andrews and Biggs 2006) and antiwar movements (Heaney and Rojas 2008), while others have studied how welfare reform (Soule and Zylan 1997) or gay rights ordinances have moved between U.S. municipalities and states (Lax and Phillips 2009).

Scholars have also explored how such emotional contagion also spreads vividly through online contacts—virtual contacts that are nonetheless embodied in a variety of different ways, thereby producing networks of contacts, albeit virtual ones. For example, one study found that blackness can be constructed in contagious ways through Twitter, with blacktags producing networked subjects that have the capacity to multiply the possibilities of being raced online (Sharma 2013). As another example, online news articles and videos about contagion only multiplied the power of viral videos. One study dealing with the coverage of Ebola in late 2014 found that each Ebola-related news video inspired tens of thousands of Ebola-related tweets and internet searches (Towers et al. 2015). Social scientists have thus argued that contagion continues to be a vital way to make sense of the often material transformation of people, events, and identities caused by online contacts, as the continual use of the metaphor of virality (to go viral) to describe that process indicates.

Contagion among/across the Disciplines

As this body of vibrant scholarly work demonstrates, investigating contagion (as matter, affect, and theory) reveals its continued centrality for conceptualizing our material and physical worlds (e.g., seminaria, corpuscles, germs, viruses), our ways of relating and communicating (e.g., gestures, verbal and written language, images, technology, social media), and our beliefs about the political (e.g., forms of persuasion, participation, resistance, and control). Our collection’s interdisciplinary work on contagion builds on this scholarship by continuing to conceptualize contagion outside of paradigms of sickness or illness and the immediate signifiers of biomedicine, considering contagion instead as socially and politically expansive. But our collection also aims to create purposeful collisions—risky contacts—between the humanities and social sciences via thinking together about contagion. We believe that the benefits of such thinking together are multiple, not only because contagion is an unruly subject (or phenomenon) that demands such a transhistorical, interdisciplinary approach but also because of the way such collisions continually reshape scholarly aims and ends.

For example, while the humanities and social sciences both consider the individual and collective effects of conceptualizing passions, affects, or emotions as contagious, the operations of that contagion resonate quite differently: literary scholars or historians might be apt to historicize that belief (to explain its generation and particular use), while social scientists might instead seek to demonstrate how emotional contagion and face-to-face conversations impact social processes like bias, perceptions of in-group status or collectivity, and gender roles. And while social scientists (particularly in critical psychology and sociology) might trace the impact of emotions as they are transmitted between individuals and groups, those in the humanities focus intently upon the genres and forms through which contagion (whether physical or emotional) is said to be transmitted.

Bringing together perspectives from the humanities and social sciences, this collection approaches contagion as a site of knowledge and as a diverse set of potentially infectious practices, affects, materialities, and ideologies that are revealed (or postulated) in contagion’s wake. Like any merging of seemingly disparate things, the fusion of so many critical perspectives on contagion—from history and literature to women’s studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and sociology—is risky. Such an expansive view of contagion may minimize or flatten the lived experience of persons who are ill or may create untranslatable disconnects or miscommunications.

And so, in the spirit of feminist practice, our collection seeks to have roots in the personal and political aspects of people’s lived experiences, even as we consider subjects both up close and far away (historically, disciplinarily, textually, psychologically). Further, the chapters in this collection simultaneously consider both what it is that transmits (i.e., what is said to be contagious) and how it transmits, continually highlighting the value of narrating contagion—that is, seeing it not as a disembodied structure for disease and illness but as an embodied, narrated, subjective aspect of people’s lives. We do not strip contagion of its dangers even as we consider its transformative possibilities. For, ultimately, contagion offers a compelling link between the personal and the political as well as material relations and metaphors; it pushes and provokes and, at times, leaps over boundaries and hierarchies. A book on the risky and radical nature of contagion cannot arrive too soon.

Thinking Together: Four Theses on Contagion

The interdisciplinary chapters in this volume were inspired by a conference of the same title held at Arizona State University in the fall of 2015, where presenters were challenged to examine anxious, contradictory, inspiring, and terrifying modes of contagion, including presentations that highlighted the unresolved (and highly productive) tensions embedded within the study of contagion. With literary scholar Priscilla Wald, author of Contagious (2008), and feminist historian Alice Echols, author of Daring to be Bad (1989), as the keynote speakers, the response to the call for papers by humanities and social science scholars alike was overwhelming in its sophistication and breadth. Panelists and keynotes queried the deeper and more sinister implications of widespread revulsion against the diseased other and its social implications. They explored the links between readings and misreadings of literary texts that both look at contagion and serve as their own mode of emotional or even revolutionary contagion. They examined the psychological impact of psychopathy and criminal copycats. They questioned the framing of gay panics and its damaging impact on LGBTQ people, just as they addressed the spread of political protest across space and time. They turned an unflinching gaze on representations of contagion in film and popular culture, revealing the best and worst qualities of nation-states that seek to maintain borders or secure the health of their citizens.

