Transforming Contagion: Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations 9780813589626

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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 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-­1992. www​.rutgersuniversitypress​.org Manufactured in the United States of America

For Faye

Contents Introduction: Contagion as Unruly Subject 1 BREANNE FAHS, ANNIKA MANN, ERIC SWANK, AND SARAH STAGE

Part I  Quarantine/Exposure 1

“A Proper Contagion”: The Inoculation Narrative and the Immunological Turn 27 C. C. WHARRAM

2

Before the Cell, There Was Virus: Rethinking the Concept of Parasite and Contagion through Contemporary Research in Evolutionary Virology 42 ANNU DAHIYA

3

Social (Ir)Responsibility: Vaccine Exemption and the Ethics of Immunity 56 RACHEL CONRAD BRACKEN

4

Radiophobia and the Politics of Social Contagion 71 MAJIA NADESAN

Part II  Flesh/Spirit 5

Isn’t Contagion Just a Metaphor? Reading Contagion in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year 87 ANNIKA MANN

6

Contagious Accumulation and Racial Capitalism in Late Nineteenth-­Century American Fiction 103 JUSTIN ROGERS-­C OOPER vii

viii  • Contents

7

Performance and the Contagious Swirl of Dramatic Tradition: Performative Revision and Subversion 116 PATRICK MALEY

Part III  Madness/Reason 8

Viral Murder: Contagious Killings and Epidemic Beliefs 133 MARLENE TROMP

9

Am I a Psychopath? 147 SADIE MOHLER

10

Cult of the Penis: Male Fragility and Phallic Frenzy 160 MICHELLE ASHLEY GOHR

Part IV  Revolution/Bureaucracy 11

Fear of the Diseased Immigrant: Contagion, Xenophobia, and Belonging 175 LOUIS MENDOZA

12

Prophylactic Policing and the Epidemiology of Dissent in the Soviet-­Era Baltic States 189 EDWARD COHN

13

Sexual Politics and Contagious Social Movements 204 ERIC SWANK

14

Words on Fire: Radical Pedagogies of the Feminist Manifesto 218 BREANNE FAHS

Acknowledgments 233 Notes on Contributors 235 Index 239

Transforming Contagion

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 1

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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

Introduction  •  3

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

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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

Introduction  •  5

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

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

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

Introduction  •  7

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

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

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.

Introduction  •  9

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

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

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

Introduction  •  11

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-­T V 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 step ahead, to see contagion in new ways, and to imagine how what excites or inspires us may soon haunt and destroy us (or the thing that seems terribly dangerous now may well become a symbol of future celebration). This is an exciting time to look closely at contagion.

To Touch Together Building on these four theses, the chapters herein track the patterns and paradoxes that emerge in the spread of contagion and our attempts to reroute, quarantine, define, or even exacerbate those contagions themselves. The chapters expose the interdependence of seemingly disparate and dissimilar entities, just as they invert risk and safety, examine collectivity and collective movements, and interrogate the possibilities for co-­optation present in the study and spread of contagion. As our collection reveals, even as the speed, invisibility, and transformative power of various contagions habitually frustrate attempts to see, define, and measure, they simultaneously reveal a range of affects, practices, and culturally significant phenomena worthy of further study and perhaps potential deployment. In order to foreground these contradictions and movements, we have chosen to organize the book thematically rather than chronologically, geographically, or disciplinarily. This thematic orientation, which “touches together” methodologies, archives, time periods, and geographies normally held separate, focuses attention upon a divergent set of categorical distinctions that contagion risks traversing, collapsing, or refusing altogether, including the human and the nonhuman, explored in our opening section on “Quarantine/Exposure”; the figurative and the real, explored in our section on “Flesh/Spirit”; the pathological and the normal, explored in our section on “Madness/Reason”; and rebellion

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and order, explored in our final section on “Revolution/Bureaucracy”—­as well as the results of such transversal. This thematic organization invites readers to look at some of the most highly charged clusters of critical, aesthetic, political, and pedagogical connections that coalesce around the topic of contagion in a sustained and interdisciplinary way. Further, through the juxtaposition of different interdisciplinary perspectives, the following four sections—­each highlighting a point of tension in the study of contagion—­offer readers the opportunity to move as contagion does, by leaping across uncomfortable gaps and moving through all-­too-­familiar sites suddenly made strange: we begin with the provocation that contagious diseases may prove salutary to individual and communal health before considering contagions that threaten those individual and communal bodies and end by considering how contagion might provide a model for social disruption and revolution. Along the way, the divergent chapters in this collection track contagion and its effects in many varying forms and are deliberately diverse in their claims, approaches, and methods—­that is, these chapters do not confine themselves to the meaning of contagion post the bacterial revolution (as a germ or virus) but instead also explore contagion as trope, a theory of communication, an anarchist strategy, a governmental tool, or an internet virus. The collection as a whole thus pursues contagion in all its manifold forms across both national and disciplinary boundaries, as the chapters contained herein move from the eighteenth century to the present, from Mexico to Great Britain to the former USSR, exploring contagion as it is defined or enacted in medical texts, poems, prose, performance, digital photography, internet postings, news stories, friendship networks, social organizations, and the university classroom. Finally, beyond refusing one particular mode or meaning of contagion, the collection as a whole also asks whether contagion can be transformed, whether contagion’s dangerous “touching together” is or can become a useful theoretical tool for scholars in the humanities and social sciences, particularly for those who deploy feminist theory, which takes as a central tenet the refusal of destructive, damaging binaries (especially ones that divide public and private spheres). As readers will see, the chapters in this collection offer a wide range of complicated and somewhat contradictory answers to this question: some chapters highlight the productivity of seeing contagion as something that reveals the agency of the things we often ignore or categorize as static, nonagential background, whereas other chapters create new narratives that are useful for progressive politics, including those of collectivity, of the imbrication of the human and the nonhuman world, and especially of the damages of neoliberalism—­a term Patrick Grzanka et al. (2016) rightly argue is so widely and diversely invoked as to create “neoliberal fatigue”—­as well as classism, racism, and sexism. Still other chapters are more cautious, wondering instead

Introduction  •  13

whether contagion’s energies for social change always carry the possibility of new and more effective containment. Our collection begins with contagion’s perhaps most materially risky and disorienting crossing—­contagion’s movement across purported boundaries separating the human and the nonhuman, the living and the dead—­and whether that crossing should be prohibited or embraced. The four chapters of “Quarantine/Exposure” first chart biomedical understandings and uses of contagion from the eighteenth century to the present before moving to contemporary responses to those biomedical certainties about individual and collective risk. As these chapters expose, while eighteenth-­century inoculation proponents and twenty-­first-­century virologists emphasize the productive incorporation of what is nominally called a “disease,” marginalized individuals (particularly mothers) resist establishment medicine’s terms of safety, arguing that contagion is a risk that must be quarantined. First, C. C. Wharram’s “‘A Proper Contagion’: The Inoculation Narrative and the Immunological Turn” returns to the eighteenth century to tell an unfamiliar story about smallpox inoculation. Wharram’s chapter reveals inoculation not as the seamless adoption of a scientific medical breakthrough by an enlightened culture but as the contentious, albeit ultimately successful deployment of three types of contagion: the insertion of actual “foreign matter” into the human body, the acceptance of foreign practices and figuration into the social and linguistic body, and the development of a capacity to think of the human as an alien organism modeled on a plant. For when eighteenth-­ century proponents of inoculation needed to counter their opponents’ xenophobic rhetoric, they found that the Turkish figure of “engrafting” offered an alternative ground for conceiving human adaptation to environmental factors. By imagining the human as analogous to the tree or the plant, proponents could graft their rhetoric onto Lockean discourses of “property” and “improvement,” while simultaneously transforming those discourses from their preoccupation with the individual to a consideration of the communitas. Moving from the earliest proponents of inoculation to the most recent work in virology, Annu Dahiya’s “Before the Cell, there was Virus: Rethinking the Concept of Parasite and Contagion through Contemporary Research in Evolutionary Virology” presents a theoretical reassessment of viral, contagion, and parasite through contemporary scholarship in evolutionary virology. As Dahiya recounts, in the past two decades, virologists have made significant connections between the role of viruses and the evolution of life on Earth. This new strand of research in virology is made possible through an epistemological shift away from thinking about viruses simply as agents of pathological disease and instead emphasizes the generative forces of these biotic entities. This theoretical resuscitation rests on thinking beyond viruses as malignant parasites set on destroying their host. As Dahiya explains, central

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to rethinking what is “viral” are new ways of technological-­scientific seeing or reading the genomes of organisms. The more virologists understand about cellular genomes, the more important it becomes to qualify or stress the multiplicity of different viral-­host relationships that can creatively coexist with and create life. For Dahiya, contemporary research in virology illuminates viruses as a constructive driving force for the creation of cellular life on Earth. This reorientation not only challenges scientific conceptions of viruses, defined as “runaway” former cellular parts, but also forces us to rethink the categories of mutation, contagion, and parasite as they relate to the conceptual understanding of viruses. After considering how contagion might be rethought as beneficial to the individual, collective, or species, the last two chapters in the section interrogate contemporary public health debates over those supposed benefits. In “Social (Ir)responsibility: Vaccine Exemption and the Ethics of Immunity,” Rachel Conrad Bracken traces the variable ethics of immunity used to justify state-­mandated vaccination and vaccine exemption in “mommy blogs” and medical history, mission statements and memoir. Bracken argues that since the earliest days of smallpox inoculation, preventative, population-­level interventions designed to limit the spread of contagious disease have been accused of impinging on individual rights. Central to these debates concerning community belonging and social obligation is what Bracken calls the “ethics of immunity,” the ways in which contagion, immunity, and susceptibility inform the negotiation of individual rights and government responsibility—­the relation of the physical body to the body politic. As Bracken argues, a singular ethics of immunity does not exist; rather, because immunity and susceptibility are stipulated by the embodied experiences of social belonging, the ethics of immunity may preference personal freedom, the public good, or both simultaneously. Ultimately, Bracken’s close reading of the ethics of immunity invoked in contemporary vaccine debates reveals a focus on the temporal, and not merely spatial, parameters of demography, contagious contact, and community belonging. By focusing on when, and not simply where, social interactions occur, she suggests that the ethics of immunity informing public health policy—­and its dissenters—­imagines communities shaped by the temporal as well as geospatial implications of contagion. The final chapter of this opening section explores how metaphors of “contagion” and “pollution” have long been deployed to describe mass media disseminations of oppositional discourses contesting dominant frameworks of risk, as illustrated by research on moral panics about nuclear waste and public health matters. In “Radiophobia and the Politics of Social Contagion,” Majia Nadesan contends that moral panics are crucial for understanding contemporary internet battles for public opinion and disinformation tactics, such as artificially engineering scientific dogmatism around hotly contested scientific

Introduction  •  15

issues. In particular, Nadesan’s chapter demonstrates how scientific dogmatism is deployed in the nuclear establishment meme of “radiophobia,” a concept developed during the Cold War to create panics around the fears of atomic annihilation. She demonstrates its utilization by authorities most recently in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in order to marginalize and deny oppositional memes, both scientific and eschatological, that argue for potentially catastrophic effects from long-­term radionuclide contamination of the environment and bioaccumulation in living organisms. Nadesan explores how, in response, Fukushima mothers must navigate competing memes in their efforts to protect their children from disputed but potentially catastrophic risks, including rising rates of thyroid cancer. Both Bracken’s and Nadesan’s chapters point our collection toward questions about contagion’s relationship to embodiment and to forms of communication, as they investigate whether digital communities operate along different axes of risk than those of embodied collectivities. In the chapters in our next section, “Flesh/Spirit,” three scholars take up contagion’s identification with different means of communication across the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, exploring how such identifications variously redefine contagion—­as matter, affect, and practice—­even as they suggest the riskiness of particular mediums and genres. Ultimately, in tracing how contagion is imagined to be communicated by print narratives, by compulsive capitalist practices, and by eloquent performances, these chapters grapple with the potential results of contagion’s manifestation in linguistic forms. First, Annika Mann, in “Isn’t Contagion Just a Metaphor? Reading Contagion in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year,” ponders the history of contagion’s conceptual flexibility, long considered a problem for contemporary literary scholars. Operating both before and after the bacterial revolution as a theory of disease and of metaphor, contagion’s conceptual looseness has been argued to risk the collapse a scholar’s methodology and object of study. But Mann argues that the peculiar flexibility of theories of contagion during the eighteenth century, when contagion operated as a theory of communicable passions and matter, allows for the term’s political utility during that period: to interrogate the act of reading in the age of print’s great expansion. As Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year reveals, contagion provides an opportunity for literary writers to investigate the act of reading when print technology was reaching an ever-­growing collective of readers. Mann argues that, under the pressure of contagion, Defoe’s Journal reveals reading as a simultaneously imaginative and haptic activity, one that contains the potential to communicate collective force and explode generic distinctions. In “Contagious Accumulation and Racial Capitalism in Late Nineteenth-­ Century American Fiction,” Justin Rogers-­ Cooper explores how late nineteenth-­century American fiction turned to the concept of contagion

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to explain the economic and racial crises punctuating life at the turn of the twentieth century. Reading a cluster of “social problem novels” published by Charles Chesnutt, Frank Norris, and Mark Twain, he describes how capitalist practices of accumulation, and fantasies of such accumulation, functioned as affectively acute contagions. Rogers-­Cooper argues that these novels pose contagious accumulation as an integral practice of capitalist culture rather than an exception to it. Further, the novels imagine the culture of such accumulation as a practice of euphoric crowds and narrate such practices as collective projects of common classes. At the same time, these novels also represent contagious accumulation as eroticized or embodied excitements, in which the desire for accumulation leads to individual and social collapse or even racial violence. For Rogers-­Cooper, such narratives parallel but contest the emergence of contagion as a conceptual vehicle for Victorian, Gilded Age, and World War I–­era intellectuals who attempted to explain chronic social crises within eugenic frameworks. Finally, in “Performance and the Contagious Swirl of Dramatic Tradition: Performative Revision and Subversion,” Patrick Maley argues that drama, theater, and performance demonstrate a model of aesthetic influence that breaks from chronological order by following the uncertain and haphazard path of contagion. Countering traditional models of artistic influence, Maley argues that the unique, and contagious, dynamics of performance suggest instead an aesthetic matrix that constantly shapes and reshapes dramatic history. For Maley, every performance raises the possibility for playwrights to retroactively influence their predecessors (as Eugene O’Neill reshapes Shakespeare or Annie Baker influences Chekhov) at the same time as they productively infect the thinking of audiences, critics, scholars, and other artists. Concentrating on the potential of performance to infect its audience and exploring how responses to performance act as contagions, Maley argues further that the unique operation of drama and performance highlights the potentially subversive power of theater. In the same way that performance is constantly able to affect the thinking of its audience about genre in unpredictable ways, so too is it able to challenge social and political hegemonies, subjecting them to the perpetual threat of revision. For Maley, it is little wonder that authorities have been so eager to shut down and censor theater throughout history: the contagion of performance proves productively dangerous. The nature of embodied performance and its potential for transformation leads us to a group of scholars thinking about how contagion’s loose conceptualization is habitually narrowed in a more sinister way: to categorize disorder and acts of violence and aggression within, against, or by the state. Moving from the more expansive possibilities of conceptualizing contagion, then, this section considers contagion specifically as it has functioned as a label for “disturbed” selves as well as violent affects and practices. As such, the three

Introduction  •  17

chapters in the section on “Madness/Reason” simultaneously explore varying constructions of the pathological and the normal, as well as what is argued to be infectious, or contagious, in those constructions. Further, beginning with an exploration of spectacular violence—­murder—­in the nineteenth century and culminating with an exploration of the contemporary “dick pic,” these chapters ask whether violence, or even psychopathy itself, is contagious and what people or groups are impacted when such a criminalizing label is so applied. But the chapters in this section also seriously explore the source and content of replicating violence, whether it occurs in media narratives, phallic imagery, or toxic masculinity. In “Viral Murder: Contagious Killings and Epidemic Beliefs,” Marlene Tromp argues that, while we assume that people exposed to criminality are likely to become criminals themselves, there may, in fact, be other forms of “contagion” in murder cases that are more apposite in assessing criminality. For Tromp, developing a better understanding of the varieties of “copycat contagion” in murder cases is critical if we hope to engage and respond to murder meaningfully. To come to this critical understanding, Tromp turns to our own historical context, arguing that we are often better readers of historical parallels than we are of our own moment because we are less emotionally attached to the belief systems. The case of Henry Wainwright in 1871 illuminates how Wainwright imitated strategies in widely disseminated—­“contagious”—­public stories of murder when he killed his lover. Equally important, however, are the ways in which social expectations about the perpetrators and victims permitted him to go free until he was caught, “red-­handed,” a year after the murder with her decomposing, dismembered body in his possession. The incapacity to trace his victim’s disappearance to the most likely perpetrator had everything to do with social stories about their roles: a wealthy businessman seemed an unlikely murderer and his victim, a “fallen” woman, did not seem worthy of much compassion. It took the bullets in her head and the knife wound on her throat to jar the police and public into reading the story differently. As Tromp illustrates, the stories we tell about murder play a key role in teaching us how to identify perpetrators and victims—­including what we believe about their skin color and sexual practices. We repeat the narratives that make sense to us and then read the world around us in the framework of those stories. Murder is not only contagious as a practice. It is contagious in its presumptions. For Tromp, we must transform the stories in order for justice to be done. Sadie Mohler’s chapter, “Am I a Psychopath?,” examines the viral spread of the question “Am I a psychopath?” Arguing that the psychopath is a historically ill-­defined and overused diagnostic category, Mohler analyzes the discursive development and cultural permutation of the psychopathic personality within psychiatry and law to examine the categorical flexibility and fragility of the diagnosis. The crux of Mohler’s concern regarding psychopathy hinges

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on the understanding that the identity must be assigned to another person by a mental health expert, for what makes the psychopath so threatening is his or her inability to empathize and care about his or her own condition or reputation. However, within the last decade, the discourse around psychopathy has noticeably shifted toward self-­labeling, as thousands of people have turned to the internet to ask the question “Am I a psychopath?” In posing this paradoxical concern, the functionality of the psychopathic identity shifts from the psychopathic “other” to the psychopathic “self.” This shift reconfirms the categorical pliancy of the psychopath and, furthermore, radically blurs the symbiotic relationship between the self and the other as people are applying the ultimate other—­the psychopath—­to the self. For Mohler, examining the viral outbreak of the question “Am I a psychopath?” in blog posts, online articles, and Google search results reveals intimate and interdependent relation­ships among what is habitually understood via categorical difference: self and other, madness and reason. Moving from the virality of self-­diagnosis to that of phallic imagery, Michelle Ashley Gohr’s “Cult of the Penis: Male Fragility and Phallic Frenzy” uses the spread of the “dick pic” to examine “ordinary” and everyday misogyny. Taking up the astonishingly pervasive circulation of dick pics across the globe, Gohr frames the dick pic as a contagion, one connected to male fragility and the fear of the vagina. By inundating society with phallic imagery, Gohr argues that the dominant culture succeeds in concealing the feminine and reinforcing masculinity through symbolic order reinforced by the unwanted sharing of male genitalia via social media. Gohr ultimately argues that the fear and distrust of women and the vagina stem from the fragility of masculinity (and, ultimately, failed masculinities) and the threat that the vagina (and vaginal imagery) poses to existing power structures, particularly seen in the explosion of contagious dick pics and the suppression of vaginal imagery. Gohr’s reminder of the stakes of identifying things that contagiously replicate takes us to the final set of questions for our collection—­whether contagion ultimately works to foment revolution or to aid the repressive apparatuses of the modern state. In our final section, “Revolution/Bureaucracy,” four scholars consider whether contagion—­as a trope, a mode of operation, a form of social control, or a mode of feminist practice—­can aid in rebellion or provide for more extensive state control. These chapters ask, finally, “Can contagion efface binaries, upend stock theories, and foment revolution and collective rebellions, or does it always return to and indeed reproduce the status quo?” In “Fear of the Diseased Immigrant: Contagion, Xenophobia, and Belonging,” Louis Mendoza argues that the 2014 immigration “crisis”—­a result of the large number of unaccompanied minors who entered the United States from Central America as refugees of brutal violence, oppressive dictatorships, and economic devastation—­resurrected a historic pattern of “America

Introduction  •  19

firsters” who characterized the immigrants as a health threat. Mendoza argues that at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, the United States witnessed sweeping social, political, economic, and demographic transformations that were accompanied by a rise in racism, xenophobia, and rhetoric that yoked social ills with foreigners and foreigners with germs and contagion. Despite the significant advancement of global health care in both eras, new immigrants have been consistently associated with germs and contagion and thereby maligned in the popular imaginary. Mendoza’s chapter explores how anti-­immigrant rhetoric and policies are often articulated in the media through an explicitly medical language framework that tries to make the policies seem clinical and health-­based, but the line between perceived and actual danger is slippery and lends itself to panic and hyperbole. These powerful anti-­ immigration narratives linking foreigners to disease thrive despite medical research that reveals the falsehood of these claims. By examining how immigrants have been stigmatized as the source of contagion at critical junctures in our national history, Mendoza also addresses important questions about the shifting nature of citizenship and belonging as well as strategies Latinos have used to combat these anti-­immigrant narratives. The next chapter continues to explore the role of contagion in the rhetoric of, and response to, state-­sponsored power, even as it shifts both geographically and temporally. Edward Cohn, in “Prophylactic Policing and the Epidemiology of Dissent in the Soviet-­Era Baltic States,” argues that, between Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 and the USSR’s collapse in 1991, a common KGB tool in the struggle with dissent was a tactic called profilaktika (or “prophylaxis”). In profilaktika cases, the KGB did not officially arrest minor political dissidents but invited them to its offices for a so-­called chat, in which a police officer convinced his victim to confess and warned of dire consequences if he or she broke the law again. Cohn’s chapter analyzes profilaktika cases from the USSR’s Baltic republics—­the Russian satellites where anti-­Soviet feeling was strongest—­to argue that the KGB often based its activity on an epidemiological model of dissent. Cohn first demonstrates that the KGB believed that the spread of violence—­like the diffusion of a disease—­could be understood through the interaction of three factors: an external agent, a susceptible host, and their environment. Then Cohn likens the assumptions of profilaktika to the American criminological theory of broken-­windows policing, showing that KGB officers hoped to prevent large-­scale unrest by cracking down on low-­level offenses that threatened public order and weakened the regime’s legitimacy. Finally, Cohn argues that Soviet officials were especially worried about political contamination in cases involving influence from abroad. In short, Soviet officials believed that political unrest behind the Iron Curtain could be managed and contained through the language and methodology of science, pursuing an epidemiological model of dissent that drew from the

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

regime’s revolutionary ideology and sophisticated models from medicine and social science. Building on themes of social unrest and the ways that times of social stress can yield both oppressive and liberatory ideologies and practices, Eric Swank, in “Sexual Politics and Contagious Social Movements,” takes up the metaphor of contagion to show its qualities as a contradictory force in the search for justice by LGBTQ groups. That is, Swank illuminates the ways in which contagion narratives can be deployed as a mechanism to maintain heterosexual privilege, with U.S. conservatives stirring up fears of “gay contagion” as justification for homophobic practices backed by institutions like the state, education, church, and schools. At the same time, Swank argues that similar mechanisms—­infection, disease, spread—­can be used by progressives to transform heterosexual allies into activists. Drawing upon social science studies of social contagion—­from studies that show that people believe you can “catch gayness” and that “immorality” can be transferred through clothing to studies that provide a more hopeful portrait of activist responses to social inequalities—­Swank offers an intriguing window into the contradictory, problematic, and heavily politicized notions of contagion as related to the practices that maintain and challenge heteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality. Our collection culminates with an exploration of the political possibilities and dangers of contagion (both liberatory and oppressive) in the academy specifically, particularly how radical work made possible by fields like women and gender studies can infect the contemporary university. In the final chapter of the collection, “Words on Fire: Radical Pedagogies of the Feminist Manifesto,” Breanne Fahs traces the pedagogical utility of teaching about the contagious nature of manifestos and asking her students to write their own manifestos. Taking up the history of the manifesto as understudied, misused, and (tragically) appropriated by corporate culture, she makes an argument for the necessity of looking closely at manifestos as sites of the infectious spread of dangerous ideas. In both content (revolutionary, hot-­headed, angry) and style (the words and tone as mechanisms to communicate emotion), manifestos—­and specifically feminist manifestos—­work to contagiously infect their readers and listeners while also fighting back against oppressive practices and ideologies. After looking at the contradictory and difficult history of the manifesto, she briefly considers three quintessential feminist manifestos—­Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Jo Freeman’s Bitch Manifesto, and Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto—­before arguing that students too can (and should) write angry, emotional, and contagious manifestos within the feminist classroom. She concludes the piece—­and we end our collection—­with excerpts from some of her students’ manifesto work, revealing the ways that these new and emerging voices, speaking from the

Introduction  •  21

margins and often discarded as unworthy of scholarly celebration, are instead to be regarded as themselves infectiously rambunctious, self-­determined, and wildly intersectional. Together, this collection offers a reading of contagion that acknowledges its own rambunctious and unruly nature, seeing promise in its inability to stay within borders and boundaries. We return again and again to the ways that contagion, as it transforms, creates productive new sites of interaction and relationships, challenging and upsetting the existing social order. It can be deployed as a force of broad interconnectivity—­as infection and invasion, revolution, or oppression and domination. Ultimately, we collectively look closely at contagion as a lively force of historical and contemporary meaning-­ making, where risky contacts pave the way for new ways of seeing, doing, and living.

