Embodying fantasies and realities of contagion

de Bruin-Molé, Megen and Polak, Sara (2021) Embodying fantasies and realities of contagion. In, Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse. (Horror Studies) University of Wales Press, pp. 1-12. (doi:10.16922/contagion).

Abstract

From Outbreak to The Walking Dead, apocalyptic narratives of infection, contagion and global pandemic are an inescapable part of post-millennial popular culture. Yet these fears and fantasies are too virulent to simply be quarantined within fictional texts; vocabulary and metaphors from outbreak narratives have infiltrated how news media, policymakers and the general public view the world and the people within it. In 2008 Priscilla Wald outlined the history of the ‘outbreak narrative’, emphasising the ways in which the politics of fictions and the fictions of politics have always been intertwined. Wald traces contagion from its early uses in the fourteenth century, where it literally meant ‘to touch together’, connoting dangerous or corrupting ideas and attitudes: ‘Revolutionary ideas were contagious, as were heretical beliefs and practices’. In contemporary contexts, we find narratives in which ‘human beings’ futile efforts to defend themselves against the threat of illness in the daily interactions’ are ‘made global by contemporary transportation and commerce’. In all instances, contagion serves as ‘a principle of classification that displayed the rationale of social organization and was, therefore, the force that bound people to the relationships that constituted the terms of their existence’.

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Contributors

Author: Megen de Bruin-Molé

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