As an outgrowth of this conference, we have selected the best of these papers for this collection and proudly feature a group of scholars who showcase the huge breadth of style, expertise, and generational perspectives on contagion, even as they traverse different time periods, geographies, and languages. Although wildly different in methodology, perspective, scope, and archive, out of this divergent research, we argue four overarching theses about contagion as it continues to transform within the fruitful contact among disciplines. First, and perhaps most explicitly, contagion crosses boundaries, refusing both categorical distinctions and binary differences. Instead, contagion highlights the interdependence of objects, mediums, and bodies, not as separate or analytically distinct, but in relationships that move together. Awareness of contagion suggests that what was once categorized as background suddenly has power and velocity, as the inert—a cup covered in germs, for example—becomes dangerously agential, possessing the capacity to invade other vulnerable targets by virtue of its movement among various human hands and mouths. For better or worse, contagion privileges connection and relation rather than isolation, difference, or distinction; consequently, contagion is inherently transformative at its core, because it does not respect categorical distinction or linear causality. Instead, it habitually jumps between orders—physiological, linguistic, social—that are supposed to be separate and distinct. In so doing, contagion forces a consideration of mediums (i.e., what transmits or communicates) and mediations (i.e., what is transmitted) that muddy cause and effect and render causation increasingly difficult to determine.

Following from this first thesis, our collection affirms that contagion is always already out of individual human control—perceived as excessive, unruly, risky, contradictory, reckless—and as such, contagion provokes a return to classification, to an attribution of risk and safety. Indeed, because what constitutes contagion is frequently invisible, appearing only in its aftereffects, fears about contagion habitually provoke attempts to locate that risk and make it visible. For example, under the virulent, disordering force of those sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plagues, visually distinguishing between individual bodies on the basis of health became untenable, as it was unclear who was infected and yet still appeared healthy. In the absence of visual certainty about individual health, new statistical methods for quantifying and generating the health of the population arose (Foucault 2003; Runsock 2002). And while scholarship on contagion has long noted how risk is attributed to objects, mediums, and bodies, our collection is particularly interested in how that risk or determination of safety is attributed to relationships and behaviors and how that attribution might be politically and personally hazardous or beneficial. The hazards of not seeing risk but nevertheless calculating probable risk—as we do every day with our physical health—means that we die from things we do not expect and seek treatment for things that may not actually harm us (e.g., cholesterol-lowering statin drugs carry significant risks under the guise of routinely improving our health, while invisible nuclear radiation and digital waste are seen as less alarming).

Further, this collection suggests that this vacillation inherent in responses to various forms of contagion—from the illumination of uncertainty and forms of de-individuated, nonhuman agency to the calculation of risk and safety—informs the politics of its use. That is, because contagion moves us away from individual narratives, rhetorics, and practices to those of the group, community, or collective and because contagion also motivates attempts to calculate risk to or from those various communities, we advance as a third thesis that contagion is habitually used to explain, motivate, or inhibit collective movements—even though those attempts are never stable. For not only are fears about contagious diseases often deployed as a rationale for legislation and incarceration (such as the 1864 Contagious Diseases Acts), the contagious proliferation of ideas or emotions in a variety of mediums is also frequently depicted as a workable strategy for generating transformative political revolutions (whether conservative or radical). Contagion can evade control, undermine hierarchy, and wiggle free from the clutches of the powerful. For example, if misogyny and racism played an instrumental (and contagious) role in the trajectory of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, activists then turned to those same mechanisms to generate large-scale protests of those election results (including the January 21, 2017, Women’s March). But in this movement, the internet—oft touted as possessing unlimited potential to democratize information and provide for interpersonal connection and the proliferation of new ideas—also reveals its capacity for the contagious replication of xenophobia, sexism, psychopathology, and violence.

Finally, then, contagion requires constant reevaluation and attention to its political impact; the same thing that protects us could kill us. As a fourth and last thesis, we argue that the moment we see something related to contagion as liberatory, it then can become potentially disempowering, subject to appropriation, distortion, co-optation, corporatization, and institutionalization. (Even more disturbingly, what was transformative can become flattening or even violently oppressive.) Just as sites of biological contagions can become productive after they have harnessed the harmful aspects of contagion for useful purposes—antiviruses, antivenins, flu shots, vaccines—the logic of contagion can turn upon itself and implode. Consequently, anything that is coded as a positive or liberatory form of contagion (such as internet-enabled interconnectivity) should be treated with extreme caution. Contagion is at once narrative-busting, soul-crushing, rebellious, and always on the move, as what was once marked as risky to individual or national health can suddenly become coded as safe (e.g., vaccines) and what appears patently safe to those same bodies can suddenly seem to require an attribution of risk (e.g., silly, comb-over–wearing reality-TV host Donald Trump). In the same way that contagion as a biological entity refuses to stand still, what we identify in our final three theses as the politics of contagion must be habitually interrogated. As justice-minded scholars, our task is to try, however futile it may be, to stay one