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Doherty, R. William, Lisa Orimoto, Theodore M. Singelis, Elaine Hatfield, and Janine Hebb. 1995. “Emotional Contagion, Gender, and Occupational Differences.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 19:355–­371. Echols, Alice. 1989. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–­1975. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Edwards, Gemma. 2014. “Infectious Innovations? The Diffusion of Tactical Innovation in Social Movement Networks, the Case of Suffragette Militancy.” Social Movement Studies 13:48–­69. Esposito, Roberto. 2008. Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Translated by Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fairclough, Mary. 2013. The Romantic Crowd: Sympathy, Controversy, and Print Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Floyd-­Wilson, Mary. 2013. Occult Knowledge: Science and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–­1976. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador. Gilbert, Pamela K. 1997. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gil Harris, Jonathan. 2004. Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gilman, Ernest. 2009. Plague Writing in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grzanka, Patrick R., Emily S. Mann, and Sinikka Elliott. 2016. “The Neoliberalism Wars, or Notes on the Persistence of Neoliberalism.” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 13 (4): 297–­307. Hammill, Graham. 2010. “Miracles and Plagues: Plague Discourse as Political Thought.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 (2): 85–­104. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Heaney, Michael, and Fabio Rojas. 2008. “Coalition Dissolution, Mobilization, and Network Dynamics in the US Antiwar Movement.” Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 28:39–­82. Hennig-­Thurau, Thorsten, Markus Groth, Michael Paul, and Dwayne D. Gremler. 2006. “Are All Smiles Created Equal? How Emotional Contagion and Emotional Labor Affect Service Relationships.” Journal of Marketing 70:58–­73. Huntsinger, Jeffrey R., Janetta Lun, Stacey Sinclair, and Gerald L. Clore. 2009. “Contagion without Contact: Anticipatory Mood Matching in Response to Affiliative Motivation.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35 (7): 909–­922. Jurecic, Ann. 2012. Illness as Narrative. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Kramer, Adam D. I., Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock. 2014. “Experimental Evidence of Massive-­Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (24): 8788–­8790. Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lax, Jeffrey R., and Justin H. Phillips. 2009. “Gay Rights in the States: Public Opinion and Policy Responsiveness.” American Political Science Review 103:367–­386. Matland, Richard E., and Donley T. Studlar. 1996. “The Contagion of Women Candidates in Single-­Member District and Proportional Representation Electoral Systems: Canada and Norway.” Journal of Politics 58:707–­733.

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Mitchell, Peta. 2012. Contagious Metaphor. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Nickerson, David. 2008. “Is Voting Contagious? Evidence from Two Field Experiments.” American Political Science Review 102:49–­57. Nixon, Kari, and Lorenzo Servitje. 2016. “The Making of a Modern Endemic: An Introduction.” In Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory, edited by Kari Nixon and Lorenzo Servitje, 1–­17. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nutton, Vivian. 2000. “Did the Greeks Have a Word for It? Contagion and Contagion Theory in Classical Antiquity.” In Contagion: Perspectives from Premodern Societies, edited by L. I. Conrad and D. Wajastyk, 137–­162. Aldershot: Ashgate. O’Connor, Erin. 2000. Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Pelling, Margaret. 2001. “The Meaning of Contagion: Reproduction, Medicine, and Metaphor.” In Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies, edited by Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker, 15–­38. London: Routledge. Porter, Stephen. 2000. The Great Plague. London: Sutton. Runsock, Andrea. 2002. Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-­ Century England and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sedgwick, Eve. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press. Sharma, Sanjay. 2013. “Black Twitter? Racial Hashtags, Networks, and Contagion.” New Formations 78 (1): 46–­64. Shuttleton, David E. 2007. Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660–­1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sontag, Susan. 1990. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador. Soule, Sara A., and Yvonne Zylan. 1997. “Runaway Train: The Diffusion of State-­Level Reforms in AFDC Eligibility Requirements.” American Journal of Sociology 103:733–­762. Tamir, Maya. 2016. “Why Do People Regulate Their Emotions? A Taxonomy of Motives in Emotion Regulation.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 20 (3): 199–­222. Towers, Sherry, Shehzad Afzal, Gilbert Bernal, Nadya Bliss, et al. 2015. “Mass Media and the Contagion of Fear: The Case of Ebola in America.” PLOS One 10 (6): e0129179. https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1371/​journal​.pone​.0129179. Treichler, Paula A. 1999. How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS. Durham: Duke University Press. Tromp, Marlene, Maria Bachman, and Heidi Kaufman. 2016. Fear, Loathing, and Victorian Xenophobia. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press. Wagner, Corrina. 2013. Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Popular Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Walgrave, Stefaan, and Ruud Wouters. 2014. “The Missing Link in the Diffusion of Protest: Asking Others.” American Journal of Sociology 119:1670–­1709. Weisbuch, Max, and Kristin Pauker. 2011. “The Nonverbal Transmission of Intergroup Bias: A Model of Bias Contagion with Implications for Social Policy.” Social Issues and Policy Review 5 (1): 257–­291.

1

“A Proper Contagion” The Inoculation Narrative and the Immunological Turn C. C. WHARRAM

In the intellectual marketplace of the twenty-­first century, immunology’s stock is on the rise. Thinkers as diverse and influential as Donna Haraway (1991), Jean Baudrillard (1993), Niklas Luhmann (1995), Jacques Derrida (2005), Roberto Esposito (2008, 2010, 2011), and Peter Sloterdijk (2013) have, with increasing intensity, discovered in the figure of immunity a way to bring the political into contact with the biological (for a brief encapsulation of recent critical thought on immunity, see Campbell 2005). This interdisciplinary property of immunity—­its biopolitical resonance—­can be easily traced in the history of the word itself. After all, immunity signified a political or legal status (e.g., diplomatic immunity) long before it ever referred to the way an organism defends itself from contagion (Esposito 2010, 6; 2011, 5–­6). Yet histories of immunology tend to gloss over an early chapter in the formation of the discipline: the introduction and propagation of smallpox inoculation in the early 1700s. Indeed, inoculation embodies the very border-­and discipline-­crossing (or hybridizing) tendency that the study of immunology has enjoyed these past few decades. As I will later explain, the term inoculation (in use from the fifteenth century) originally referred to the production of hybrid plants by horticultural grafting. It was not until the 1710s that the English word inoculation 27

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was newly applied to the practice of inducing a benign case of smallpox in patients; the British learned how to inoculate from the Turks, who used this same horticultural metaphor to refer to a medical procedure—­this example of “translating a metaphor” being another form of border-­crossing. This chapter examines the intersections of inoculation with what Esposito (2011) calls the “immunitary paradigm” (2008, 45–­77; 2011, 7–­8). It argues that we can produce a more nuanced and precise understanding of the history of immunology by reconsidering the foundational figure of contagion. While immunity has become an anchor for biopolitical inquiry into social, political, psychological, and economic relations, our notions of immunity have downplayed the history of inoculation. That is, before Foucault’s (2008) “birth of bio-­politics” of the 1740s, there was smallpox inoculation (20–­21). Inviting inoculation’s radical reevaluation of contagion into the histories of immunology, I argue, expands the promise and reach of biopolitical thinking.

The Immunological Turn Citing the recent writings of Peter Sloterdijk ([2009] 2013), Bruno Latour (2012) declared that “immunology [is] the great philosophy of biology” (160). Latour’s proclamation foregrounds immunology’s propensity for transcending disciplinary boundaries: biology and philosophy find themselves, according to Latour’s reading of Sloterdijk, melded in immunology. Immunity, moreover, is now the central term of inquiry in the interdisciplinary study of biopolitics, located at the intersection of the biological and the political (267). We appear to have experienced an “immunological turn” without our noticing. The philosophical resonances of immunology have become crucial to twenty-­first-­century considerations of biopolitical phenomena, from the technological to the geopolitical. For example, Donna Haraway (1991) argued for a transformation of our concept of the “postmodern body” through an analysis of “discourses of immunology,” whose job is to negotiate “questions about the boundaries of the self ” (208, 214). For Haraway, by upgrading our frame of reference from a nineteenth-­to a late twentieth-­century immunological discourse, we might abandon the notion of “the immune system as battlefield” in exchange for an immunity built on “the semi-­permeable self able to engage with others (human and non-­human, inner and outer)” (224, 225). More recently, Jacques Derrida (1998, 2003, 2005) has refigured many of the key concepts of his earlier writings—­différance, iterability, aporia, pharmakon—­in the figure of “autoimmunity.” Transposing the autoimmune response of “protecting itself against its self-­protection by destroying its own immune system” from the “living organism” onto a social or political platform (such as religion or the state), Derrida (1998) examines the “terrifying but inescapable logic of the autoimmunity of the unscathed” and suggests that the drive for absolute

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protection (the desire to remain “unscathed”) triggers an autoimmunitary process (73n27). In his analysis of the events of September 11, 2001, as “autoimmunitary,” Derrida (2003) describes how the U.S. body politic “in quasi-­suicidal fashion” paved the way for the traumatic events by “training people like ‘bin Laden’” and “creating the politico-­military circumstances that would favor their emergence and their shifts in allegiance” (94, 95). Finally, in Rogues, Derrida (2005) turns to the autoimmune potential proper to democracy itself, citing the canceled elections of Algeria in 1992, the election of “fascist and Nazi totalitarianisms” in Europe, and internally directed police interrogations and surveillance in the post-­9/11 United States as examples (30–­40). In a democracy, the popular voice can turn on itself, suspending or abolishing democratic institutions: “There is something paradigmatic in this autoimmune suicide” (31). In Contagious, a sustained examination and critique of the “outbreak narrative,” Priscilla Wald (2008) reformulates Benedict Anderson’s (1991) influential geopolitical conception of “imagined communities” into a twenty-­first-­century biogeopolitical context—­what she calls “imagined immunities” (2008, 29–­67). In so doing, Wald persuasively argues that immunity has become the privileged framework for theoretical approaches to analyses of the nation and of “community.” This reconfiguration and central positioning of immunity is nowhere more evident than in the writings of Sloterdijk and Esposito, two “immunitary theorists” (Brown and Williams 2015, 11) who share the conviction that the project of modernity entailed a significant shift in the figuring of immunity (the useful term immunitary theorist is a coinage of Nik Brown and Rosalind Williams 2015). Sloterdijk envisions an ethical “immunological turn” (Lemmons 2015, 58) in an account of “Homo immunologicus”—­the historical evolution of ever more complex “inner worlds” or “immuno-­spheres” through which humanity has defended itself against alien invaders, against extrinsic contagion (Sloterdijk 2013, 10). Esposito (2010) posits an “immunitary paradigm” operative in modernity since at least the seventeenth century: “Immunization is so important that it can be taken as the explicative key of the entire modern paradigm” (12). According to Esposito (2011, 86), Thomas Hobbes inaugurates this paradigm (however unconsciously) in the mid-­1600s with a strong central authority, a “sovereign” who in “modernity’s most celebrated immune scenario” assumes the role of social and political arbiter by attaining legal “immunity” to the rules and regulations to which all other members of the community must submit (in order to keep from killing each other in a “state of nature”). Immunity was central to Hobbesian governance but was absolutely restricted to sovereign power. John Locke, however, represents the crucial entry point into this “immunitary paradigm.” The newfound acknowledgment of individuals in their sovereignty, property, and liberty became, in Esposito’s (2008) analysis, the

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means by which individuals asserted their own boundaries in order to avoid being subsumed within the larger community framework, as articulated in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government of 1690. That is, their (individual) immunity from the demands of the “common” was central to the establishment of civil governance (Esposito 2008, 63–­69). As legal historian Lynne Curry (2002) has convincingly shown, Locke’s “theoretical construction” of property rights based on owning one’s own body—­“every Man has a Property in his own Person” (287), to which I return below—­and the concomitant “obligation to refrain from harming another’s property” were formative in the legal discourses of English common law and, subsequently, in the American colonies and the United States. Locke thus established “a strong ideological link extending over centuries [that] brought together the concepts of individual liberty, private property, and bodily autonomy in Anglo-­American legal culture” (Curry 2002, 6). And as Niklas Luhmann (1995) has argued, “the legal system serves as society’s immune system” (374). Luhmann, on whom Esposito (2011) draws in his elucidation of the immunitary paradigm (44–­51), explains that “one can see the nexus of law and the immune system more clearly if one considers that the law is formed in anticipation of possible conflict” (1995, 374). Lockean “proprietary logic” becomes, in Esposito’s (2008) reading, the retroactive origin (preceding even the “immunity” granted to a sovereign arbiter) of a social organization predicated on immunology (65). Locke’s notion of property moves outward from “an immediately biological reference” (i.e., the body): “Just as work is an extension of the body, so is property an extension of work.” Esposito calls this “a sort of prosthesis” through which the individual owns by virtue of “transitive property” (65–­66). Property comes into being, then, by being drawn into the circle connected to an individual—­or, to splice together Sloterdijk and Esposito, into an “immuno-­sphere” of the propria. This act of making propria, making one’s own, stands in a negative relation to the potential for communitas. The opposing force to Locke’s private and privatizing (i.e., appropriating) individual is the threat of the communal “contagion”: “Modern individuals truly become that, the perfectly individual, the ‘absolute’ individual, bordered in such a way that they are isolated and protected [‘immune’], but only if they are freed in advance from the ‘debt’ that binds them one to the other; if they are released from, exonerated, or relieved of that contact, which threatens their identity, exposing them to possible conflict with their neighbor, exposing them to the contagion of the relation with others” (Esposito 2011, 13, emphasis added). The act of appropriation, or carving property out of the communal, functions for Locke as a means of protection—­a metaphorical but also a legal boundary between the enclosed self and the “contagion of the relation with others.” Yet it was a scant twenty-­ five years after Locke’s writing of Two Treatises of Government, this foundational text of the “immunitary paradigm,” that the controversy of smallpox

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inoculation erupted onto the British scene, tossing this clearly marked dichotomy into chaos. At the same time, proponents of inoculation would explicitly expound Lockean proprietary logic by stressing how smallpox inoculation facilitated “improvement” (a Lockean attribute fundamental to the logic of appropriation and enclosure) while throwing that logic into utter turmoil through the boundary-­smashing incorporation of deliberate, foreign “contagion.” These contradictions were both suspended and transcended in the notion of “a proper contagion,” to which I will now turn.

“A Proper Contagion” Genealogies of immunology tend to omit—­or, at best, to marginalize—­the role of early eighteenth-­century smallpox inoculation in the development of the science.1 Opening with a cursory acknowledgment that humans have long observed that surviving exposure to a disease produces a long-­term immunity to subsequent threats of contagion, the standard account quickly skips forward to the “scientific” era, with both Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur featured prominently and heroically. Most often credited as “the founder of immunology,” Jenner synthesized a smallpox vaccine from cowpox after observing in the 1790s that the milkmaids in his rural home in southern England rarely contracted severe cases of smallpox—­vaccination etymologically derived from the Latin vacca for “cow” (Cruse and Lewis 2010, 3). Pasteur applied these discoveries to other contagions, using the term vaccination in “honor of Jenner” to refer to all such artificially induced immunities (“Pasteur” 1885, 365). Inoculation’s disappearance in these tales is symptomatic. As Haraway (1991) argues, discourses of immunology trace a “heroic quest” produced by men of genius (205). The story of inoculation, on the other hand, centers on a figure neither scientist nor man: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Moreover, immunological histories contaminate our current biopolitical discourse. When Esposito (2011) claims that the “biological perspective” of immunity of most interest to him is the passage “from natural to acquired immunity,” he first makes the cursory immunological nod to the ancients (“an early instance is to be found in Lucan’s Pharsalia”) before leaping to “the turn . . . between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, first with the discovery of a measles [sic] vaccine by Jenner, and then with the experiments by Pasteur and Koch” (7). A “return to inoculation” in all its reverberations (rather than vaccination), I argue, will enrich the newly discovered centrality of philosophical, social, and political immunity. Smallpox inoculation involved reading contagion not simply as dangerous but as potentially beneficial. Moreover, inoculation signified a further incorporation of alterity, since its point of origin was clearly non-­European. Whether originating in Asia or Africa (Herbert 1975; Rusnock

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2002, 43), smallpox inoculation entailed the acceptance of an entirely foreign practice. While English uses of contagion have tended to stress its connection to disease, poison, and infection from Early Renaissance plagues through to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the Latin root of contagion—­con as “together” and tangĕre as “to touch”—­does not definitively connote a negative experience. To foreground an alternative narrative, I invoke the resonant phrase “a proper Contagion,” used in the first published treatise on smallpox inoculation (Timonius 1717, 73). The history of inoculation accentuates a more positive reading of contagion and forces us to reconsider foreign externality not as a source of disease, poison, or infection but as a necessary incorporation of otherness. When the “contagion” becomes the “proper,” when otherness is internalized, the body (whether individual or corporate) becomes better able to negotiate a global ecology. As the etymology of in-­oculation reveals, the internalization (in-­) of an external perspective or foreign “eye” (-­oculus) produces an improved, hybridized body, better adapted to encounter an expanding world. The early story of inoculation is far more interesting, and more intensely public, than typical histories of immunology describe. Discourse generated around inoculation during the eighteenth century is remarkable for its sheer volume. In the English-­speaking world, more than 175 separate books and pamphlets specifically addressed the question of the smallpox “contagion” and its “inoculation,” or the synonymous term engrafting. Louis-­Sébastien Mercier’s (1772) entertaining science fiction novel Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred offers a glimpse into the debate. The novel’s time-­ traveling protagonist describes a visit to the “Inoculation Hospital,” during which he learns that the refusal of the French in the 1700s to accept smallpox inoculation becomes a matter of retrospective scorn to his French informants of the year 2500: “Sooner or later truth will prevail  [  .  .  .  ]. We now practise inoculation, as they did in your time in China, Turk[e]y, and England” (I. 71–­72). Mercier’s fanciful vision of an inoculating future for France chronicles why this story fails to hold much traction in histories of immunology: it was common knowledge that smallpox inoculation had long been the norm in China and Turkey, and as Mercier implies, it was French xenophobia that censured this “foreign” treatment. Africans also performed inoculation long before Europeans. The first smallpox inoculations in Europe resulted from Lady Montagu’s importation of the practice to England in 1721, but before it connoted anything whatsoever to do with a medical practice, the word inoculation referred to a way of producing hybrid plants through the grafting of a stock from one organism onto another. An eighteenth-­ century horticultural guidebook explains: “The insertion or inoculation of a [ . . . ] bud [or eye] into [ . . . ] a stock [allows] for the improvement and propagation of fruit trees” (A New

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Treatise 1780, 41–­42). When the early eighteenth-­century ear heard inoculation, the word would have sounded similar to the term grafting to ours. Just as the knife of the gardener slips back the bark of the tree to insert the bud, or “eye,” of the grafting organism, so too the medical inoculator runs a blade transverse to the skin in order to form a slit into which some of the “the Seeds of this Disease” would be implanted (Boylston 1727, vi). The “oculus” embedded in the etymology of inoculation, then, is the eye or bud of a plant. Indeed, the first use of the word inoculation to refer to a medical practice in English, published as a letter from Dr.  Emanuel Timonius of Constantinople in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions, explicitly acknowledges that the word inoculation derives from a Turkish figure of speech alluding to the horticultural improvement of fruit trees through engrafting: “The Method of the Operation is thus. Choice being made of a proper Contagion, the Matter of the Pustules is to be communicated to the Person proposed to take the Infection; whence it has, metaphorically, the name of Inoculation” (1717, 73). When Montagu brought smallpox inoculation to London, then, she not only imported a Turkish medical practice but also propagated a Turkish metaphor. This phrase—­“a proper Contagion”—­is particularly striking, appearing as it does in the very first publication in which the

FIGURE 1.1  Plate 6 from Bradley’s New Improvements of Planting and Gar-

dening (1726) illustrates the preparatory stages (“The Mark made in the Bark for the Bud” and “A Bud prepared for putting into the Incision made in the Stock”) for various types of horticultural grafting, including “Budding or Inoculating” (second from the right).

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English word inoculation refers to the voluntary and deliberate procurement of disease for the purposes of long-­term benefit. It foregrounds the vexed question of the “proper” with regard to contagion. What could it possibly mean for a contagion to be “proper”? And yet, in shifting the emphasis of the “proper” from the individual to the group, “a proper Contagion” indexes precisely what is at stake in the paradoxical story of inoculation. The story of smallpox inoculation is the successful and transformative incorporation—­or, perhaps I should say, appropriation—­of three types of contagion: (1) the insertion of actual “foreign matter” into the human body (the “matter” of the smallpox “pustules” that are “communicated” into the patient); (2) the acceptance of foreign practices and figuration into the social and linguistic body (the importation by Montagu of a Turkish medical practice and the Turkish metaphor to describe it); and (3) the development of a capacity to think of the human as an alien, improvable organism, modeled on a plant (inoculation referring to the propagation of hybrid plants through engrafting one organism onto another). Inoculation involves the internalization of a radical exteriority: foreign matter is inserted into an individual’s body in order to strengthen the immune system for contending with disease. Inoculation, as a medical innovation, also transformed the cultural body of Great Britain (and its colonies) through the importation of foreign matter—­Turkish practices, ideas, and figuration—­for the purpose of enhancing Britain’s ability to negotiate a newly global ecology. Ultimately, inoculation would enjoy widespread cultural acceptance by 1800, yet this outcome was anything but assured in the course of the century (Miller 1957, 103; Razzell 1977, 40–­82). Many critics voiced concerns over these methods for radically foreignizing individual and national bodies, focusing on the “contagious” aspects of inoculation and mocking the idea of using “pagan” methods to communicate “foreign matter” into healthy bodies. A famous anti-­inoculator of the 1720s, the reverend Edmund Massey (1722), defined the practice as follows: “Inoculation [ . . . ] is an Engraftment of a corrupted Body into a sound one” (11). Supporters of inoculation, needing to counter the xenophobic rhetoric of its opponents, found that the Turkish figure of “engrafting” offered an alternative ground for conceiving human adaptation to environmental factors. That is, by imagining the human as analogous to the tree or the plant, proponents of inoculation could graft their rhetoric of smallpox inoculation onto the discourse of improvement. Though those for and against inoculation agreed on little else, both sides saw engrafting as “making a tree of man,” as one writer put it. What becomes evident is that the Lockean ethical imperative of improvement, as it was applied to “natural” tracts of land through the work of the agricultural laborer, could also be enacted on the bodies of individuals. By taking the natural body and grafting it with the seeds of smallpox, the physician “improved” the human

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organism, making it hardier and more fruitful. Such claims stemmed from inoculation’s roots in the improvement of plant organisms through engrafting, a method that brought new vigor to the plant, increasing productivity and resilience. In fact, one of the otherwise inexplicable facets of early inoculation treatises is the stress on the “seasonability” of inoculating the patient. Physicians constantly pointed out that certain times of year were productive for inoculation, while others were not, even though they had no experimental basis for making these claims. They were based, in their entirety, on the strong analogy between the plant and the human body. The basic principles of improvement that Locke set forth in the Two Treatises extended the proprietary logic of the Lockean self into the natural environment. According to Locke, “every man has a property in his own person. [ . . . ] The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his” (287–­288). By applying labor to nature, sometimes called the commons, sometimes wastes, property came into being. Because my labor belongs to me, when I use my labor to improve nature, I enclose that land, both literally and figuratively—­literally, in that much of my labor will involve severing off this land from its surroundings to ensure higher agricultural productivity, and figuratively, in that my act of improvement, my labor, makes the land proper to me, as it is now enclosed as “mine.” Locke argues that since “land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement [ . . . ] is called, as indeed it is, waste” (297), it is the moral obligation of all humanity to engage in the labor of improvement. In the wake of Locke’s advice, the concept of improvement would dominate agricultural and horticultural discourse for more than a century in a deluge of guides, manuals, and handbooks that fashioned the discursive trunk onto which the first writers on smallpox spliced the term inoculation. It may seem paradoxical, then, to have linked the practice of inoculation to the Enlightenment concept of improvement, since Locke defined it as a radically interior process, the bettering of inner spaces by setting off clear demarcations of a border to the outside through means such as enclosure. Yet inoculator Zabdiel Boylston (1726) delineates the difference between “Natural” and the “Inoculated” smallpox with discourse deeply inscribed by improvement rhetoric: The Difference between them seems only to be, as in that of improving Plants, the one is propagated by Nature accidentally, and the other by Nature with Industry, with Intent to make them better. The one is called wild, the other tame, or improv’d; and as the Ground is good or bad, so will the Plant or Fruit be differing, more or less: So it will be in the Small-­Pox transplanted. [ . . . ] There is a large Field open for much to be said by the Ingenious and Learned in Praise of this Method, and, I hope, good Improvements will be made in, and by it. (vi, emphasis added)

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As Boylston’s discourse reveals, inoculation was considered a form of transplantation (“the Small-­Pox transplanted”). No wonder that early treatises on inoculation referred to the practice as “transplantation,” for the human body began to be seen as a tract for “improvement” in the agricultural sense of engrafting. While eighteenth-­century improvement rhetoric dwelled on the practice of enclosure, the act of fencing or hedging in the common lands, the making of public land into private property, the story of inoculation was one of improvement through the internalization of “foreign matter” in multiple senses—­a narrative not of enclosure but exposure. Inoculation was both a foreign practice (Turkish, Chinese, African) and an invasive influx of foreign material into the body. Anti-­inoculators such as William Wagstaffe (1722), predictably, were rabidly xenophobic in their rhetoric, while those arguing for inoculation, such as Cotton Mather (1721), could be surprisingly xenophilic. The xenophiles eventually won this rhetorical battle, with horticultural engrafting and its contagious transfer to the new practice of human inoculation advancing the role of the “foreign” within the idea of the “nation” as the century progressed. Nicolas-­Joseph Sélis (1761) offered a satiric version of this intercultural commerce in his immensely popular The Inoculation of Good Sense. Sélis joked that contemporary social ills were the result of a lack of “Good Sense” but that a solution might be found in the “contagion” of a diverse perspective: [I]f we could find the means of making [Good Sense] up into a small grain, and inoculating it, we should forthwith be guided and directed by reason. [ . . . ] There is an absolute necessity for taking the different ingredients that are to compose the remedy in question from various Nations. Accordingly to a portion of English phlegm, I have added several drams of Italian refinement, several ounces of Spanish gravity, and of German stiffness, and have mixed up the whole with a few scruples of French levity. Such is the composition of the grain of Good Sense proper for effecting a radical cure upon us. (46)

Sélis’s explanation for the way inoculation improves or “cultivates” the stock of individuals betrays his Eurocentrism. Nevertheless, his method is to induce an immunitary “common sense” through contact with others—­or, in the words of Esposito (2010), “with their neighbor, exposing them to the contagion of the relation with others” (13). While the inoculated society was improved through its importation of foreign ideas and foreign material, the engrafted individual was transformed into a plant. And that imaginative transformation, the “making a tree of man,” proper to inoculation necessitated an enormous mental leap—­not of anthropomorphism but rather arboromorphism—­an acknowledgment that humans and trees were not so different—­or rather that, deep down, humans might be

“A Proper Contagion”  •  37

tree-­beings. By the end of the century, well documented in immunological histories, Jenner would distill the first vaccine using cowpox to induce immunity to smallpox in humans. But how could a disease prevalent in cows inoculate people against a human disease? The “vaccination narrative,” seeing the cow in humanity, indeed constituted a significant decentering of the human. Acknowledging a radical similarity between cowpox and smallpox entailed, by extension, acknowledging a radical similarity between cows and humans.

The Inoculation Narrative Geneticists now know that the “human” part of our genetic narrative is very small indeed in comparison to what we share with other species. Cattle, for example, are 80–­85  percent genetically similar to humans (Bovine 2009, 523). Yet the imaginative identification between cows and humans that Jenner discovered pales in comparison to the earlier plant-­human connection that the first smallpox inoculators propagated. In other words, it took a far greater feat of imaginative anthro-­decentrism to recognize the plant inside the human in the 1710s than the human in the cow in the 1790s. Analogous to the genetic memory of the species linking us to our evolutionary kin, the somatic memory of the individual is “stored” in a cellular coding, a facility immunologists call immunological memory. Deliberately introduced into the body in order to stimulate an immune response, an infectious agent—­a pathogen or contagion—­translates an organism’s cellular response to the same or similar pathogen in the future. When a contagion becomes proper—­“when choice is made of a proper Contagion”—­immunity happens. Cells are translated such that the organism is transformed. A recoding takes place from a state of having been unexposed to a state of exposure—­a recoding from “enclosed” to exposed, to revise Locke in the same way early inoculation proponents did. This recoding of immunological memory is prompted by a “proper Contagion,” a viral being that translates the organism in order to navigate an expanding ecology. The counter to the “outbreak narrative” so powerfully elucidated and critiqued by Priscilla Wald (2008), might be a story or stories informed by what could be called an “inoculation narrative.” When I use the term inoculation narrative, I do not mean to evoke desperate and heroic tales of vaccine development by drug researchers racing against the clock to save a population from microbial invasion. After all, such media accounts of inoculation are subsumed under the “outbreak narrative.” Instead, an inoculation narrative counters the story of “infiltration and subversion” critiqued by Wald (269) and replaces them with stories documenting the receptivity of otherness, of “foreign matter.” Interestingly, the discourse surrounding inoculation mimics that of the translator in literary history. Like translation, inoculation entails the

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incorporation of a foreign other into the native body. The translator’s work indeed attempts to see the native soil through the eyes of the linguistic other, drawing on inoculation’s etymology of “inserting an eye.” The anonymous “lady” who translated Moritz’s (1795) Travels through Several Parts of England had clear insight into the advantages gained through a familiarity with a foreign perspective: “It is necessary, proper, and desirable for the people of any country not to form their judgments of themselves entirely by their own observations; but to learn and know what opinions and what judgments are formed of them by persons, who cannot be suspected of being under any undue bias” (viii). Translators, gifted with the ability to perceive the world through more than one linguistic lens, splice together the native and the foreign, with knowledge that, in cutting across the linguistic gulf and into the native body, can see through the eyes of, are able to in-­oculate, the other. And perhaps the “inoculation narrative” simply represents another way of articulating a “translation aesthetic.” Biopolitics, as Esposito (2006) has shown, is a particularly rich field for investigating a “translation aesthetic,” for finding a relation between different languages: “Perhaps the sensibility to a theme such as biopolitics may be linked to this liminal condition of the border, for biopolitics is also situated at the intersection between apparently different languages such as those of politics and life, of law and of anthropology” (49). Even then, the stories of immunology’s engrafting “prehistory” and inoculation’s receptivity to otherness and to translating foreign matter signify a crucial corrective to the standard immunological tale. To Priscilla Wald’s “revised story” of the “outbreak narrative” in Contagious—­“In place of the fearful scenario in which monstrous microbes from elsewhere threaten to turn ‘us’ into ‘them,’ the revised story shows ‘third-­worldification’ to be a product of uneven development” (2008, 270)—­I suggest the complementary “revised story” of the “inoculation narrative,” an alternative tale that oscillates in turn and by turns between immunity and community. That is, the inoculation narrative documents the already “themness” of us. It revises the history of immunology to explain why we need a supplement of “them” (an alien booster shot in order to improve) and how much “they” can turn into “us”—­and how much this “they” extends from foreign bodies to foreign ideas, all the way to utterly nonhuman beings. The inoculation narrative doesn’t just translate them for us but also us to them. The problem, for inoculation’s earliest proponents, was that the practice ran counter to an ideology of “enclosure”—­that is, inoculation by necessity required an opening (literally, a graphic “cut,” a wound) into the self, a “porous border” between inside and outside. What the earliest inoculators managed was a form of human improvement that abandoned “enclosure” in favor of a wound of openness. In the typical “immunological narrative,” or history of the science of immunology, the immune system is considered a means

“A Proper Contagion”  •  39

by which the body (and by extension, the community) protects itself from externality—­through shutting down or attacking. As an alternative, the inoculation narrative—­at the very outset of our historical understanding of biological immunity—­arises out of an acknowledgment that immunity arrives only as a radical turn to contagion, to con-­tangĕre, to touching otherness.

Note 1 The standard template offers a sentence or a paragraph (or neither) mentioning

inoculation, quickly followed by the “more scientific and far safer approach” (Barrett 1970, 60) of nineteenth-­century vaccination. For other examples, see Rose, Milgrom, and van Oss (1973, 1–­2); Amos (1981, 1–­2); Kuby (1992, 6–­7); Vardaxis (1996, 2); Diodati (1999, 3); and Cruse and Lewis (2010, 1). A telling counterexample is offered by Silverstein, who embeds a chapter on “The Royal Experiment of Immunity, 1721–­1722” (1989, 24–­37) yet manages to downplay the role of “Lady Mary”—­ “not entirely clear,” “did little to advance the cause of inoculation” (28)—­while foregrounding inoculation’s failures and the questionable use of “human guinea pigs” (25). While the story of smallpox inoculation has been well told by Miller (1957), Razzell (1977), Rusnock (2002), and Shuttleton (2007), among others, these accounts do not situate inoculation within the genealogy of “discourses of immunology” (Haraway 1991, 208), nor is it their intention to.

References Amos, W. M. G. 1981. Basic Immunology. Toronto: Butterworths. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. New York: Verso. Barrett, James T. 1970. Textbook of Immunology. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby. Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Translated by James Benedict. New York: Verso. Bovine Genome Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, The. 2009. “The Genome Sequence of Taurine Cattle: A Window to Ruminant Biology and Evolution.” Science 324 (5926): 522–­528. Boylston, Zabdiel. 1727. An Historical Account of the Small-­Pox Inoculated in New England upon All Sorts of Persons, Whites, Blacks, and of All Ages and Constitutions. London: S. Chander. Brown, Nik, and Rosalind Williams. 2015. “Cord Blood Banking—­Bio-­Objects on the Borderlands between Community and Immunity.” Life Sciences, Society and Policy 11:11. Campbell, Timothy. 2006. “BIOS, Immunity, Life: The Thought of Roberto Esposito.” Diacritics 36 (2): 2–­22. Cruse, Julius M., and Robert E. Lewis. 2010. Atlas of Immunology. 3rd ed. Boca Raton: CRC Press. Curry, Lynne. 2002. The Human Body on Trial: A Handbook with Cases, Laws, and Documents. Santa Barbara: ABC Clio. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” In Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo and translated by Samuel Weber, 1–­78. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

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Derrida, Jacques. 2003. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides.” In Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, edited by Giovanna Borradori, 85–­136. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-­Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Diodati, Catherine J. M. 1999. Immunization: History, Ethics, Law and Health. Windsor, Ontario: Integral Aspects. Esposito, Roberto. (1998) 2010. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Translated by Timothy Campbell. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Esposito, Roberto. (2002) 2011. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Malden: Polity. Esposito, Roberto. (2004) 2008. BIOS: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Translated by Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Esposito, Roberto. 2006. “Interview by Anna Paparcone.” Diacritics 36 (2): 49–­56. Foucault, Michel. (2004) 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. Edited by Michel Snellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Herbert, Eugenia. 1975. “Smallpox Inoculation in Africa.” Journal of African History 16 (4): 539–­559. Kuby, Janice. 1992. Immunology. 3rd ed. New York: W. H. Freeman. Latour, Bruno. 2012. “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk).” In In Medias Res: Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Poetics of Being, edited by Willem Schnickel and Liesbeth Noordegraaf-­Eelens, 151–­164. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Lemmons, Pieter. 2015. “Review Essay: Sloterdijk.” ID: International Dialogue: A Multidisciplinary Journal of World Affairs 5:49–­62. Locke, John. (1690) 1999. “Second Treatise.” In Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett, 265–­428. Reprint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1995. Social Systems. Translated by John Bednarz. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Massey, Edmund. 1722. A Letter to Mr. Maitland, in Vindication of the Sermon against Inoculation. London: W. Meadows. Mather, Cotton. 1721. Sentiments on the Small Pox Inoculated. Boston: J. Edwards. Mercier, Louis-­Sébastien. 1772. Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred, in Two Volumes. Translated by W[illiam] Hooper. London: G. Robinson. Miller, Genevieve. 1957. The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Moritz, Charles P. 1795. Travels, Chiefly on Foot, through Several Parts of England in 1782, Described in Letters to a Friend. Translated by a Lady. London: G. G. and J. Robinson. A New Treatise on the Art of Grafting and Inoculation, Wherein the Different Methods Are Copiously Considered. 1780. Salisbury: Collins and Johnson. “Pasteur.” 1885. The Nation 40 (April 30): 365–­366. Razzell, Peter. 1977. The Conquest of Smallpox: The Impact of Inoculation on Smallpox Mortality in Eighteenth Century Britain. Sussex: Caliban Books. Rose, Noel R., Felix Milgrom, and Carel J. van Oss, eds. 1973. Principles of Immunology. New York: Macmillan. Rusnock, Andrea A. 2002. Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-­ Century England and France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Sélis, Nicolas-­Joseph. 1761. The Inoculation of Good Sense: An Estimate of the Present Manners of the French Nation. London: G. Seyffert. Shuttleton, David E. 2007. Smallpox and the Literary Imagination, 1660–­1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, Arthur M. 1989. A History of Immunology. New York: Academic Press. Sloterdijk, Peter. (2009) 2013. You Must Change Your Life. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Malden: Polity Press. Timonius, Emanuel. 1717. “An Account, or History, of the Procuring the Small Pox by Incision, or Inoculation.” In Philosophical Transactions, 72–­76. London: W. Innys. Vardaxis, Nicolas J. 1999. Immunology for the Health Sciences. Melbourne: Macmillan Education Australia. Wagstaffe, W[illiam]. 1722. A Letter to Dr. Freind, Shewing the Danger and Uncertainty of Inoculating the Small Pox. 3rd ed. London: Samuel Butler. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press.

2

Before the Cell, There Was Virus Rethinking the Concept of Parasite and Contagion through Contemporary Research in Evolutionary Virology ANNU DAHIYA

The time has come to reconsider the concept of viral contagion by thinking beyond the perspective of disease. Since the 1990s, significant connections have been made regarding the role of viruses in the evolution of life on Earth. Research in evolutionary virology has recently begun to move away from exclusively relying on a view of viruses as causes of pathological disease. Instead, scientists have started to analyze the productive role of viruses in evolution. As science writer Carl Zimmer notes, “The idea that a host’s genes could have come from viruses is almost philosophical in its weirdness” (2011, 48). He continues: We like to think of genomes as our ultimate identity . . . But if most of an organism’s genes arrived in its genome in a virus, does it even have a distinct identity of its own? Or is it just a mishmash of genes, cobbled together by evolution? 42

Before the Cell, There Was Virus   •  43

It’s as if the world was filled with hybrid monsters, with clear lines of identity blurred away. Microbiologists have been getting used to the viral roots of the microbes they study for decades now. And as long as microbes were the only organisms with much evidence of virus-­imported genes, we could try to ignore this philosophical weirdness by thinking of it merely as a fluke of “lower” life forms. But now we can no longer find comfort this way. If we look inside our own genome, we now see viruses. Thousands of them. (48–­49)

Given these remarks, how do we reconcile the knowledge that our genome has remnants of things “outside” ourselves within us? How did these viruses get in our DNA? Why are they there, and what function(s) do they serve? Is it possible for us to remove these “others”? If it were possible, would that be an advantageous move? Would there be an “us” if we removed “them”? Zimmer hints that this shift in perspective serves as the driving force behind recent scientific publications that emphasize the generative forces and effects existing in these biotic entities. This research has taken form largely due to advances in scientific technology, which provide the ability to distinguish between “shared” genomic sequences in cell lineages and the “unknown” parts of DNA. Portions of “our” genome that were once known as “junk DNA” are now being reinterpreted by scientists as holding significant clues about the evolutionary past of all living cells. These genomic regions are noncoding because they are not translated into proteins, and hence they are referred to as “junk” or “selfish” because there is no (direct) link between genomic sequence and present cell activity that can explain their existence. But contemporary research is rapidly moving away from the notion that this “junk” DNA is useless. It is precisely in these noncoding sequences that one can distinguish not only human DNA from chimpanzee DNA but also the “genomes of all higher life forms from each other” (Villarreal 2004, 297). In addition to its usefulness for the taxonomic classification of current life forms, “junk” DNA also provides insight of how both prokaryotic (or single-­celled) and eukaryotic (or multicellular and nucleated) cells came into existence.1 Moreover, genomic “junk” harbors strange connections about the viral characteristics of life itself. In this chapter, I attend to the theoretical implications of the research in virology from the past two decades that clearly indicates that we, as living creatures, consist of thousands and thousands of viruses in the very thing we often culturally consider as the marker of our being: our DNA. Using research that argues the evolutionary preexistence and formative role of viruses in the origins of the first cells—­the modern hallmark of “life”—­on Earth, I argue that a logic of contagion is integral to and inherent within the evolutionary forces of biological life. Viral contagion is an essential component of the creation of

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life and continues to be the driving engine of life. Both within and beyond the category of life, in how they exceed the category of life, viruses play a vital role in the constitution and proliferation of the philosophical concept of “life” and living beings. Traditional conceptions of “contagion” include “the communication of disease from body to body” (Oxford English Dictionary [OED] 2016), or direct contact, that can result in fatal sickness and possibly death. Though viruses can and do spread and have an “infecting influence” (OED 2016), this chapter argues for us think beyond the material connections between harm and contagion. It is not the case that contagion’s sole interlocutor must be sickness, disease, fatality, and death. There is instead a case to be made for contagion as a kind of “worlding” process of biochemical and genetic systems. Furthermore, this chapter also thinks past the concept of a parasite as a microscopic freeloader. Derived from the Latin parasītus, which means “a person who lives at another’s expense,” biologically rooted definitions of the term share the same sentiment. Here, a parasite is “an organism that lives on, in, or with an organism of another species, obtaining food, shelter, or other benefit . . . one that obtains nutrients at the expense of the host organism, which it may directly or indirectly harm” (OED 2016). The biomedical politics embedded within both contagion and parasite operate under the assumption of a liberal individual(ism) that can be always aware of outside “others” who are only capable of depleting resources and expediting bodily destruction. A recoding of the concepts of contagion and parasite is necessary if we have always been virally infected.

Visualizing the Virosphere While the Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit genealogies of virus flow back to “poison,” “secretion,” “venom,” and—­more uncommonly—­“semen” (OED 2016), from the nineteenth century onward, modern scientific definitions of viruses have been historically contingent on the scientific concepts and technologies that engendered their “discovery” and existence. In the nineteenth century, experimental techniques to capture microscopic agents were integral to the beginnings of microbiology and the accompanying concept of “the ‘microbe’ into the world as a new biological and political actor” (Cohen 2011, 19, citing Latour 1988). Due to their larger size, bacteria could be viewed with simple microscopes. Historian of science Sally Smith Hughes (1997) delineates how in “the bacteriological fervor of the years following acceptance of germ theory,” which came into prominence after Louis Pasteur’s and Robert Koch’s respective research in the 1860s and late 1870s that causally linked specific microorganisms as the agents of particular diseases, “bacteria were assumed to be the cause of almost all human and animal infections” (11). As a result, they resided in the scientific biomedical spotlight as the main biopolitical actors of disease

Before the Cell, There Was Virus   •  45

at the microscopic level. The use of Chamberland filters in bacteriology (the disciplinary forerunner of microbiology) became the norm in the 1880s. Named after Louis Pasteur’s laboratory coworker Charles Chamberland, these filters had small pores that could “catch” most bacteria. Unable to be “caught” or “seen” with Chamberland filters, it is at this time that viruses became “invisible” biomedical entities. In the epistemological shadows of bacteriology, the first scientific characterizations of viruses were rooted in a language of lack and confusion. Drastically smaller in size than bacteria,2 what we now classify as viruses were deemed “filterable infectious agents” (Hughes 1977, 43) and “invisible-­filterable viruses” (Magner 2002, 291) due to the inability of Chamberland filters to retain and separate them from cultured mediums. Though the rise of bacteriology began to solidify a causal relationship between a particular microbe and disease, virus was a “catch-­all” category in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “for any substance, whether identified or not, which transmitted an infectious disease” (Hughes 1977, 111). The nonspecificity of virus as a “reference to unknown agents of disease” continued into the twentieth century (Magner 2002, 262). Unlike bacteria and other disease-­causing microscopic organisms, viruses troubled medical and scientific theory and experimental praxis due to their “filterable” quality and the speculation that they may be “obligate parasites of living organisms” due to their inability to exist in vitro—­that is, unlike living microorganisms like bacteria, viruses are unable to exist outside their hosts in a nutrient-­enriched test tube or petri dish (Magner 2002, 291). Because the majority of viruses are too small for even the strongest light microscopes, one can find a number of texts in which viruses are troped as being “invisible invaders” (Oldstone 2010). The presence of “invisible” viruses before the mid-­ twentieth century was ascertained only through symptoms of disease and death. Thus in the first decades of the twentieth century, viruses were still classified in negative terms because they were not identifiable through the established procedures of scientific laboratory techniques. Despite early twentieth-­century understandings of viruses being rooted in the biological characteristics of life they lacked, the rise of molecular biology in the mid-­twentieth century has an intimate connection with viruses. The discoveries surrounding the gene and development of genomic sequencing were deeply intertwined with and made possible through viral experimental labor (Fox Keller 2002; Kay 1993, 1999). As a budding discipline whose focus was to study life at the molecular level within cells, pivotal research in molecular biology was made possible through viruses. Historian Lois N. Magner writes, “Until pressed into the service as the experimental animal of molecular genetics, bacterial viruses remained a laboratory curiosity. In the hands of molecular biologists, viruses became the ‘living molecules’ that served as a kind of

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Rosetta stone and made it possible to decipher the instructions for cell structure and function” (2002, 293). These ideal “workhorses” for molecular biological research revolving around the gene also brought in the genomic age in the 1970s with the sequencing of “ΦX174, a virus that infects [the bacteria] Escherichia coli” (Edwards and Rohwer 2005, 504). Three decades later, the dependence on and (defective) understandings of viruses as “gene stealers” are being called into question due to consistent metagenomic evidence indicating that viral protein coding sequences (or “open reading frames”) are almost always novel sequences with no cellular homologues (Edwards and Rohwer 2005, 505). On this, Luis Villarreal, the director of the Center for Virus Research at the University of California-­Irvine, writes: “It was not until many viral genomes were finally sequenced, beginning in the 1970s, and phylogenetic methods for the analysis of sequence similarity were developed (neighbor joining and parsimony) that inferences concerning the evolutionary history of viruses could be drawn. Finally, with the sequencing of many host genomes in the 1990s, it became clear that all host genomes, from bacterial to human, have been strongly affected by viral colonizing activity. Thus, the needed information has finally been assembled to allow us to evaluate virus and host evolution together and connect these two elements of the tree of life” (2005, 3). The recent field of metagenomics, also known as environmental genomics, focuses on sequencing DNA samples found within samples of ecological environments (Hutchinson 2007, 6234). This is different from the general microbiological practice of culturing of organisms within laboratories. Since 2002, metagenomic studies consistently conclude that viruses are “the most abundant biological entities on the planet” (Edwards and Rohwer 2005, 504). Through the computational sequencing of environments, metagenomics is beginning to unveil the virosphere that permeates all ecologies of our biological world. Due to the sheer numbers of viruses present in all biological environments, metagenomic analyses provide an alternative concept of viral–­one that destabilizes the traditional microbiological concept of viral that is anchored in metaphors of invisibility and lack of independent organic existence. We can no longer understand all viruses as simply or fully following “a scorched-­earth policy” focused on organismic destruction (Hamilton 2008, 39). Rather, the very idea of environment is virally shifting itself. From a genomics perspective, the organism/environment boundary is one that is virally permeated and, as I suggest below, virally created.

Viral Symbiosis In her research beginning in the 1960s, the late biologist Lynn Margulis argued for the evolutionary importance of microbial symbiosis (Sagan 1967). Her groundbreaking work on the idea of symbiosis in the 1960s and 1970s changed

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how entire biological disciplines conceive of evolution. Margulis’s research shifted the focus in evolutionary circles from animals (namely, mammals) to the evolution of both single and multicellular microorganisms. She inarguably advanced the field of evolution by introducing very important questions that help us understand (some) of the complexities of the origins of certain cells. Margulis presented a “theory of the origin of eukaryotic cells” through the symbiogenetic origins of certain eukaryotic organelles: “the mitochondria, the photosynthetic plastids and the (9+2) basal bodies of flagella were once themselves free-­living (prokaryotic) cells” (Sagan 1967, 225). Two main examples of Margulis’s research in symbiogenesis are very well known: the symbiotic formation of mitochondria and plastids. These organelles, mitochondria and plastids, were once free-living prokaryotes, or single-celled organisms, that merged and started to permanently coexist together, forming a new kind of cell. We can genomically trace that they were once distinct cells because they each have their own separate DNA “outside” the main central locus of the nucleus in the cell. The door that Margulis opened prompts one to question what other processes in the evolution of life on Earth have symbiogenetic properties. We can also ask, given recent research about the creative evolutionary effects of viruses, Is symbiosis a term solely reserved just for events between living things? Rather than a contradiction, is the idea of viral symbiosis an evolutionary reality? Unfortunately, Margulis’s own treatment of viruses and the viral milieu connects more to the pathological, evolutionarily useless, and dangerous concept of parasite rather than one that signifies an evolutionarily advantageous or beneficial symbiotic capacity. In an excerpt from What Is Life?, she and her son and coauthor Dorion Sagan outline their position on the symbiotic uselessness of viruses in the larger scheme of life: Viruses are not [living]. They are not autopoietic [or self-­making]. Too small to self-­maintain, they do not metabolize. Viruses do nothing until they enter an autopoietic entity: a bacterial cell, the cell of an animal, or of another live organism. . . . Smaller than cells, viruses lack sufficient genes and proteins to maintain themselves. The smallest cells, those of the tiniest bacteria (about one ten-­ millionth of a meter in diameter) are the minimal autopoietic units known today. Like language, naked DNA molecules, or computer programs, viruses mutate and evolve; but, by themselves, they are at best chemical zombies. The cell is the smallest unit of life. (Margulis and Sagan 1995, 24, emphasis added)

During the late nineteenth century, viruses were thought to be “the simplest of all living, gene-­bearing life-­forms” (Villarreal 2004b, 101). “Their demotion to inert chemicals” or nonliving entities occurred after 1935 when a particular

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plant virus, the tobacco mosaic virus, was successfully crystallized (Villarreal 2004b, 102). Because living organisms like bacteria simply die when they are isolated in a “pure crystalline state,” this experiment “proved” to the scientific community that viruses are more like chemicals than truly living organisms (Kay 1986, 450). Moreover, not only could viruses be crystallized, but they also exhibited the strange quality of being able to be brought back from the “dead” due to how they could be “de-­crystallized,” or re-­formed after crystallization. This was something that was impossible to do with “living” organisms, and it was perhaps due to this that the understanding of viruses as “chemical zombies” was constructed. Furthermore, Margulis was right in recognizing that without the machinery of cells, viruses cannot self-­reproduce. Because this ability to self-­reproduce lies at the heart of modern definitions of life, viruses are categorized as nonliving. This nonliving categorization, however, also then excludes viruses from being imagined as symbiotic parts of our origins as living beings. Although Margulis is known as one of the most radical biologists of our time and is particularly famous for her concept of symbiosis as a driving principle of microbial evolution—and thus all life—she does not have an innovative place for viruses in her grand schema. Margulis does not have a space for “viral creativity” or the evolutionary impact of viruses in the story of life—­something I argue is an originating force of eukaryotic and even bacterial origins. Until recently, the idea of a “productive” contagion or “creative” viral symbiosis has been unthinkable because of the biological binary between “symbiont” and “parasite” that was enforced by even innovative biologists like Margulis: life itself is privileged over the nonliving genetic actors that brought it into being. In Viruses and the Evolution of Life, virologist Luis Villarreal asks whether recategorizing viruses as living rather than as nonliving would have useful effects for contemporary theoretical biology. He responds to his own question by rhetorically arguing that the nonliving classification of viruses does indeed produce deleterious effects: the status of viruses as nonliving excludes them from being understood with the same vitality as all other living things. In fact, he claims that if we were to treat viruses as living rather than nonliving parasitic biochemical agents, the “enormously high rates of viral reproduction and variation would define the leading edge of all evolving entities” (2005, ix–­x). Though rescripting viruses as living rather than nonliving may be potentially productive, this move has not occurred in the majority of current scientific research and debates. Villarreal expands on the consequence of continuing to designate viruses as nonliving: “Hence, we need not consider their contributions to the origins of species and the maintenance of life, and they have been dismissed from the tree of life. They are environmental or chemical toxins that simply kill of less-­fit hosts: a nasty part of the natural habitat that must be overcome” (Villarreal 2005, ix–­x). Recalling how Margulis and Sagan argue viruses are “at best chemical zombies,” Villarreal connects their view to the common

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scientific characterization of viruses as unnecessary “environmental or chemical toxins.” For Villarreal, Margulis’s dismissal of viruses is due to their lack of autonomy, in that they need a host to “produce their own proteins.” This dismissal, like how scientists once thought “junk” DNA was junk, becomes a conceptual downfall in connecting viruses to evolutionary discourses that theorize the origins of life (Villarreal 2005). However, despite the mother of symbiogenesis herself not seeing any evolutionary symbiotic value in viruses, we can extend this famed concept to a critique of how she limits the concept of symbiotic to living beings—­things that hold onto the fantasy of “autonomy”—­ and reserves “contagion,” “parasite” and even “chemical zombies” for the vast viral world in a wholly uncreative and destructive sense. We can think of viral symbiosis by following Villarreal and thinking beyond simply cell-­to-­cell (i.e., living-­to-­living) relationships in cellular evolution and symbiogenesis. In my view, however, we should resist the need to classify viruses as “living” in order to understand their role in the evolutionary histories of life and should instead expand our understanding of symbiosis beyond conceptions of cell-­to-­cell or living-­to-­living interactions. Viral symbiotic contagion chronologically—­ even ontologically—­ preexists, enhances, and evolutionarily complexifies cellular life. Though Margulis’s work on symbiogenesis had widespread epistemological effects, Villarreal marks Margulis and Sagan’s dismissal of viruses in their theorizing of the evolution of life as the limit of their thought (Villarreal 2005, x). The resistance to expanding the concept of symbiosis beyond that of cell-to-cell or living-to-living interactions results in a world where change is rooted in notions of the autonomous “individual” and life. It is perhaps the fact that productive change is rooted in notions of the individual (as well as in life) that there is such resistance to expanding the concept of symbiosis, as there is a deep-­rooted passivity assigned to things outside the category of life. In their modern categorization as nonliving, viruses have an evolutionary power that becomes an invisible force in the narratives of life. This chapter, then, argues that viral liminality precisely speaks to how symbiotic contagion both constitutes and exceeds the concept of life. Villarreal conceptually expands symbiosis by destabilizing the dependence of viruses on cells through a redefinition of virus. Rather than classifying them as “obligate intracellular parasites,” he simply defines viruses as “molecular genetic parasites” (Villarreal 2005, 8). The former makes it conceptually impossible for viruses to exist without cells already being present. The latter treats the cell as a particular product of more ancient (and more unstable) replication systems. Viruses, when defined as molecular genetic parasites, can coexist with these earlier evolutionary replication systems. Thus those earlier replication systems predate what we define as the smallest unit of life in contemporary science—­the cell. In this shift, it becomes possible for viruses to be parasites of the “prebiotic, acellular replicating systems” that predated cellular

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life (Villarreal 2005, 8). As molecular genetic parasites, viruses “are capable of parasitizing any replication system, including other viruses as well as prebiotic systems. Thus, there is a reason to think that even prior to cellular life forms, molecular genetic parasites may have already existed” (Villarreal 2005, 8). One example from Villarreal’s research that exemplifies this is how the nucleus of all eukaryotic cells was formed from viral symbiogenesis. In radically arguing that the nucleus—­a defining feature of multicellular life—­was a genetically viral creation and effect, Villarreal subverts the idea of multicellular life being able to exist without viral contagion. Following Villarreal, we see that what biologists call the “genetic control center” of cells was indeed a symbiotic creation effect—­a symbiosis that was viral in nature. Like mitochondrion or plastids’ organelles, however, the introduction of a viral “other” is much more central to the thesis of life than previously thought.

Creative Contagion If we are to rethink or at least expand our cultural imaginary of the concept of viral—­what viruses are and what they engender in a biological, evolutionary, and genetic sense—­the ideas of contagion and parasite must be interrogated and transformed. In order to trouble the fidelity between symbiosis and life and to think through how viral parasitic contagion recasts the way we understand the evolution of all life on Earth, we need to turn the idea of viral creativity rather than viral defunctness. Villarreal urges us to realize how the existence of life is predicated upon the creative desires and effects of viruses. The numerous relationships that viruses have with the concepts of disease, contagion, and the evolution of life can be best thought about by under­ standing the differences between two different possible viral “life strategies” that result in very different effects for their infected host: acute, or lytic, and lysogenic viruses. A lytic life cycle is what we usually think of when we think of viruses: a virus enters the cell, co-­opts the host cell’s reproductive machinery, forces the cell to make virus parts and assemble them, and then bursts (or lyses) the cell—­which kills the cell. This bursting releases an abundance of viral progeny and always results in cell death. A lytic infection corroborates the pathological disease model that is most often associated with viruses and viral acts. In contrast to the lytic cycle, in a lysogenic cycle, the virus integrates itself with the host DNA, but it does not necessarily kill the host. Instead, a lysogenic virus creates future progeny only when the host itself reproduces. Furthermore, persistent viruses are a subset and kind of lysogenic virus (which again are viruses that exist in the genomes of their hosts). It is important to note that though one cannot characterize all lysogenic viruses as persistent, persistent viruses are always lysogenic in nature. Lysogenic viruses that are persistent are ones that make the most nuanced use of their life cycles because they maintain “a

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continued presence” in their host “such that it allows transmission of the genetic parasite to subsequent generations of the host” when the host itself reproduces (Villarreal 2005, 5). The slips in identification of what-­is-­host from what-­is-­ viral occur much more strongly in lysogenic than in lytic infection. A virus undergoing a lytic cycle immediately utilizes its host’s reproductive machinery and creates offspring in large magnitudes. By contrast, a virus undergoing a lysogenic cycle is called “quiescent” because after entry into the host, the virus inserts itself into the host’s genomic material through a complex set of protein mechanisms. There, the virus remains latent and reproduces only when the host itself undergoes reproduction. In other words, a lysogenic virus remains within the host DNA and does not produce progeny through its own means or through host death. Thus the relationship between a lysogenic virus and its host is much longer and more intimate than the abrupt damage caused by a lytic infection. As the subtlest kinds of lysogenic viruses, persistent viral mechanisms suggest that not all viruses abruptly extort nutrients from their hosts, manipulate host replication machinery for their own use, and subsequently destroy host cells minutes after the creation of their progeny. Rather, the kinds of viruses that coevolve with their hosts are those that are persistent “parasites”—­ parasites that we now know prove crucial to the creative process of host evolution. Lytic viruses (which cause immediate harm or disease in their hosts) not only are heavily dependent on large host populations but also rapidly evolve new mechanisms of resistance from host immunity. In contrast, persistent viruses rely much less on massive host populations and operate instead through an alternative logic altogether. This alternative logic is born out of how a persistent virus becomes an integral part of the host’s genome. Because a lysogenic virus can remain within the host DNA for millions of years, it challenges this need to separate oneself from parasites or disease in a very powerful way. The intimate connections between persistent viruses and their hosts bring forth how critical it is to reconsider the relationship between organisms and their external and internal viral milieus. A critique of the concept of autonomy—­an idea central to the modern constitution of biological life—­within evolutionary research allows us to rethink and displace the ontological separation between “us” and viral or contagious “others.” One way to displace the notion of autonomy in biological evolution is thinking through how persistent viral integration into a host’s genome engenders complex effects. One possible outcome is that the host can become immunologically resistant to infection by similar lytic or deadly viruses. That is, infection or contagion by persistent viruses protects living hosts from lytic or deadly infection. From the host’s point of view, persistent infection is protection. This particular effect can be interpreted as beneficial for the host if it can be assumed that this viral merger within the host species leads to an increase

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in evolutionary fitness for an organism (compared to before viral contamination). Postinfection, the living host’s expression of certain new genes can result in noticeably different and advantageous functioning or appearance. This genetic linking or contagion provides the organism with new ways to respond and live within its milieu that it previously did not have. In providing it with new and previously nonexistent capacities, persistent viruses create new possibilities for and within life. Persistent viruses, as mentioned earlier, resulted in the creation of nuclei—­something that almost all our cells have. Life on this Earth began as a single-­celled organism. Human beings are very complex multicellular organisms. Villarreal argues that all life on Earth—­whether single or multicellular—­is directly related to ancient viral symbiotic mergers. Persistent viruses thus embody what we can scientifically and conceptually “discover” if we move away from solely relying on a pathological disease view of viruses and instead make the wager that there are productive characteristics embedded in the idea of viruses and what is “viral.” Yes, we sometimes get sick from certain kinds of viral lytic parasites. However, in rethinking the concept of parasite, we also need to affirm (or reaffirm) how, in evolutionary terms, we are viral parasitic effects ourselves. Though scientists still continue to debate whether viruses are “dead” or “alive,” I argue that this complicated taxonomic classification and its underlying theoretical significance is a fetish: a need to locate the forces of biological evolution wholly within cellular life. Through genomic and metagenomic sequencing and analysis, evolutionary virology has destabilized the totalizing position that lytic, “deadly” viruses have had within the concept of “viral.” The corelationship between genetic complexity and viral contagion does not stop at (what is currently marked as) the smallest living organisms or the boundaries of “life.” In 2003, for example, researchers in France published on Mimivirus, a giant virus that infects amoeba and is named after its strange ability to “mimic microbes.” Mimivirus has a genome approximately three times the size of some bacteria (La Scola et al. 2003, 2033). Now classified in the “giant” virus taxonomic family Mimiviridae, this virus not only plays with and blurs the boundary between nonliving and living but also recasts the idea of contagion as a process or effect solely reserved within the domains of “life.” It was found in 2008 that giant viruses are themselves sites of infection. Belonging to the same family of giant viruses as Mimivirus and even larger than the former, Mamavirus was itself found to be infected with a much smaller virus (Pearson 2008). This miniature virophage—­nicknamed Sputnik—­inside the giant Mamavirus “sickens” its viral host so that Mamavirus produces less giant viral progeny in its amoebic host. While not engendering novel genetic capacities through infection of its viral host, speculation on how “the virophage could be a vehicle meditating lateral gene transfer between gene viruses” is still under way (La Scola et al. 2008, 100). Through a dialectics of contagion,

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viruses, when understood as molecular genetic parasites, are themselves virally infected. Through forces that exceed the category of life, contagion is an integral and emergent property of the genetic landscapes of complex biochemical systems. Perhaps the vitality we tie to life should instead be associated with contagion. If contagion exceeds even the category of life, it is a productive, irreducible force of biochemical systems and thus our world. Rather than simply a deadly, avoidable, and dependent relationship that saps life of its novelty, a re-­evaluation of parasite and contagion allows us to understand the interconnectedness and complexity of genomes—­both living and nonliving. This in turn suggests that the most forceful, potentially productive processes that shape our world are not those that begin with liberal humanism’s central political actor—­the autonomous individual—­but instead within circuits of contagion that induce, engulf, and evolutionarily propel life into the future.

FIGURE 2.1  B. La Scola et al., “Sputnik Propagation in

Mamavirus-­Infected Amoebae,” Nature (2008), doi:10.1038/ nature07218. Reprinted with permission from Macmillan.

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Notes 1 A prokaryote is usually a unicellular organism, although prokaryotes can form

colonies together. A prokaryote lacks a nucleus (and thus has its DNA in a nucleoid region in the cell) and organelles. It tends to reproduce at a faster rate than eukaryotes through asexual reproduction. Eukaryotes, on the other hand, are multicellular and include animals, plant, fungi, algae, and protozoa. Eukaryotes are much larger than prokaryotes in size, reproduce through sexual reproduction, and have both a nucleus and membrane-­bound organelles. 2 Bacterial size is generally measured using the metric unit of the micrometer or micron (µm), which is 10–­6, or one millionth of a meter. Viruses, in contrast, are measured via the metric unit of the nanometer (nm), which is 10–­9, or one billionth of a meter. Though they are both invisible to the human eye, it is important to note that viruses are generally (though not universally) about three orders of magnitude smaller than most bacteria and could not be seen using the technology that was used in the beginnings of microbiology—­light microscopes.

References Claverie, Jean-­Michel. 2006. “Viruses Take Center Stage in Cellular Evolution.” Genome Biology 7 (6): 110. Cohen, Ed. 2011. “The Paradoxical Politics of Viral Containment; or, How Scale Undoes Us One and All.” Social Text 29 (1): 15–­35. Forterre, Patrick. 2006. “The Origin of Viruses and Their Possible Roles in Major Evolutionary Transitions.” Virus Research 117:5–­16. Forterre, Patrick. 2008. “Three RNA Cells for Ribosomal Lineages and Three DNA Viruses to Replicate Their Genomes: A Hypothesis for the Origin of Cellular Domain.” PNAS 103 (10): 3669–­3674. Forterre, Patrick, Simonetta Gribaldo, and Céline Brochier. 2005. “Luca: à la recherche du plus proche ancêtre commun universel.” M/S: Medicine Sciences 21 (10): 860–­865. Gilbert, Scott F., Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber. 2012. “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals.” Quarterly Review of Biology 87 (4): 325–­341. Hamilton, Garry. 2008. “Welcome to the Virosphere.” New Scientist 199 (2671): 38–­41. Hughes, Sally Smith. 1977. The Virus: A History of the Concept. New York: Science History Publications. Hutchinson, Clyde A. 2007. “DNA Sequencing: Bench to Bedside and Beyond.” Nucleic Acids Research 35 (18): 6227–­6237. Kay, Lily E. 1986. “W. M. Stanley’s Crystallization of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus, 1940–­1940.” Isis 77 (3): 450–­472. Kay, Lily E. 1993. The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology. New York: Oxford University Press. Kay, Lily E. 1999. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Keller, Evelyn Fox. 2002. The Century of the Gene. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. La Scola, Bernard, Stephane Audic, Catherine Robert, Liang Jungang, Xavier de Lamballerie, Michel Drancourt, Richard Birtles, Jean-­Michel Claverie, and Didier Raoult. 2003. “A Giant Virus in Amoebae.” Science 299 (5615): 2033.

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La Scola, Bernard, Christelle Desnues, Isabelle Pagnier, Catherine Robert, Lina Barrassi, et al. 2008. “The Virophage as a Unique Parasite of the Giant Mimivirus.” Nature 455:100–­105. Latour, Bruno. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Magner, Lois N. 2002. A History of the Life Sciences. New York: Marcel Dekker. Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. 1995. What Is Life? New York: Simon and Schuster. Moreira, David, and Purificación López-­Garcia. 2009. “Ten Reasons to Exclude Viruses from the Tree of Life.” Nature Reviews Microbiology 7:306–­311. Oxford English Dictionary (OED). 2016. s.v. “contagion, n.” Oxford University Press. http://​www​.oed​.com​.proxy​.lib​.duke​.edu. OED. 2016. s.v. “parasite, n.” Oxford University Press. http://​www​.oed​.com​.proxy​.lib​.duke​.edu. OED. 2016. s.v. “parasite, v.” Oxford University Press. http://​www​.oed​.com​.proxy​.lib​.duke​.edu. OED. 2016. s.v. “virus, n.” Oxford University Press. http://​www​.oed​.com​.proxy​.lib​.duke​.edu/​ view/​Entry/​223861​?redirectedFrom​=​virus&. Pearson, Helena. 2008. “‘Virophage’ Suggests Viruses Are Alive.” Nature News 545 (7): 667. Raoult, Didier. 2009. “There Is No Such Thing as a Tree of Life (and of Course Viruses Are Out!).” Nature Reviews Microbiology 7:615. Sagan, Lynn. 1967. “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 14:225–­274. Villarreal, Luis P. 2004a. “Can Viruses Make Us Human?” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 148 (3): 296–­323. Villarreal, Luis P. 2004b. “Are Viruses Alive?” Scientific American 291: 101–­105. Villarreal, Luis P. 2005. Viruses and the Evolution of Life. Washington, DC: American Society for Microbiology Press. Villarreal, Luis P. 2006. “How Viruses Shape the Tree of Life.” Future Virology 1 (5): 587–­595. Villarreal, Luis P. 2007 “Virus-­Host Symbiosis Mediated by Persistence.” Symbiosis 44:1–­9. Villarreal, Luis P. 2008. “The Widespread Evolutionary Significance of Viruses.” In Origin and Evolution of Viruses, edited by Esteban Domingo, Colin R. Parrish, and John J. Holland, 477–­516. New York: Academic Press. Villarreal, Luis P. 2009. “The Source of Self: Genetic Parasites and the Origin of Adaptive Immunity.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1178:194–­232. Villarreal, Luis P. 2015. “Force for Ancient and Recent Life: Viral and Stem-­Loop RNA Consortia Promote Life.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1341:25–­34. Villarreal, Luis P., and Günther Witzany. 2010. “Viruses Are Essential Agents within the Roots and Stem of the Tree of Life.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 262:698–­710. Villarreal, Luis P., and Günther Witzany. 2015. “When Competing Viruses Unify: Evolution, Conservation, and Plasticity of Genetic Identities.” Journal of Molecular Evolution 80:305–­318. Witzany, Günther. 2012. “From Molecular Entities to Competent Agents: Viral Infection-­ Derived Consortia Act as Natural Genetic Engineers.” In Viruses: Essential Agents of Life, edited by Günther Witzany, 407–­419. Dordrecht: Springer. Youle, Merry, Matthew Haynes, and Forest Rohwer. 2012. “Scratching the Surface of Biology’s Dark Matter.” In Viruses: Essential Agents of Life, edited by Günther Witzany, 61–­81. Dordrecht: Springer.

3

Social (Ir)Responsibility Vaccine Exemption and the Ethics of Immunity RACHEL CONRAD BRACKEN

Since the earliest days of smallpox inoculation, preventative, population-­level interventions designed to limit the spread of contagious disease have been accused of impinging on individual rights (Hausman 2014). In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in partnership with the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP), recommends vaccines to protect against fourteen bacterial or viral infections before a child’s sixth birthday, including measles, mumps, diphtheria, polio, and pertussis (CDC 2015a). Based on these recommendations, state laws establish vaccine requirements for children attending school and daycare: public spaces wherein the government has an obligation to protect the populace from the spread of infectious diseases (CDC 2015b). In recent years, related in part to fears that the combined measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine could cause autism—­a theory that has since been disproven1—­parents have expressed a greater fear of the potential risks and complications associated with vaccines that are meant to protect against now quite rare diseases. For many of these parents, the immediate risk posed by vaccination outweighs the risk that their child will contract a vaccine-­preventable disease as well as the risk that decreased vaccination rates could spur a widespread resurgence 56

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of vaccine-­preventable illnesses (Berezin and Eads 2016; Cawkwell and Oshinsky 2015; Lee et al. 2016; Sobo 2016). Moreover, recent sociological research suggests that existing public health interventions intended to promote childhood vaccination are often unconvincing to parents who assess the risks of vaccination and of vaccine-­preventable diseases relative to an individual child (Berezin and Eads 2016; Dubé et al. 2015; Lee et al. 2016; Sobo 2016). Thus contemporary debates regarding vaccine exemption echo the centuries-­old dilemma of public health: how to protect the public from the spread of contagion while simultaneously respecting an infected—­and potentially contagious—­ individual’s civil liberties and a citizen’s bodily autonomy. What risks to the individual are permissible to ensure the safety of the community? Conversely, what risks must society assume in order to protect its citizens? Contagion, in both the literal and the metaphorical senses, provides a powerful heuristic by which to conceptualize community belonging, as our shared immunity and susceptibilities to infection may biologically reinforce socioculturally constructed perceptions of “self ” and “other.” At the same time, these “imagined immunities,” per Priscilla Wald (2008) in Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, expose the interconnectedness of our communities; the spread of disease from one individual to another betrays contact across the borders of race, class, gender, and nation (Bashford and Hooker 2001; Birkle and Heil 2013; Ostherr 2005; Silva 2011; Wald 2008). Public health policy not only accounts for the spread of contagion between distinct communities but also considers its circulation among members of a single community and, as a result, the threat that individual community members may pose to collective health and well-­being. Public health operates, therefore, along the blurry border differentiating the self from society, its responses to contagion revealing the indistinguishability of the body and the body politic—­the ways in which, as contemporary essayist Eula Biss contends in On Immunity: An Inoculation, “We ourselves belong to a greater body composed of many bodies” (2014, 126). While there is certainly fascinating, socially relevant work to be done regarding the racial, classed, and gendered dimensions of public health and vaccine exemption (Conis 2013; Mamo and Epstein 2014), I choose to focus this chapter on how the proponents and opponents of state-­mandated vaccination negotiate social obligation and community belonging in regard to population-­level health intervention. That is, I consider how decisions regarding vaccine compliance and vaccine exemption assess the risk of infection and vaccine-­related injury as individual or collective phenomena relative to their effects on personal or public health—­the body or the body politic. Simply put, it is a question of bodily scale: Are risk and immunity contained within an individual body or cultivated within a population of proximal bodies? I contend that those who urge compliance with state-­mandated vaccination

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schedules seek to preserve the health of a population in the aggregate, assessing the competing risks of contagion and vaccine complication on the scale of the body politic, while those who argue for vaccine exemption evaluate these risks on the scale of the body relative to the health of a single community member. It is not my intention to present an argument for or against government-­ mandated childhood vaccination or to evaluate the strength of the arguments presented by either position. Rather, I am interested in abstracting the logic used to account for social risk and obligation underlying the vaccine debate—­what I term the ethics of immunity shaping the rhetoric employed on both sides of the issue—­and in considering how these ethical principles inform our perceptions of immunity, contagion, and community belonging. Whether prioritizing the health of an individual body or the collective body politic—­a community comprised of many individual bodies—­scalar perceptions of immunity and the risk of contagion underlie the rhetoric of mommy blogs and medical history; mission statements and memoirs structure community belonging in terms of social obligation both biologically and biopolitically conceived. I focus on the rhetoric employed on both sides of the debate because it reveals a fundamental miscommunication between public health departments and vaccine-­hesitant parents and the incommensurate ideologies underlying their respective ethics of immunity: biopolitical governmentality2 and, per Jennifer Reich, “neoliberal parenting” (2016). While a rash of recently published sociological studies point to the neoliberal ideology underpinning parents’ assessment of vaccine risk (Berezin and Eads 2016; Lee et al. 2016; Reich 2014; Reich 2016; Sobo 2016), this chapter accentuates why such logic is irreconcilable with the aims of public health. I begin by offering more thorough definitions of the body politic and the ethics of immunity as they operate in this chapter, subsequently drawing on these definitions to trace the rhetorical justifications of state-­mandated vaccination and vaccine exemption in two sections: “The Body Politic” and “The Body in/and the Body Politic.” Each of the interlocutors I engage negotiates the ethics of immunity by balancing the interests of a single body against those of the social collective. Their conclusions vary according to the scalar perspective they adopt in framing the issue; while those opposed to government-­ mandated vaccines weigh the risks and benefits of vaccination in terms of the individual, those in favor of government-­mandated vaccination preference the collective. Identifying this difference in perspective may help physicians and public health departments more effectively communicate with vaccine-­ hesitant parents and vice versa, especially as recent sociological research accentuates how little—­if at all—­parents consider the risks sustained by a collective body politic when deciding whether or not to vaccinate their own children (Berezin and Eads 2016; Lee et al. 2016; Reich 2014; Reich 2016; Sobo 2016). Lastly, and by way of conclusion, I consider how disembodied digital

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communities, in which much of the contemporary vaccine debate takes place, both complicate the scale at which state-­mandated vaccination is evaluated and offer space for resolution.

Biology, Biopolitics, and the Ethics of Immunity For the purposes of this chapter, the body politic denotes a simultaneously political and biological entity roughly synonymous with population: multiple individual bodies existing in close proximity. Although political philosophers have engaged it metaphorically, as the state or national population over which the sovereign—­as the head—­rules, my use of body politic is more akin to that of biopolitical theorists, whose analyses of population-­as-­biopower in the rise of the modern nation-­state reveal the conceptual coevolution of legal and biomedical perceptions of immunity and community belonging (Rose 2007; Foucault 2007; Foucault 2008; Cohen 2009; Esposito 2011). Mine is not a biopolitical argument per se but rather one attuned to the ways in which public health policy—­legally designed to manage a state or national population and thereby antithetical to neoliberal “healthism” (Berezin and Eads 2016)—­brings together the sociocultural, political, and biological forces that shape communal living. Neither a singular nor a discretely bounded body, the body politic is nevertheless an embodied entity. As it operates within public health policy, and relative to the various ethics of immunity I trace throughout this chapter, the body politic represents a mutable collective of individual bodies capable of transmitting contagion but also of cultivating a shared immunity to certain infectious diseases. As a society negotiates the sociocultural and political terms of community belonging—­the rights and obligations of the self to society and vice versa—­it must account for the risk of contagion and the potential for immunity as consequences of living in an embodied body politic. Accordingly, scholars of contagion and culture consider how laws and social norms established to regulate interpersonal contact and the provision of medical care register a fear of contagion shaped by biomedical perceptions of immunity and susceptibility as individual and/or communal phenomena (Kraut 1994; Ostherr 2005; Wald 2008; Silva 2011). Indeed, as Ed Cohen posits in A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body, “Immunity informs us deeply: as organisms, as individuals, as citizens, as peoples, and as a species. In the wake of immunology, we no longer just live our politics, but our politics literally live in us” (2009, 31). We “live our politics,” I argue, according to an ethical framework I term the ethics of immunity. By ethics of immunity, I refer to the social expectations and processes of risk assessment governing the behaviors of one who is either immune or susceptible to contagion—­how an individual negotiates personal interests and obligation

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to a community with the community’s desire to maintain population health via biomedical governmentality. The decisions to vaccinate, to bathe regularly, to avoid public spaces when feeling ill, to fund a public sewer system, or to quarantine, for example, are all behaviors guided by an ethics of immunity. Likewise, the decision to refuse vaccination is also guided by an ethics of immunity, although one rooted in a neoliberal ideology that, by prioritizing autonomy, choice, and deregulation, encourages parents to assess the risks and rewards of pediatric vaccination for themselves and for their children alone (Reich 2014; Reich 2016; Sobo 2016). Therefore, a singular ethics of immunity, as I define it, does not exist. One may, for example, comprehend immunity as cultivated by an individual, discrete, and definitively bounded body and, subsequently, articulate a neoliberal ethics of immunity that preferences personal freedom and the aversion of immediate risk. Conversely, one who understands immunity and susceptibility to be the result of multiple bodies existing in close proximity may prioritize overall population health and the institution of long-­term community health policies that are designed to stem the spread of contagion among the multiple bodies of a body politic. Whether conceived on the scale of the body or the body politic, such ethics are not official in that they are not written, yet they inform both public policy and individual action. The CDC’s recommended vaccination schedule is designed, like any public health measure, as a biopolitical, population-­level intervention rather than an effort to treat individual patients, though, of course, the end goal of public health is to improve the well-­being of the persons that constitute a collective (American Public Health Association, n.d.). While these recommendations account for the risks incurred by the individual body to be vaccinated—­childhood vaccination schedules are determined by the effect of age on one’s immune response and the severity of the illness to be vaccinated against, for example, and vaccination laws permit medical exemption for those allergic to or otherwise unable to receive vaccinations (CDC 2013)—­ the rhetoric used to urge compliance accentuates the necessity of maintaining a community’s herd immunity, its shared resistance to infection resulting from previous or endemic exposure to contagion (CDC 2015c; Sobo 2016). The vaccine-­hesitant or vehemently antivaccine, however, unequivocally preference the safety of a single body, weighing the risks of vaccination against its benefits for the individual rather than for a larger demographic collective—­a community, city, state, or national body. In a recent study, Elisa J. Sobo (2016) demonstrates that, even for those parents with at least a general knowledge of herd immunity (45.3 percent of parents surveyed), it nevertheless “has little salience for parents considering pediatric vaccination” (187). Others, like Suzanne Humphries (2012), belittle herd immunity as an unsubstantiated theory lacking sufficient evidence to prove that increasing vaccine compliance

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can stem the spread of contagion and resent assuming the risks of vaccination without being sure of its benefits. “We are being systematically altered, sickened and manipulated by powerful governing bodies that either don’t understand the risks of vaccination, or don’t care. We are told that the health of the herd is more important than any single life,” Humphries protests in an opinion piece provocatively titled “‘Herd Immunity’: The Flawed Science and Failures of Mass Vaccination” (para. 5). By pitting the CDC’s recommendations against rhetoric like Humphries’s, the contemporary vaccine debate demonstrates how an ethics of immunity may be scaled up or down to preference the aggregate health of the population or the well-­being of a single person governed by public health policy. Further attention to this rhetoric and to the scalar logic underlying the biopolitical or neoliberal ethics of immunity invoked on both sides of the debate is necessary, therefore, if we wish to rebuild trust between concerned citizens and public health officials.

The Body Politic On a webpage devoted to debunking common vaccine “myths” or misconceptions, the World Health Organization (WHO) insists upon the need to maintain high rates of vaccine compliance even though many vaccine-­preventable illnesses are rare in developed countries. We must vigilantly vaccinate, the WHO explains, because the interactions among individual bodies permit the spread of infection; further, the contagion carried by a single individual has the potential to overwhelm an unprotected community. The WHO’s rationale betrays a problematically nationalist fear of an infectious “other,” similar to what Alan Kraut describes as “medical nativism” in Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the Immigrant Menace (1994) and Wald (2008) notes in her analysis of the “outbreak narrative.” Although vaccine preventable diseases have become uncommon in many countries, the infectious agents that cause them continue to circulate in some parts of the world. In a highly inter-­connected world, these agents can cross geographical borders and infect anyone who is not protected. [ . . . ] So two key reasons to get vaccinated are to protect ourselves and to protect those around us. Successful vaccination programmes [sic], like successful societies, depend on the cooperation of every individual to ensure the good of all. We should not rely on people around us to stop the spread of disease; we, too, must do what we can. (WHO 2013, under “Myth 4”)

The WHO’s justification of government-­mandated vaccination so closely juxtaposes vaccine compliance and “successful societies” as to suggest that the two are, in fact, the same. The hallmark of a successful society, the WHO suggests,

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is the collective immunity conferred by vaccines. Immunity is depicted as a civic virtue, a symbol of cooperative community values. And while the WHO concedes that one reason to comply with recommended vaccination schedules is to “protect ourselves,” it implores us to “do what we can” to ensure the overall health of a population. The ethics of immunity that the WHO proposes, then, is one that equates vaccine compliance with social obligation, that preferences the health of the body politic over that of the body singular, and that deems the risk of disease recurrence—­in a future near or far—­more ominous than the immediate risk of vaccination. In fact, it does not even acknowledge the immediate risks vaccination may present to the individual. Alison Lee, writing for the blog-­style parenting resource Scary Mommy, similarly insists that an individual is obliged to comply with government-­ mandated vaccines to prevent the spread of infection to other members of a community and, thereby, to preserve the public’s health. Where the WHO accentuates vaccination’s positive impact on community health, Lee emphasizes the adverse effects of vaccine exemption, insisting that to refuse vaccination is to expose an entire community to the risk of contagion. In a post inexorably titled “Vaccinations: It’s Not YOUR Choice,” Lee insists that the decision “to vaccinate or not to vaccinate is NOT a personal choice” because a “personal choice does not affect hundreds, thousands of people, entire communities” (2011, para. 4, all emphases in original). The WHO urges each individual to consider the impact his or her decision to vaccinate, or not, has on the health of the community as a whole, but Lee offers no room for compromise; first and foremost, she contends, the individual must contribute to the collective health of the community in which he or she lives because the risk of contagion posed by community living is inherently shared among all members of that community. The ethics of immunity that she presents, therefore, operates on the scale of the body politic, demonizing immunological freeloaders who benefit from but do not contribute to a community’s herd immunity. Personal concerns evaluated at the scale of an individual body are irrelevant to the ethics of immunity that Lee defines: “When you say, I choose not to vaccinate and it is my right!—­you are deciding for me, and thousands of other parents and their children. You are exposing your children and mine to diseases that should no longer be here. You are exposing elderly folks [ . . . ] to these diseases. You are taking away children, parents, and grandparents away from their families. That is your personal choice? No, it is not” (Lee 2011, para. 12, all emphases in original). Vaccine refusers have not only failed to “do their part” to maintain a community’s herd immunity (per the WHO) and thereby to protect this community from an infectious “other” but also have allowed themselves to become the bearers of contagion, “exposing” others to “diseases that should no longer be here,” Lee contends. If a parent’s decision whether or not to vaccinate his or her child affected only that child

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and/or family, Lee explains, the decision would be solely his or her own. However, because the decision to vaccinate directly affects other members of the community, it is not a decision that should be left to an individual. Where Lee accentuates the threat posed by other bodies within a collective, however, Eula Biss also finds the potential for strength and protection in this community, one in which an individual’s immunity is bolstered by a collective, synergistic resistance to contagion: herd immunity. Yet both authors frame an individual’s compliance with government-­mandated vaccine schedules as a social obligation, each proposing an ethics of immunity that operates at the scale of the population. “The unvaccinated person is protected by the bodies around her, bodies through which disease is not circulating,” Biss contends, “But a vaccinated person surrounded by bodies that host disease is left vulnerable to vaccine failure or fading immunity. We are protected not so much by our own skin, but by what is beyond it. The boundaries between our bodies begin to dissolve here” (2014, 19–­20). A community’s shared herd immunity dissolves the borders between self and society in Biss’s description, and as a result, she concludes, a “superior” immunity is forged. Biss suggests, therefore, that individual immunity—­as a discretely bounded entity—­is an impossibility. Further refining the dynamics of immunity, contagion, and community, Biss writes that “the capacity of some vaccines to generate a collective immunity superior to the individual immunity produced by those same vaccines suggests that the politic has not only a body, but also an immune system capable of protecting it as a whole” (2014, 126). To Biss, the “collective immunity” engendered by large-­scale vaccination campaigns reveals that the politic’s “body” is composed of many bodies united by their proximity—­by the risks and responsibilities that result from community living. Both immunity and the risk of contagion are cultivated by the body politic, a community in which individual bodies so closely interact as to become indistinguishable. Because the self cannot be isolated from society, the ethics of immunity that Biss invokes figures immunity from a holistic perspective, as the product of an individual’s interaction with both the environment and the community in which he or she lives. “The natural body meets the body politic in the act of vaccination, where a single needle penetrates both,” she writes, yoking together the interests of personal and public health (Biss 2014, 126). What is best for social bodies, then, is also what is best for individuals bodies. One is not obliged to comply with state-­mandated vaccination programs simply because society’s concerns outweigh those of the individual but because the health of the public depends on the health of individuals and the risk of contagion is only truly allayed by collective herd immunity. The ethics of immunity proposed by Biss, Lee, and the WHO all insist, therefore, that one upholds his or her end of a social contract by contributing to a shared immunity trusted to protect the whole society from vaccine-­preventable illnesses.

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The Body in/and the Body Politic On the other hand, historian Mark A. Largent expresses reservations regarding government-­mandated vaccination in his recent monograph Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America (2012), proposing an ethics of immunity that acknowledges risk aversion on the individual scale, although, ultimately, he does not oppose all mandatory vaccines. While the ethics of immunity informing his position does not rebut Biss’s assertion that “immunity is a public space” (2014, 95), Largent paints a gloomier portrait of an embodied community: “I categorically reject as egotistically libertarian any claim that no one has a right to compel us to do anything with our bodies,” he insists, explaining that “we live in an interconnected community and are intensely reliant on one another, a situation that forces us to submit to a multitude of concessions as we balance the pragmatic demands of sharing the earth with the rest of humankind” (2012, 172). Biss’s “superior immunity” is supplanted here by “a multitude of concessions,” and the ethics of immunity that Largent imagines accentuates what is lost rather than what is gained by community belonging. Because community living facilitates the spread of contagious diseases—­diseases that are able to circulate only when persons cohabitate— ­it exposes the individual members of a body politic to risks only averted by compromising bodily autonomy and assuming the risks associated with vaccination. Vaccines are designed to protect individual bodies from infectious “crowd” diseases, yet complying with state-­mandated vaccination schedules is still a concession, Largent argues, echoing the nihilism Roberto Esposito identifies as the crux of community belonging in Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Community “doesn’t keep us warm, and it doesn’t protect us,” Esposito insists. “On the contrary, it exposes us to the most extreme of risks: that of losing, along with our individuality, the borders that guarantee its inviolability with respect to the other” (2010, 140). Similarly, the ethics of immunity that Largent lays out emphasizes what the individual loses—­his or her right to choose whether or not to vaccinate—­rather than what the community gains—­herd immunity—­by collective living. Not only does this ethics of immunity clearly differentiate the interests of the self from those of the society, but it also problematizes the prioritization of collective interests that Biss, Lee, and the WHO advocate. While public health officials, drawing on large sample sizes, can quantify the collective risks and benefits of mass immunization programs, “for parents—­who are vested with responsibility first to their child and who are granted the political right to fulfill that responsibility as they see fit—­the ‘big picture’ of public health is generally of only secondary concern,” Largent explains (2012, 10, 21, 30). Notably, all of the nonvaccinators who Sobo surveyed had no or quite limited knowledge of herd immunity, and neither the health of nor the risk to the

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collective body politic informed their decisions to refuse vaccination (2016, 190). “The ‘big picture’ of public health” obscures the immediate individual risks that vaccination poses in order to accentuate the promise of collective immunity, a large-­scale perspective that Largent finds problematic and so-­ called neoliberal parents consider irrelevant. More vehement critics of government-­mandated childhood vaccines, like Barbara Loe Fisher, cofounder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC)—­a nonprofit claiming to have “launched the vaccine safety and informed consent movement in America” (NVIC, n.d.)3—­model an ethics of immunity that more forcefully resists the sublimation of the self to the society in which that person lives. Encouraging Americans to resist mandatory childhood vaccination in the NVIC’s May 2015 newsletter, Fisher insists: Vaccines are not safe or effective for everyone because we are not all the same and we do not all respond the same way to pharmaceutical products like vaccines. [ . . . ] Vaccine safety research is not a priority because long ago public health officials made a calculated decision that the lives of those harmed by vaccines are expendable in order to pursue what they consider to be a more important goal: the eradication of a long list of infectious microorganisms through compulsory vaccine use. When vaccine risks turn out to be 100 percent for you or your child, you are expected to quietly accept that you are unavoidable collateral damage in the war on microorganisms. (2015)

The public space of immunity that Fisher describes is not a shared social body but rather a collective of distinct and differentiated individuals whose bodily health can be abstracted from the overall health of the communities in which they live: “We are not all the same,” she insists. Individual bodies—­bodies that may suffer as a result of vaccination—­take precedence over any intellectual conception of the herd or community. No mention is made to either a collective immunity (per Biss and Lee) or a shared susceptibility (per the WHO). Identifying vaccination as a central strategy in what she calls “the war on microorganisms,” Fisher obscures the language of public health by redefining the aims of state-­mandated vaccination: the WHO recommends vaccines to “stop the spread of disease” within national and international communities, but Fisher claims that vaccines are primarily used to “eradicat[e]” a “long list of infectious microorganisms.” As Fisher portrays it, public health’s seemingly monomaniacal obsession with eradicating all “infectious microorganisms” threatens to sacrifice an individual to the cause of community health, to treat them as “unavoidable collateral damage.” The ethics of immunity that Fisher proposes assumes that personal health can be separated from community health, that immunity and the risk of contagion are independently cultivated, and that although members of a community live in close proximity,

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the individual bodies through which contagion spreads are both bounded and autonomous. The ethics of immunity that Fisher articulates is the absolute antithesis of Biss’s, then. The contemporary debate surrounding vaccine exemption that these two represent thus hinges on whether immunity and susceptibility to disease are perceived as individual or collective phenomena and, consequently, whether the ethics of immunity informing the decision to vaccinate—­perceived on the scale of the body or the body politic—­conforms to neoliberal or biopolitical ideology.

Public Health in a Disembodied Body Politic The debates surrounding childhood vaccination have reached a fever pitch in recent years, aided and abetted by the proliferation of venues for self-­ publication and the accessibility of information—­credible or not—­online. Digital communities are unmoored in time and space, both asynchronous and spatially diverse, yet nonetheless facilitate conversations and provoke debates with a sense of immediacy. The dialogue fostered in the comments section of a particular blog post, for example, may be sustained for a number of years as new readers encounter and engage with material published online, allowing information, inaccuracies, and exaggerations to spread through digitally imagined communities. Yet most problematically, perhaps, the online communities that digital technologies enable constitute a disembodied body politic that does not experience the embodied effects of contagion and immunity. Atemporal and disembodied digital communities are effectively free to assess the risks of vaccination as immediate and individual without witnessing the long-­term consequences of their decisions within an embodied collective. Therefore, such spaces permit a neoliberal assessment of vaccine risk. Yet while disembodied digital collectives cannot cultivate herd immunity or be infected with vaccine-­preventable illnesses, the embodied members of these digital communities can. Like the novel and the newspaper, venues for digital publication offer a new way to invent and to represent “imagined communities” a la Benedict Anderson (2006). And although the nation that Anderson describes as imaginatively engendered via the simultaneity of shared literary production is, ultimately, a disembodied abstraction, the body politic that is conceptually unified by a shared cultural imaginary and subject to public health intervention necessitates biopolitical governance precisely because it is an embodied collective. Professor of English and scholar of medical rhetoric Bernice L. Hausman and her coauthors trace a history of vaccine hesitance and resistance to compulsory vaccination in the United States in an article titled “‘Poisonous, Filthy, Loathsome, Damnable Stuff ’: The Rhetorical Ecology of Vaccination Concern,” which reveals the striking similarity between today’s antivaccine rhetoric

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and late-­nineteenth-­century vaccine skepticism, as represented in figure 3.1. Although the “contemporary rhetorical ecology that includes the Internet and the power of celebrity voices changes the way in which such skepticism is articulated and circulated,” Hausman et al. (2014) contend, “what feels new in contemporary vaccine skepticism may in fact be a reworking of longstanding concerns” (407, 414). Self-­designed web pages, blogs, and social media sites offer concerned parents throughout the United States and across the globe new opportunities to self-­select digital communities as an alternative

FIGURE 3.1  “Death the Vaccinator,” published in the London Society for the Abolition of

Compulsory Vaccination, circa late 1800s, from the Collection of the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Image cropped to include illustration only. Reproduced with permission of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

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to the body politic that they unavoidably inhabit as corporeal beings living among other embodied individuals. And yet, because disembodied digital communities cannot cultivate immunity, the effects of vaccine refusal are absorbed by embodied communities. Communities may be disembodied, abstract, or socially constructed, but the body politic is also always biologically constituted. When framed as an issue of scale, the vaccine-­exemption debate emerges not as the product of scientific illiteracy, fearmongering, conspiracy theories, or capitalist exploitation but rather as a contemporary exemplar of public health’s greatest challenge: its need to adequately account for the individual in the design of population-­level interventions. When the body politic is disembodied, when it takes the form of a digital community, this challenge becomes far greater. How might digital spaces be leveraged, instead, to allay the concerns expressed by vaccine-­hesitant parents? Eve Dubé, Dominique Gagnon, Noni E. MacDonald, and the SAGE Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy suggest, in “Strategies Intended to Address Vaccine Hesitancy: Review of Published Reviews,” that peer-­to-­peer communication via social media may counter vaccine hesitancy (2015, 4201), while Philip B. Cawkwell and David Oshinsky (2015) recommend the use of narrative rather than statistical evidence in parent-­physician communication in “Storytelling in the Context of Vaccine Refusal: A Strategy to Improve Communication and Immunisation.” As the rhetorical analysis provided herein attests, however, such stories and social media exchanges must evaluate the risks and benefits of vaccination relative to a single child if they are to be compelling to “neoliberal parents.”

Notes 1 Historian of medicine, science, and technology Mark A. Largent argues that the

sustained focus on the MMR vaccine’s purported link to autism is a polemical “proxy debate” that “obscures serious problems—­some inherent to the vaccines themselves and some unintentionally generated over the last several decades—­that animate parents’ anxieties about vaccines” (2012, 1). From the research he surveys, Largent concludes “that there is no causal link between vaccines and the onset of symptoms of autism in otherwise healthy children. By 2009, the CDC could cite nine authoritative studies from researchers around the world concluding that there is no demonstrable link between vaccines and autism” (2012, 73). See also Cawkwell and Oshinsky (2015), who explain how the “smooth” functioning of the scientific community to discredit the suggested vaccine-­autism link nevertheless fails to assuage the lay public (3). 2 See Deborah Lupton’s introduction to The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body (1995, 5–­13) for an account of public health, biopower, biopolitics, and governmentality. 3 Since I completed a first draft of this chapter in January 2016, the NVIC has amended their mission statement. No longer claiming to have “launched the vaccine safety and informed consent movement in America,” they describe their

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organization as “an independent clearinghouse for information on diseases and vaccine science, policy, law and the ethical principle of informed consent.” As of April 2018, the NVIC’s mission statement eschews a firm stance on vaccine compliance or resistance: “The information on this website is intended to assist readers in making educated decisions about vaccination and is not intended to advise for or against the use of vaccines.” Nevertheless, the material on their site—­including the May 2015 newsletter, authored by NVIC cofounder and president Barbara Loe Fisher and provocatively titled “Blackmail and the Medical Vaccine Exemption,” which I reference later in this chapter—­contains inflammatory rhetoric, including the assertion that “liability free doctors want permission from lawmakers to blackmail virtually every American into playing vaccine roulette” (NVIC 2015).

References American Public Health Association. n.d. “What Is Public Health?” Accessed March 31, 2018. https://​www​.apha​.org/​what​-is​-public​-health. Anderson, Benedict. (1983) 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. New York: Verso. Bashford, Alison, and Claire Hooker. 2001. “Introduction: Contagion, Modernity and Postmodernity.” In Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies, edited by Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker, 1–­12. London: Routledge. Berezin, Mabel, and Alicia Eads. 2016. “Risk Is for the Rich? Childhood Vaccination Resistance and a Culture of Health.” Social Science and Medicine 165:233–­245. Birkle, Carmen, and Johanna Heil, eds. 2013. Communicating Disease: Cultural Representations of American Medicine. Heidelberg, Denmark: Universitätsverlag. Biss, Eula. 2014. On Immunity: An Inoculation. Minneapolis: Graywolf. Cawkwell, Philip B., and David Oshinsky. 2015. “Storytelling in the Context of Vaccine Refusal: A Strategy to Improve Communication and Immunisation.” Medical Humanities 42 (1): 31–­53, https://​doi​.org/​10​.1136/​medhum​-2015​-010761. CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). 2013. “The Childhood Immunization Schedule.” http://​www​.cdc​.gov/​vaccines/​hcp/​patient​-ed/​conversations/​downloads/​ vacsafe​-child​-immun​-color​-office​.pdf. CDC. 2015a. “2015 Recommended Immunizations for Children from Birth through 6 Years Old.” http://​www​.cdc​.gov/​vaccines/​parents/​downloads/​parent​-ver​-sch​-0-6yrs​.pdf. CDC. 2015b. “State Vaccination Requirements.” http://​www​.cdc​.gov/​vaccines/​imz​ -managers/​laws/​state​-reqs​.html. CDC. 2015c. “Community Immunity.” Vaccines and Immunizations Glossary. http://​www​ .cdc​.gov/​vaccines/​about/​terms/​glossary​.htm​#d. CDC. 2015d. “Possible Side Effects from Vaccines.” http://​www​.cdc​.gov/​vaccines/​vac​-gen/​ side​-effects​.htm. Cohen, Ed. 2009. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Durham: Duke University Press. Conis, Elena. 2013. “A Mother’s Responsibility: Women, Medicine, and the Rise of Contemporary Vaccine Skepticism in the United States.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87 (3): 407–­435. Dubé, Eve, Dominique Gagnon, Noni E. Mac Donald, and the SAGE Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy. 2015. “Strategies Intended to Address Vaccine Hesitancy: Review of Published Reviews.” Vaccine 33:4191–­4203.

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Esposito, Roberto. 2010. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Translated by Timothy Campbell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Esposito, Roberto. 2011. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Malden: Polity Press. Fisher, Barbara Loe. 2015. “Blackmail and the Medical Vaccine Exemption.” National Vaccine Information Center. http://​www​.nvic​.org/​NVIC​-Vaccine​-News/​May​-2015/​blackmail​ -and​-the​-medical​-vaccine​-exemption​.aspx. Foucault, Michel. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–­1978. Edited by Michel Snellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador. Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–­1979. Edited by Michel Snellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador. Hausman, Bernice L, Mecal Ghebremichael, Philip Hayek, and Erin Mack. 2014. “‘Poisonous, Filthy, Loathsome, Damnable Stuff ’: The Rhetorical Ecology of Vaccination Concern.” Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 87:403–­416. Humphries, Suzanne. 2012. “‘Herd Immunity’: The Flawed Science and Failures of Mass Vaccination.” International Medical Council on Vaccination. http://ellismobilechiro .com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Herd-Immunity-The-flawed-science-and -failures-of-mass-vaccination.pdf. Kraut, Alan M. 1994. Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Largent, Mark A. 2012. Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lee, Alison. 2011. “Vaccinations: It’s Not YOUR Choice.” Scary Mommy. http://​www​ .scarymommy​.com. Lupton, Deborah. 1995. The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Mamo, Laura, and Steven Epstein. 2014. “The Pharmaceuticalization of Sexual Risk: Vaccine Development and the New Politics of Cancer Prevention.” Social Science and Medicine 101:155–­165. National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). n.d. “About National Vaccine Information Center.” Accessed July 1, 2016. http://​www​.nvic​.org/​about​.aspx. Ostherr, Kirsten. 2005. Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health. Durham: Duke University Press. Reich, Jennifer. 2014. “Neoliberal Mothering and Vaccine Refusal: Imagined Gated Communities and the Privilege of Choice.” Gender and Society 28 (5): 679–­704. Reich, Jennifer. 2016. “Neoliberal Parenting, Future Sexual Citizens, and Vaccines against Sexual Risk.” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 13:341–­355. Rose, Nikolas. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-­First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Silva, Cristobal. 2011. Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sobo, Elisa J. 2016. “What Is Herd Immunity, and How Does It Relate to Pediatric Vaccination Uptake? US Parent Perspectives.” Social Science and Medicine 165:187–­195. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press. WHO (World Health Organization). 2013. “What Are Some of the Myths—­and Facts—­about Vaccination?” http://​www​.who​.int/​features/​qa/​84/​en/.

4

Radiophobia and the Politics of Social Contagion MAJIA NADESAN The metaphors of “contagion” and “pollution” have long been deployed to describe mass media disseminations of oppositional discourses, or memes, contesting dominant frameworks of risk and/or technocratic assessments of hazards. Although Richard Dawkins first articulated the framework of informational memes that disseminate mimetically in 1976, his conception has evolved significantly to incorporate more culturally rich conceptions of contagious social information (Blackmore 1998). The epidemiological metaphor of contagion captures the political dimensions of mimetic transmission because contagious ideas that challenge institutionally established ones are regarded by the proponents of the latter as polluting, contaminating, and/or cancerous. Understanding social contagion has achieved special urgency in the internet era because of technology’s democratization of production and the speed and scope of internet disseminations. Recently the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research aimed at studying “social epidemics” of propagating and “misinforming” memes. Research findings will likely be deployed to combat internet memes designated as both contagious and polluting (i.e., “misinforming”). However, as one might imagine, there are deep politics implicated in designations of truth and misinformation in the battles for public opinion and for influence over the official historical record. 71

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Established disinformation tactics aimed at promulgating false information, such as artificially engineering scientific dogmatism around hazards whose risks are fraught with scientific uncertainty, are of particular relevance in understanding internet battles for public opinion. This chapter demonstrates how scientific dogmatism is deployed in the nuclear establishment meme of radiophobia, a concept developed during the Cold War by proponents of atomic weapons testing to discredit expert and popular fears concerning radiation safety by trivializing, feminizing, and “hystericizing” them within a psychodynamic framework. The gendered nature of the term hystericize is not unrecognized; radiophobia was first defined in 1951 as the irrational fear of radiation that most specifically afflicted women of reproductive age—­particularly in terms of the uterus and its dysfunctions. Radiophobia was again deployed to discredit expert and popular concerns about radiation risks, particularly reproductive risks, in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl and 2011 Fukushima nuclear crises. Detailed analysis of the Fukushima crisis discloses that radiophobia operates dogmatically to negate scientific uncertainty about risks from chronic exposure, bioaccumulation, and hot spots, especially for children. Japanese mothers are the meme’s primary targets today, requiring them to navigate competing memes about radiation safety in their efforts to protect their children from disputed, but potentially significant, biological risks.

Dangerous Memes Memes compete to replicate and to impose their order of intelligibility and normative practices on the social terrain. Ruling or hegemonic memes shape mainstream and/or authoritative truths but confront resistance posed by oppositional memes that derive their authority from institutional renegades, folk knowledges, and other alternatively positioned epistemologies. Memes that challenge mainstream scientific authority today circulate virtually, such as those contesting vaccination or GMO (genetically modified organism) safety. These oppositional memes draw on scientific and government findings as well as grassroots cultural understandings that diverge significantly from establishment truths, as especially illustrated by anti-­GMO memes that derive authority from European scientific research (Séralini, Clair, and Mesnage 2012). In the productivity of the internet age, establishment truths are deconstructed and contested by internet activists who deploy oppositional memes in the war over meaning and truth. In an effort to understand and mitigate this situation, the NSF funded research aimed at studying (and likely combating) “social epidemics” of propagating and “misinforming” memes (Pai 2014), while Google strives to create search algorithms that sort out results relying on

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problematized source materials. Big data and search filters are the latest tools in more than a century of efforts to manage public opinion. Public relations authorities, such as Edward T. Bernays (1891–­1995), offered industry and government foundational texts for managing public opinion and engineering consent, as exemplified in Bernays’s Propaganda. In the opening pages, he argues that cultivation of society’s thoughts and habits by “invisible governors” is necessary for a “smoothly functioning society” ([1928] 1930, 1). One important information arena shaped by Bernays’s ideas about engineering social consent was public opinion on atomic energy. Historian Megan Sethi (2012) documents that Bernays guided the Federation of American Scientists in its efforts to educate the public on atomic matters in the late 1940s. She traces his role in the group’s establishment of the National Committee on Atomic Information (NCAI), which ultimately adopted a more doctrinaire approach toward education that minimized radiation risks while touting benefits (16–­18). Willard Libby, a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, deployed the phrase “sunshine units” when referencing increments of exposure to radioactive strontium (1957, 761), clearly illustrating the tendency for atomic authorities to frame radiation risks benignly. In other words, those authorities orchestrating the chords of public opinion wanted no discord concerning atomic matters and constructed memes such as “sunshine units” to mitigate public concerns about radiation safety. Global outrage over the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a critical impetus for efforts to engineer consent around radiation safety.

FIGURE 4.1  Uncertainty at Sendai Station. Photo by John Bertucci.

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Atomic Annihilation, Radiophobia, and Social Control The global public was shocked and terrified by the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rupturing the social terrain in 1947. The public doubted human control over atomic technology and failed to see clear distinctions between atomic weapons and other (promised) atomic technologies. Atomic authorities and establishment academics alike decried the public’s resistance to atomic promises. Sociologist William Ogburn coined the idea of “cultural lag” to describe the public’s unwillingness to embrace atomic innovation and proposed a social science Manhattan project, one aimed at not only investigating the societal implications of atomic energy but also exploring “the means of stimulating in the popular mind the will to use the new technology for ‘the achievement of a good society’” (cited in Bayer 1985, 32–­33). The social sciences never got their Manhattan project, but Hornell Hart won the Edward T. Bernays Atomic Energy Award for his essay “Social Sciences and the Atomic Crisis,” published in 1949, which offered social science the tools of social control to engineer acceptance and cultural adaptation (Hart 1949, 323). Social controls were needed to combat cultural lag and to impose security and safety regimes over nuclear processes. The control paradigm that was developed in the 1940s and 1950s to prevent atomic annihilation involved bureaucratic and cultural deployments, including promulgation and institutionalization of the radiophobia meme. From the early 1950s onward, the nuclear complex’s radiophobia meme responded to fears of atomic annihilation akin to a prophylactic, vaccinating against oppositional memes while also functioning to mitigate contagion after it infected the social body. By substituting the dislocating implications of biological contagion with the psychological framework of “social contagion,” the radiophobia meme mitigated contagion semiotically. This substitution reestablished the nuclear complex’s institutional authority and technological mastery over the atom by trivializing, feminizing, and hystericizing oppositional memes that called into question the proliferation of risky atomic technologies given limited human understanding and controls over atomic fission and radioactive waste. Radiophobia was first coined in 1951 by Jack DeMent, who discussed a “new psychological syndrome” in an editorial piece in the opening pages of the Western Journal of Surgery, Obstetrics, and Gynecology. Cast as an expert in radiation safety in introductory remarks to the editorial, DeMent described radiophobia as rooted in ill-­formed understandings that needed to be combatted with appropriately targeted expert reassurances: “Radiophobia is the fear (or unhealthy dread) of atomic weapons and radioactivity. Radiophobia may be reasoned or unreasoned, founded or unfounded, active or passive. Radiophobia is quickly growing and, unless checked, will soon reach very

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large proportions. . . . It is the incomplete, ill-­digested half knowledge which is the precursor of the radiophobic syndrome and which causes more fear and superstition—­and their concomitant changes in the individual—­than a full and reasonable understand of atomic energy and its limitations” (1951, viii). The editorial’s strategic location in a medical journal focused on female reproduction implied that women were believed to be more susceptible to the dangerous dread of atomic energy and were specifically targeted for educational rehabilitation (Beyond Nuclear 2013). Women may well have been concerned about their reproductive health given the contestations over truth about radiation occurring in the Cold War context and because of the extension and sensationalism of atomic testing in the United States. Renegade scientific and medical authorities such as H.  J. Muller, Alice Stewart, John Gofman, E. F. Sternglass, and A. Tamplin warned publicly of the dangers of nuclear fallout and radiation exposure for pregnant women. For example, Muller, a pre-eminent geneticist who helped evaluate the post–­World War II Atomic Bomb Causality Commission’s genetic study, contributed an editorial to the Science News-­Letter titled, “The Menace of Radiation,” in which he wrote, “The effects of radiation on heredity are more insidious, elusive and delayed than any other biological effects known. Their total magnitude would undoubtedly be very considerable” (1949, 374). This competing “no-­threshold and transgenerational effects” meme unfolded in opposition to the radiophobia meme promoted by atomic advocates. Concern about the health hazards of atmospheric testing was amplified when the New York Times (1956) published the National Academy of Sciences’s summary of the genetic hazards of radiation derived from the “Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation” (BEAR) report (18). This news coverage emphasized the transgenerational transmission and accumulation of largely recessive mutations, specifying that the inheritance of too many mutated genes could lead to sudden genetic deterioration and widespread reproductive failures. These conclusions contradicted the premises of radiation rationalization, particularly those that radiation exposure could be incrementally controlled and its biological effects predicted. The battle for public opinion raged on. Nuclear proponents redoubled their efforts to shape public anxiety about radioactive fallout as an irrational phobia while atmospheric testing escalated in intensity and frequency, as illustrated by this account of radiophobia as a “neurosis”: “Many Americans are suffering from a new phobia: radiophobia. . . . The phobia, which has also been referred to as ‘nuclear neurosis,’ spread in the wake of the National Academy of Sciences’ learned summary on the genetic hazards of radiation in June 1956. Now, more than three years later, after strenuous efforts in defense of X-ray, radio-­phobia is believed by many to be definitely under control, but it is also believed to have been driven into the subconscious, where it still smolders”

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(“U.S. Suffers Radiophobia” 1959, 429). Public discourse about radiation safety and fallout was fraught with antagonistic tensions. On the one hand, genetic and medical authorities argued that radioactive particles from nuclear fallout accumulated in bodies and posed potentially catastrophic risks for fertility and transgenerational mutations. On the other hand, atomic authorities and those whose research was funded by atomic institutions represented ionizing radiation hazards using abstract units of electromagnetic energy, the biological effects of which could be accurately predicted as negligible or even beneficial under specified thresholds. The radiophobia meme was rediscovered and rearticulated in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. LexisNexis’s first entry on radiophobia, dated September 15, 1987, is an editorial by David Marples, an academic expert in the area of Slavic studies who argued that “phobia or not, people are ill at Chernobyl” (A7). Marples disputed psychosomatic formulations of radiophobia by decrying failures by authorities to provide food from “safe” noncontaminated areas, and he stated that radiation levels were alleged to be “dozens of times higher” than reported by the Chernobyl reactor’s former director. However, unlike Marples’s editorial, most published discussions of radiophobia in the post-­Chernobyl environment do not contest the term. Rather they embrace radiophobia within a therapeutic language that invites medical and scientific experts to intervene on behalf of individuals suffering from untoward psychological anxiety about radiation. In this formulation, radiophobia is attributed to a failure of communication by health care and scientific authorities. Radiophobia emerges as a symptom of ignorance unwittingly fostered by expert authorities who fail to communicate their scientific understandings of “thresholds” for low-­dose effects and cellular repair mechanisms.

Competing Memes on Radiation Safety Radiation safety is a complicated and contested symbolic terrain in significant part because of the complex materialities of modeling the diverse forms and effects of radiation exposure. Radiation exposure can be framed as internal or external to the body. It can be framed in terms of electromagnetic radiation (e.g., gamma rays and X-rays) or the particle decay and chemical effects of radioactive elements (e.g., uranium). Its effects can be thought of somatically or genetically and can be tracked across individual lifespans or generations. Radiation risk management has entailed the establishment of standardized dose models that predict excess deaths or cancers per additional exposure of units homogenized across organs or bodies. The hegemonic body of knowledge produced by the Atomic Bomb Causality Commission (ABCC), the International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP), and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation

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(UNSCEAR), which are funded by atomic institutions, are riddled with acknowledged uncertainties, and key models and assumptions are debated (Nadesan 2013). The uncertainties and conflicts in establishment truths offer oppositional memes fuel for their alternative accounts. In particular, ABCC findings, which are foundational to radiation risk assessments and were deployed in the wake of the Fukushima crisis, have been politicized since the studies’ inceptions (Lindee 1994). In the wake of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, scientific investigation of atomic effects was controlled by Americans, who censored Japanese scientists’ independent investigations. The ABCC was launched with a series of visits by U.S. authorities who were particularly interested in surgical burns caused by the blasts and long-­term reproductive and genetic effects (Henshaw and Brues 1947). Based on animal irradiation studies and secret wartime research, these authorities saw that the potential for reproductive disturbances, malignancies of one form or another, shortened lifespans, and altered genetic patterns would likely occur years after exposure. A genetic study was established and more research called for but was not pursued by the ABCC until Japan administered a national survey in 1950 to address citizens’ recollections of their locations in relation to the explosions and symptoms experienced after the disaster. Individual citizens’ dose exposure was inferred from reported symptoms and locations. Those who were not directly exposed to the blasts but were subsequently exposed to radiation when entering the cities to search for family and friends were excluded from the ABCC’s calculations of risk. Japanese medical doctor Shuntaro Hida has long contested the ABCC’s statements, particularly regarding low-­dose and non-­cancer-­related biological effects. Hida has argued in the Japanese news media that the cultural stigmatization of contamination caused victims to hide symptoms despite significant afflictions that he treated secretly in his clinic (cited in Iizuka 2012). Hida notes that the American occupying authority forbade “speaking, recording or doing research into symptoms of atomic-­bomb survivors” (cited in Iizuka 2012). Hida contends that the United States “concealed” information about fallout-­related illnesses in Japan and has since censored public knowledge and research about exposure to ionizing radiation, particularly the effects of internally ingested alpha and beta emitters, such as uranium (Mainichi 2012). From 1979 to 2009, Hida served as the chair of the Japan Confederation of A-­and H-Bomb Sufferers Organization’s central consultation center (Mainichi 2012). Hida’s oppositional formulations of radiation risks circulate in concert with other research and editorials challenging atomic authorities’ claims for “tolerance doses” and “thresholds” for effects.

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Radiophobia and Fukushima The March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster—­involving three meltdowns and at least one spent fuel pool fire—­renewed deployments of the radiophobia meme in the war over public interpretation of radiation risk (Nadesan 2013, 34–­43). Reassurances of no immediate health risks were recounted by the Japanese press in response to a flood of alarming official data concerning contaminated rice, drinking water, and beef. For example, in January 2012, the Asahi Shimbun included the headline “Fukushima People Eating More Cesium but Not in Danger, Says Study.” The United Nations also promoted the “no harm” meme, as reported by Reuters on January 31, 2012, in an article titled “No Big Fukushima Health Impact Seen: U.N. Body Chairman.” Governmental assurances of minimal fallout, low exposures, and little-­to-­ no risks were immediately contested by a range of authorities, activists, and exposed citizens within Japan. For example, former minister for internal affairs Haraguchi Kazuhiro alleged that the radiation monitoring station data were actually three decimal places greater than the numbers released to the public (cited in Penney 2011). Ongoing atmospheric emissions, contaminated water leaks, hot spots, incineration of radioactive waste, and highly radioactive black soil found throughout northern Japan and in Tokyo exacerbated fears of widespread radiation contamination after the disaster (Nadesan 2013). Voluntary radiation monitoring organizations were formed, and efforts were made to identify hot spots in communities designated as habitable (under twenty millisieverts a year). Fears about radiation grew, especially in the Fukushima region, as residents experienced inexplicable symptoms that they attributed to exposure to radioactive fallout. Hida reported receiving calls from residents in the Fukushima Prefecture who described fatigue, diarrhea, and hair loss. He was quoted in the Japan Times in 2012: “I am worried because I received such calls much earlier than I expected” (cited in Iizuka 2012). Japanese government and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) officials scoffed at radiophobic citizens. For example, one government official stated that residents’ concerns over radiation-­contaminated drinking water were a “psychological issue” after the Ministry of the Environment reported up to 18,700 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilogram of soil at the bottom of their drinking water reservoir at the Kido Dam (Mainichi 2015a). Despite citizens’ protests, officials argued that stress was the real culprit behind inexplicable symptoms attributed to exposure to ionizing radiation. The Center for Psychological Studies of Disaster at Fukushima University began surveying Fukushima mothers and children in 2011, finding that they experienced “more stress” than mothers and children in areas with less contamination (Mainichi 2015b).

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Seeking to reestablish normalcy in the wake of the disaster, governmental authorities labeled bodily reactions attributed to radiation by sufferers instead to radiophobia (stress caused by phobia), and Dr.  Shunichi Yamashita prescribed “smiling” as a cure (Meyer 2011). Dr. Yamashita, the appointed radiological health safety risk management adviser for the Fukushima Prefecture, appeared widely on national TV, arguing that radiation levels in Fukushima were of no concern and would not have health effects. He claimed that one hundred millisieverts of exposure (a level of exposure one-­hundred times Japan’s pre-­Fukushima national exposure level) was safe even for pregnant women and was quoted alleging that “the effects of radiation do not come to people that are happy and laughing. They come to people that are weak-­ spirited, that brood and fret” (cited in Democracy Now 2011). Called to account for asserting that no effects from radiation occur to happy people by Der Spiegel, Yamashita responded using the language of scientific expertise, claiming that few statistically significant increased rates of cancer exist for exposure levels under one hundred millisieverts (Meyer 2011). Yet NASA identifies one hundred millisieverts as the level above which neurological damage begins for astronauts exposed to ionizing radiation (Sieffert 2014). Astronauts are typically extraordinarily healthy adults. According to radiophobia proponents in Japan and abroad, the greatest risk from Fukushima was stress from fear of radiation, and the antidote was more education and smiling. Radiophobia was the big risk from nuclear disasters. Or perhaps it was not. Scientists and medical doctors have challenged the radiophobia meme with alternate accounts of troubling post-­Fukushima symptoms among vulnerable populations. In particular, debate about Fukushima’s exposure effects has focused on the reasons for rising childhood thyroid cancer rates in Fukushima Prefecture. Chaotic evacuations because of poor crisis communications in March 2011 interfered with distribution of potassium iodide, the ingestion of which helps block the human thyroid’s absorption of radioactive isotopes of iodine (Hayashi 2011). Exposure to radioactive iodine was widely acknowledged to have caused cancer in children directly exposed to the Chernobyl fallout (Chernobyl Forum 2006). Comprehensive surveys conducted by Fukushima University Hospital and by other physicians in Japan have documented high rates of thyroid nodules and thyroid cancers in Fukushima children (with rates up to fifty times higher than ordinarily found in childhood populations), leading one group of researchers to report a link between exposure and thyroid cancer (Tsuda et al. 2014). As of August 2015, the Fukushima Prefecture government identified 104 thyroid cancer cases in the prefecture according to Kyodo news (Japan Times 2015). However, Japan’s governmental authorities contest the link between exposure to radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and spiking

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thyroid cancer, arguing that missing data preclude any attributions of causality. Children in Japan were not given radiation monitoring badges until June 2011, months after the accident occurred (Ogura 2011). The data collected during the early days of the disaster were destroyed. NHK, Japan’s national public broadcasting agency, reported in August 2011 that Japan’s nuclear commission had erased children’s exposure data derived from a test of one thousand children age fifteen or younger who had been screened for radiation affecting their thyroids (NHK 2011). According to atomic authorities, radioactive plumes, hot spots, and contaminated food and water cannot cause cancer in the absence of scientific validation of individual exposures. Accordingly, Shoichiro Tsugane of Japan’s Research Center for Cancer Prevention and Screening declared in the Japan Times that no cause can be attributed to the children’s cancer in the absence of specific data on their radiation exposure: “Unless radiation exposure data are checked, any specific relationship between a cancer incidence and radiation cannot be identified” (Japan Times 2015). Japan’s government continues to promote normalcy as it lifts evacuation orders and urges displaced residents to return to areas measuring up to twenty millisieverts per year in exposure, when pre-­Fukushima national exposure level limits were set at one millisievert. Every day, people must ultimately navigate truth in a context of contested science and oppositional formulations of risk. Children’s safety, in particular, is hotly contested in the context of increased exposure standards and concerns about the risks of long-­term bioaccumulation (NHK 2012). A report by the UN special rapporteur Anand Grover on the right to enjoy the highest standards of physical and mental health notes that concerns about radiation in Japan have caused family schisms, as mothers have evacuated with their children, leaving behind fathers in areas with increased allowable exposure levels (Grover 2013). Mothers, traditionally responsible for their children’s health, are the agents who must navigate uncertainty and are therefore most directly positioned by and against the radiophobia meme. The Japan Times reported in 2015 that mothers feel tremendous anxiety for their children’s well-­being but are simultaneously subject to great family pressures to conform to the new, more radioactive environment: “Those who remain there live in constant fear for their children’s health. But choosing to flee opened them to accusations of being bad wives who abandoned their relatives, community and husbands tied to jobs. It is a no-­win situation for those who face the decision to stay or go, because they may be unable to live up to the ideal of a ryosai kenbo (good wife, wise mother) . . . there is pressure on mothers to keep their worries to themselves” (Green 2015). Many mothers voluntarily left their homes in areas not formally designated for evacuation, incurring enormous financial cost and social stigmatization as a result of violating traditional societal expectations for Japanese women.

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Independent Japanese filmmaker Hitomi Kamanaka’s latest documentary, “Little Voices from Fukushima,” explores efforts by Fukushima mothers to understand the radiation risks to their children’s well-­being posed by the disaster. Kamanaka describes the mothers featured in the film as ordinary people impelled by concern for their children to seek out alternative accounts of radiation safety after having their concerns trivialized and ignored by Japanese officials. In developing her film, Kamanaka turns to mothers from Belarus for accounts of radiation effects on children to draw implications from mothers’ experiences with inexplicable bodily symptoms in Fukushima. “Little Voices from Fukushima” rejects the “hysterical” female subject position promoted in the radiophobia meme by positioning mothers as rational agents searching for information to understand troubling symptoms, including ubiquitous thyroid nodules in their screened children and rising rates of diabetes. In this way, “Little Voices from Fukushima” lends credibility to mothers’ concerns, risking the film’s positioning as misinformation in relation to the establishment’s “no effects” meme.

Radiophobia, Social Control, and Contested Claims to Truth Radiophobia was articulated in 1951 by pronuclear advocates as a dangerous neurosis characterized by the dread of radiation most often or typically afflicting women concerned about their offspring. Using rationalized models for predicting radiation dose effects predicated upon arcane and contested models of dose-­response exposure effects, radiophobia is described and promoted by atomic authorities who dismiss fear of atmospheric fallout of ionizing radiation. Health physicists’ rationalized models of radiation exposure have sought to replace the affective horrors of burnt and diseased bodies and the uncertainties of heritable mutations with abstract calculations of death by cancer (alone) that are provided in impenetrable technocratic measurements, such as rems and millisieverts. However, radiophobia proponents did not fully monopolize public opinion on radiation exposure effects. Dissident scientists and medical doctors contested radiophobia’s basic premise that the “fear of radiation exceeds its hazards” through their published research, interviews, and editorials describing the heritability of radiation-­caused germline cell mutations, processes and consequences of bioaccumulation of radionuclides within bone and organs, and the special vulnerabilities to ionizing radiation found during in-­utero development and early childhood. Despite their lack of voice, concerned mothers have historically been, and remain in the present, the primary protagonists in the contestations over radiophobia. The meme was designed to vaccinate health care providers and other expert authorities against mothers’ concerns and potential antinuclear activism. Radiophobia’s psychoanalytic and technocratic language has aimed

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to minimize mothers’ agency and discipline their resistance to atomic authorities’ assurances of radiation safety. Although hystericized by radiophobia’s proponents, mothers’ tentative inquiries and undisciplined departures have reinvigorated marginalized voices concerning ionizing radiation’s health and ecological consequences in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis. Mothers’ efforts to protect their children amplify the significance of scientific contestations over dose models, special vulnerabilities, and transgenerational effects for people living in contaminated arenas. Rising incidents of thyroid cancer and nodules among young people in Fukushima have disrupted the radiophobia meme, lending support to dissenting accounts. The question of whether Fukushima children’s thyroid cancer derives from Daiichi-­sourced radiation has been debated at length and across years on the international stage and in the pages of scientific journals. In the meantime, Fukushima mothers strive, below the mainstream radar, to find the truths that will promote their children’s health and healing, fearing that it is already too late.

References Asahi Shimbun. 2012. “Fukushima People Eating More Cesium but Not in Danger, Says Study.” AJW, January 19, 2012. http://​ajw​.asahi​.com/​article/​0311disaster/​fukushima/​ AJ201201190032. Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. n.d. “100 Years: The Rockefeller Foundation.” Accessed July 1, 2016. http://​rockefeller100​.org/​items/​show/​5773. Bayer, Paul. 1985. “Social Scientists and the Bomb.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 1 (October): 31–­40. Bernays, Edward. (1928) 1930. Propaganda. New York: Horace Liveright. Beyond Nuclear. 2013. “Radiophobia: Anxiety Disorder Misused.” Last modified August 22, 2013. http://​www​.beyondnuclear​.org/​children​-health/​2013/​8/​22/​can​-nuclear​-power​ -ever​-comply​-with​-the​-human​-right​-to​-health​.html. Blackmore, Susan. 1998. “Imitation and the Definition of a Meme.” Journal of Memetics—­Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission 2. http://​cfpm​.org/​jom​ -emit/​1998/​vol2/​blackmore​_s​.html. Chernobyl Forum. 2006. “Chernobyl’s Legacy: Health, Environmental and Socio-­Economic Impacts and Recommendations to the Governments of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine.” International Atomic Energy Agency. http://​www​.iaea​.org/​Publications/​ Booklets/​Chernobyl/​chernobyl​.pdf. Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DeMent, Jack. 1951. “Radiophobia: A New Psychological Syndrome.” Western Journal of Surgery, Obstetrics, and Gynecology 59 (11): viii. Democracy Now. 2011. “Japan Admits 3 Nuclear Meltdowns, More Radiation Leaked into Sea; U. S. Nuclear Waste Poses Deadly Risks.” June 10, 2011. http://​www​.democracynow​ .org/​2011/​6/​10/​as​_japan​_nuclear​_crisis​_worsens​_citizen. Green, Megan. 2015. “Reluctant to Speak, Fukushima Moms Admit Fear of Radiation, Pressure from Families.” Japan Times, September 29, 2015. http://​www​.japantimes​.co​.jp/​ news/​2015/​09/​29/​national/​social​-issues/​reluctant​-speak​-fukushima​-moms​-admit​-fear​ -radiation​-pressure​-families/​#​.WBOZSyQpKUk.

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Grover, Anand. 2013. “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right of Everyone to the Enjoyment of the Highest Attainable Standard of Physical and Mental Health.” Human Rights Council, Twenty-­Third Session, May 2013. Hart, Hornell. 1949. “Social Sciences and the Atomic Crisis.” Journal of Social Issues 5 (2): 4–­29. Hayashi, Yuka. 2011. “Japan Officials Failed to Hand Out Radiation Pills in Quake’s Aftermath.” Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2011. http://​online​.wsj​.com/​article/​ SB10001424052970204010604576596321581004368​.html. Henshaw, Paul, and Austin Brues. 1947. “Atomic Bomb Causality Commission General Report.” National Academy of Sciences, January 1947. http://​www​.nasonline​.org/​ about​-nas/​history/​archives/​collections/​organized​-collections/​atomic​-bomb​-casualty​ -commission​-series/​abccrpt​_pt1​.pdf. Iizuka, Megumi. 2012. “A-Bomb Doctor Warns of Further Fukushima Woes.” Japan Times, July 12, 2012. http://​www​.japantimes​.co​.jp/​text/​nn20120712f3​.html​#​.T​_​-lU​_V0jwl. Japan Times. 2015. “New Report Links Thyroid Cancer Rise to Fukushima Nuclear Crisis.” October 7, 2015. http://​www​.japantimes​.co​.jp/​news/​2015/​10/​07/​national/​science​ -health/​new​-report​-links​-thyroid​-cancer​-rise​-fukushima​-nuclear​-crisis/​#​.VhU3aCtBmFt. Kamanaka, Hitomi. n.d. “Little Voices from Fukushima.” Indiegogo. Accessed July 1, 2016. https://​www​.indiegogo​.com/​projects/​little​-voices​-from​-fukushima​#/. Libby, Willard. 1957. “Radioactive Fallout.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 43 (8): 758–­775. Lindee, M. Susan. 1994. Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mainichi. 2012. “Bomb Survivor Doctor Continues to Speak Up about Significance of Internal Exposure.” January 23, 2012. http://​mdn​.mainichi​.jp/​mdnnews/​news/​ 20120123p2a00m0na013000c​.html. Mainichi. 2015a. “Fukushima Town Residents Protest Official’s Comment about Radiation Safety.” July 7, 2015. http://​mainichi​.jp/​english/​english/​newsselect/​ news/​20150707p2a00m0na019000c​.html. Mainichi. 2015b. “Moms, Children from Fukushima No-­Go Zones Feel More Stress.” October 2, 2015. http://​mainichi​.jp/​english/​english/​newsselect/​news/​ 20151002p2a00m0na006000c​.html. Marples, David. 1987. “Phobia or Not, People Are Ill at Chernobyl.” The Globe and Mail (Canada), September 15, 1987. http://​www​.lexisnexis​.com​.ezproxy1​.lib​.asu​.edu/​ hottopics/​lnacademic/?. Meyer, Cordula. 2011. “Studying the Fukushima Aftermath: ‘People Are Suffering from Radiophobia.’” Der Spiegel, August 19, 2011. http://​www​.spiegel​.de/​international/​world/​ 0​,1518​,780810​,00​.html. Muller, H. J. 1949. “The Menace of Radiation.” Science News-­Letter 55 (24): 374, 379–­380. Nadesan, Majia. 2013. Fukushima and the Privatization of Risk. London: Palgrave Macmillan. New York Times. 1956. “Text of Genetics Committee Report concerning Effects of Radioactivity on Heredity.” July 13, 18, 1956. NHK. 2011. “Nuclear Commission Erases Children’s Exposure Data.” August 11, 2011. http://​www3​.nhk​.or​.jp/​daily/​english/​11​_14​.html. NHK. 2012. “Ministry Sorry for School Radiation Flipflop.” June 12, 2012. http://​www3​.nhk​ .or​.jp/​daily/​english/​20120612​_13​.html. Ogura, Junko. 2011. “Japan to Hand Out Radiation Meters to Kids near Crippled Plant.” CNN, June 14, 2011. http://​edition​.cnn​.com/​2011/​WORLD/​asiapcf/​06/​14/​japan​ .nuclear​.crisis/​index​.html​?eref​=​edition.

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Pai, Ajit. 2014. “The Government Wants to Study ‘Social Pollution’ on Twitter.” Washington Post, October 17, 2014. http://​www​.washingtonpost​.com/​opinions/​truthy​-project​-is​ -unworthy​-of​-tax​-dollars/​2014/​10/​17/​a3274faa​-531b​-11e4​-809b​-8cc0a295c773​_story​ .html​?wpisrc​=​nl​-headlines​&​wpmm​=​1. Penney, Matthew. 2011. “Nuclear Workers and Fukushima Residents at Risk: Cancer Expert on the Fukushima Situation.” The Asia-­Pacific Journal, July 1, 2011. http://​japanfocus​.org/​ events/​view/​100. “Radiophobia: A New Psychological Syndrome.” 1951. Western Journal of Surgery, Obstetrics, and Gynecology 59 (11): viii. Reuters. 2012. “No Big Fukushima Health Impact Seen: U.N. Body Chairman.” January 31, 2012. http://​www​.reuters​.com/​article/​2012/​01/​31/​us​-japan​-fukushima​-health​ -idUSTRE80U1AS20120131. Séralini, Gilles-­Eric, Emilie Clair, Robin Mesnage, Steeve Gress, Nicholas Defarge, et al. 2012. “Long Term Toxicity of a Roundup Herbicide and a Roundup-­Tolerant Genetically Modified Maize.” Food and Chemical Toxicology 50 (11): 4221–­4231. Sethi, Megan Barnhart. 2012. “Information, Education, and Indoctrination: The Federation of American Scientists and Public Communication Strategies in the Atomic Age.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 42 (1): 1–­29. Sieffert, Alyssa Megan. 2014. “Astronaut Health and Safety Regulations: Ionizing Radiation.” The SciTech Lawyer 10 (4): 20–­22. Tsuda, Toshihide, Akiko Tokinobu, Eiji Yamamoto, and Etsuji Suzuki. 2015. “Thyroid Cancer Detection by Ultrasound among Residents Ages 18 Years and Younger in Fukushima, Japan: 2011 to 2014.” Epidemiology 27 (3): 316–­322. “U.S. Suffers Radiophobia.” 1959. Science News-­Letter 76 (26): 429.

5

Isn’t Contagion Just a Metaphor? Reading Contagion in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year ANNIKA MANN

Scholars working in the humanities who investigate contagion before the twentieth century frequently find themselves in a difficult position. Examining contagion before the bacterial revolution (from roughly the 1860s to the 1890s), when germs could first be visually identified, scholars of these earlier periods might find themselves endlessly parsing medical and nonmedical uses of the term, trying to decide when contagion is being used figuratively—­that is, as a metaphor—­and when it connotes something real—­that is, when it describes a disease. But these acts of discrimination can be fruitless, as medical historians Vivian Nutton (2000) and Margaret Pelling (2001) have established, because before the second half of the nineteenth century, contagion denoted a wide variety of processes that had both negative and positive connotations. These included direct, person-­to-­person contact (the Latin meaning of contagion, “to touch together”); indirect pollution (via proximity or mediated contact); the communication of “moral failings” (Nutton 2000, 138); and

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ideas about reproduction, “horticulture, animal husbandry and technologies such as dyeing and wine-­making” (Pelling 2001, 17). For the scholar taking up contagion, the difficulties that attend its investigation are exacerbated by the way the term in any period confuses agent and means, as well as cause and effect (as it is the effects of a contagion that are understood to propel it to another body). As Cynthia Davis (2002) explains, contagion is “both a content and a method,” because it habitually “denotes both disease and the process of its spread” (830). But therein lies a more acute problem: for literary scholars, contagion’s ability to be “both a content and a method” also appears an especially apt way to describe, or even theorize, the workings of language. While Ernest Gilman (2011) has demonstrated that the plague has long been identified with the word and with notions of errant textuality (proliferating books), Peta Mitchell (2012) has argued that poststructuralists following Jacques Derrida (1968) use contagion—­specifically virality—­as the privileged figure for explaining how figures of speech like metaphor themselves operate (Mitchell 2012, 28–­35). But Erin O’Conner (2000) has warned that this usage, which she argues is habitual in postcolonial discourse, threatens to collapse one’s methodology with one’s object of study. For O’Conner, “the imagery of contagion and disease circulates freely in contemporary [literary] discourse, where it provides a sort of all-­purpose figure for cultural, authorial, and textual influences. But these metaphors take on a particularly troubling cast when they appear in writing that is attempting to historicize—­and even to change—­global distributions of power” (55). And so O’Conner, echoing Susan Sontag’s (1990) imperative to differentiate contagion as a metaphor from contagion as an infectious disease, argues that “the critical fascination with contagion as a figure for the colonial encounter has gone hand in hand with a failure to appreciate how real diseases such as cholera have helped to structure the imperial imagination” (55, my emphasis). In deploying contagion as a useful figure for influence, or for communication, scholars potentially ignore or erase how and for what reasons (biological or political) certain diseases spread to and decimate particular populations. And so, even while Kari Nixon and Lorenzo Servitje (2016) have argued that contagion is endemic to our contemporary condition—­due to “our post-­modern, post-­human, post-­natural society [that] nevertheless retains the paradigms of contagion and infection in discourses beyond biomedicine” (3)—­contagion remains problematic across these discourses because it courts collapse. Contagion can efface the difference between a disease and its means of transmission, between the figurative and the real, and between one’s methodological frame (or theory) and one’s object of study. These collapses are risky because they also have the potential to efface the particular historical—­that is, political—­context and purpose of the term’s usage and how the term has been applied during certain periods to particular bodies,

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exchanges, mediums, and so on. This chapter pivots upon this very riskiness. That is, this chapter argues that it is contagion’s conceptual lability, its messiness, that provides the term with its political utility during the eighteenth century: to interrogate the act of reading during the era of print’s great expansion, when the technology first began to reach an ever-­growing number of readers. I argue here that eighteenth-­century literary writers use contagion, which during this period operated as both a theory of communicable affect and a theory of infectious disease, to explore the act of reading following the 1695 lapse of the Licensing Act (which allowed for a drastic increase in the number of printed texts because printers no longer needed license from the government). In particular, literary writers use contagion to explore where the force for transforming readers’ bodies resides during the act of reading—­in a text’s figures (its narrators, characters, or metaphors), its porous pages, or the bodies of other readers themselves. Accordingly, this chapter first explains how contagion was theorized as both transformative passions and matter during the early eighteenth century. As this section will explain, these theories are distinct, yet they do overlap, particularly in their identification of collective human bodies gathered together or brought into contact during the reading process as an exacerbating condition for contagion. This chapter’s final section explores how Daniel Defoe applies both kinds of contagion to the act of reading among an ever-­growing collective in his A Journal of the Plague Year ([1722] 2003). In so doing, Defoe exposes reading as a simultaneously imaginative and haptic activity that refuses generic distinctions and risks self-­transformation.

Early Eighteenth-­Century Contagion Theory: Affect and Matter During the first quarter of the eighteenth century, contagion operated as a theory of both communicable affect and infectious disease. As this section will detail, these theories are importantly distinct: while affect was thought to be visibly communicated by gestures and certain kinds of language, infectious diseases, such as smallpox or the plague, were thought to operate beneath or beyond the realm of vision, invisibly communicated by a variety of bodies, objects, and mediums. Yet these theories do overlap: both postulate that the human body is open and absorptive and that it involuntarily responds to—­indeed is physically moved by—­the passions and material particulates of other surrounding bodies (and its surrounding environment more largely). Further, both of these theories suggest that collectives of human bodies gathered together increase contagion’s transformative force—­that is, contagion’s ability to physically move and thereby upend a body’s internal organization. As I will discuss, these flexible theories make contagion a particularly apt means for investigating the act of reading in the age of print’s expansion, when the medium of print began to reach ever-­greater numbers of readers. But when

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so applied—­that is, when reading is conceptualized as contagious—­these theories trend in different directions: emphasizing contagious passions suggests that a text’s power comes in its moving figures, whereas highlighting contagious matter more radically relocates the force or impetus for the transformation of reader’s bodies to the surface of the page and the bodies of other readers. As historians and literary scholars such as Susie Tucker (1972), Michael Heyd (1995), Lawrence Klein (1998), Jon Mee (2003), and Misty Anderson (2012) have established, English writers who responded to the preaching of exiled French Huguenots in London in 1707 redefined enthusiasm—­a term previously referring to religious zeal worked up to such a pitch as to be mistaken for divine contact—­as a contagious inflammation of the brain. This delirium was said to be caused by either improper, obsessive thoughts (which agitated the body and thereby produced effluvia in the brain) or contagious passions spread from an infected enthusiast to other bodies. The mechanisms of this spread were argued to be the particular gestures and language of the infected body or—­less frequently—­invisible, material particulates mediated by air. For example, lawyer and politician John Trenchard (1709) suggested that contagious passions were spread by gestures and certain kinds of speech because of the natural tendency that humans possess to imitate one another. “The yawning of one Person infects a whole Company,” Trenchard wrote. “The Tone, the Motions, the Gestures, and Grimaces of those we converse with steal insensibly upon us, even when we endeavor to avoid them” (25–­26). Trenchard argued that contagion is mimetic, as “the actions of others” are registered by the senses and “by an undesigned imitation produce the like in our selves” (28). But Trenchard also speculated that it is possible that passions are communicated invisibly. “Effluxes of Volatile Animal Spirits flow constantly from us, of such form and configuration as easily permeate and penetrate some Bodies,” he wrote, and “when entered, communicate the same passions and dispositions to Bodies suitably disposed, as they caused in the Body from whence they came” (27). According to Trenchard, by absorbing the invisible yet material forms of passions, bodies are reconfigured. More famously, in his “Letter concerning Enthusiasm” (first published in his 1711 Characteristics), philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, echoed Trenchard in describing communicable affect as both the involuntary imitation of the gestures of others and physical contact with invisible, infectious material particulates, with the additional caveat that groups of people gathered together (collectives) increased the transformative force of those passions upon receptive bodies. He explained that during “popular Fury” or “Pannick,” passions are immediately, mimetically communicable: “In this state their very Looks are infectious. The fury flies from Face to Face: and the Disease is no sooner seen than caught” (Shaftesbury 1711, 44).

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In a longer passage, Shaftesbury located both visible expression of passions and infected breath as the elements that communicate enthusiasm: “When innumerable Eyes glow with the Passion, and heaving Breasts are laboring with Inspiration: when not the Aspect only, but the very Breath and Exhalations of Men are infectious, and the inspiring Disease imparts itself by insensible Transpiration” (69). Both means of spread—­passions made visible in “innumerable eyes” and those spread invisibly via “insensible Transpiration”—­render the crowd acutely dangerous here. While Trenchard and Shaftesbury both speculated that breath might invisibly mediate dangerous passions, they more readily identified that bodily spectacle (the expressions of impassioned human bodies) facilitates the transmission of dangerous passions, which are imitated and then experienced by surrounding bodies. In contrast, medical theories of contagious disease suggested that contagion is much more flexible and thereby difficult to control. Physicians and medical writers argued that contagious matter enters the body largely unperceived, as that matter is invisibly communicated by a wide variety of human and nonhuman means—­by other human bodies as well as objects and mediums. Importantly, then, contagious diseases during this period were theorized as capable of being spread by both immediate and mediated contact, rendering contagion exceptionally difficult to forestall, given the sheer number of mediums that could communicate disease. Ephraim Chambers (1728) summarized these means of spread in an entry on contagion in his Cyclopoedia; or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. He wrote that contagion “in some Diseases, is only effected by immediate Contact, or Touch: as the Madness of a Dog, which is communicated by biting; and the Venom of the Pox, which is transmitted from the infected Person in the Act of Copulation.” While rabies and syphilis required immediate contact, “in others [such as the smallpox] it is by infected Clothes” and in still others, such as the plague, “the Contagion is transmitted thro’ the Air to a great distance, by means of Steams or Effluvia expiring from the sick; as in the Plague, and other pestilential Distempers; in which Case, the Air is even said to be contagious” (315). And so while theories of contagious affect suggest that passions become infectious when they are visibly and aurally expressed by the human body, theories of contagious matter suggest instead that agential force for physical transformation is both invisible and disbursed across a variety of bodies, objects, and mediums. Importantly, in this dispersal and subsequent transformation, these bodies, objects, and mediums retroactively lose their distinctness—­their categorical difference from one another. This effacement of difference is so unsettling because it imperils the stated aims of physicians and medical writers: to produce certainty about or safety from disease. For example, Richard Mead (1720), fellow of the Royal Society, physician to George II, and expert on contagion, argued that a variety of objects could

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be transformed into fomites—­carriers of infection—­by a contagious disease. Mead explained that the “Matter of Contagion . . . may be lodged and preserved in soft, porous Bodies, which are kept pressed close together” (17), including “Cotton, Hemp and Flax, Paper or Books, Silk of all sorts, Linen, Wool, Feathers, Hair, and all kinds of Skins” (24). These “Bodies” retained contagion because they were open and absorptive (“soft, porous”) physically as well as substantially “close” to those human bodies that wore, handled, or carried them. And so Mead multiplied (via his extended list) those bodies that could “lodge” and “preserve” contagion, rendering “Paper or Books,” by which he transmitted his own advice for avoiding disease, as potential objects of fear. The categorical effacement that attends contagion was exacerbated for most physicians by the presence of collectives of human bodies, which could transform the air from a medium to a contagious body in its own right. This transformation was especially dangerous because it was what was argued to allow that most mortal of diseases—­the plague—­to spread from one continent to another. Mead (1729) explained this process: when a human body absorbed a contagious disease through the lungs or skin, contagious matter entered the blood, which was put into greater motion. The agitation of the blood generated heat and eventually fermentation, which caused the body to excrete fluid (sweat) that was “impregnated” (101) with diseased matter. That matter was then absorbed into the air surrounding the body, where it became dangerous effluvia (or the atmosphere surrounding the body). If enough infected persons gathered together, sweating and breathing into the air, the air would become a contagious body capable of propagating that contagion over vast distances without the presence of human bodies themselves. As the anonymous author of Some Observations concerning the Plague explained, “By the great Number of infected Bodies, the Air receives such a Taint, [or rather is so charged and loaded with Poisonous Particles] as suffices to propagate the Contagion to some Distance, without any other Spark to kindle the spreading Fire” (Well-­Wisher 1721, 4, brackets in original). Even more explosively than Shaftesbury’s panicked bodies, numbers of infected persons breathing disease into the air transformed that air into a body able “to propagate the Contagion.” This transformation of air was so terrifying because it rendered disease unavoidable: all human bodies must breathe, but fleeing from places infected with a disease (the most common piece of advice for surviving a plague) would not guarantee safety, as air moves freely across countries and even oceans. These theories of contagion are attractive as a means for understanding the act of reading during the age of print’s expansion because they so acutely raise two issues central for its expansion during the early part of the eighteenth century: generic distinctions and the contributing force of the collective. Literary scholars (Irlam 1999; Lubey 2012; Lynch 2015; Mee 2003; Anderson 2012;

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Warner 1998) have demonstrated that both novelists and poets deploy theories about how passions can be contagiously communicated as a rationale for reading literary texts during the early eighteenth century. While novelists suggest the productive, reforming power of a reader’s affective identification with particular narrators or characters, poets argue that poetry’s eloquent language and figures of speech are more apt for communicating contagious passions that are curative for reading bodies. For example, in his Grounds for Criticism in Poetry, John Dennis (1704) argued that “the frequent use of Metaphors, Dialects, Epithets, is a great deal fitter for Poetry than it is for Prose, because they are the Language of Passion, and Poetry is more Passionate or more Enthusiastic than Prose” (340). Dennis explained that poetry’s language shows objects in “violent motion” (362), which—­when taken in by the reader’s senses—­moves and transforms that reader’s body in turn. For Dennis, once “the Spirits [of the reader] being set in a violent emotion, and the Imagination being fir’d by that agitation; and the Brain being deeply penetrated by those impressions, the very Objects themselves are set as it were before us, and consequently we are sensible of the same Passion that we should feel from the things themselves” (362–­363). According to Dennis, this experience (feeling the “same Passion”) was crucial for communicating Christian virtue. The kind of application of contagion seen in Dennis’s Grounds accrues power to the literary text in particular, as poetry is identified as (and elevated to) the genre of communicable affect primarily because of its use of “Metaphors, Dialects, Epithets,” which communicate infectious passions from the author to the reading body. But as this chapter’s review of medical discourse has illustrated, figurative language is not the only means that was thought capable of spreading contagion. According to medical theory, any text (as a porous, absorptive object) was a potential fomite, a carrier of contagious matter. Indeed, because during this period paper was made out of recycled clothing, during an outbreak of the plague in 1636, the privy council responded to a petition from persons living in Buckingham and Middlesex requesting closing of paper mills and the criminalizing of rag gathering ( Jenkins 1900). As the petition argued, “the paper-­makers brought the plague into the country places where they work by means of their rags, as into Horton where sixteen or seventeen persons died, and also into Colnbrook” (quoted in Jenkins 1900, 584). Theories of contagious matter as applied to texts undermined the generic hierarchies that theories of contagious passions were used to prop up. As Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year will make abundantly clear, the potential of “Paper and Books” to carry contagious matter during an outbreak of the plague rendered distinctions between governmental documents and poems, university-­sanctioned medical advice and word-­spells, impossible to maintain. Pondering acts of reading alongside the devastating plague of 1665,

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Defoe’s Journal undermines generic distinctions and changes the location of a text’s moving powers: rather than its figures, Defoe locates a text’s virality in its mediums of transmission—­its grounding pages and intervening hands.

Reading Contagion in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year H. F., the narrator of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, cannot stay indoors. Though he understands the dangers, he cannot keep to himself. He writes that “tho’ I confin’d my Family, I could not prevail upon my unsatisfy’d Curiosity to stay within entirely my self ” ([1722] 2003, 78). Rather than blockade himself within his own home, or even leave London entirely, H. F.—­ thought to be the initials of Defoe’s uncle, Henry Foe, who remained in London during the plague and survived—­feels compelled to wander the streets, watching and recording the progress of the plague. A Journal of the Plague Year is a compilation of texts from 1665, including print matter such as Bills of Mortality, parish lists, printed proclamations from the government, and sections from more ephemeral printed documents like astrological books or pamphlets promising safety from infection. H. F. collects this printed material and places it alongside what he claims are the oral responses to the plague—­rumor, gossip, and anecdotes that he hears as he walks the streets of London. Defoe presents H.  F. as the text’s author/editor, and importantly, H.  F. differentiates this editorial work from his own private acts of writing and reading. H. F. writes that after walking the streets, “I would retire Home sometimes . . . Such intervals as I had, I employed in reading Books, and in writing down my Memorandums of what occurred to me every Day, and out of which, afterwards, I for most of this Work as it relates to my Observations without Doors: What I wrote of my private Meditations I reserve for private Use, and desire it may not be made publick on any Account whatever” (75). H.  F. constructs two oppositions here: the space within the “Home” and “without Doors” and H.  F.’s “private Meditations  .  .  . for private Use” and those “Observations” allowed to be made “publick.” When read alongside H. F.’s claim that his Journal is not a personal history, these comments construct the documents that make up the Journal as public, having to do with outer spaces rather than inner ones (such as the home or the self ). Crucially, H. F. also places reading inside the home and for the self in this passage, as “reading Books” appears here as a solitary, private activity, one aligned with H. F.’s “private Meditations.” But while H. F. seeks to construct divisions between private and public in regard to spaces and documents and places his own acts of reading within the private space of the home, his Journal as a whole records the manifold ways that the plague—­a communicable contagion—­effaces all such distinctions. In its complete defeat of quarantine, the plague as recorded by H. F. refuses

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any separation between public and private, the wider community and the self. Under the force of the plague, the act of “reading Books” is also rewritten, as reading for “private Meditation,” is interrupted by H.  F.’s alternating endorsement of and unease with the way printed documents are circulated and read among a body of readers. In scenes that emphasize reading as a collective activity, reading is alternately opposed to and aligned with the plague, exposed as an affective and haptic activity that subjects the reading body to the passions and particulates of others. Early on in Defoe’s Journal, H.  F. presents the text of the 1665 Quarantine Acts, the “Orders from the Lord Mayor,” which required that medical examiners determine whether individuals were diseased, whereupon those diseased individuals would be shut up in their own homes (with the rest of their families, if necessary), thereby isolating the disease by preventing diseased persons from infecting others. But almost all of the anecdotes narrated by H.  F. indicate how badly quarantine failed, due to the way homes could not be made private and the way that individual persons could not be identified as diseased. Thus H. F. explains that quarantine made homes into prisons that were ill-­equipped to contain their charges, since “every Prison, as we may call it, had but one Jaylor” (52) and they were “without Barrs and Bolts, which our common Prisons are furnish’d with, so the People let themselves down out of their Windows, even in the Face of the Watchman” (53). H. F. repeatedly describes how families or individuals escaped their homes, which were porous and public as much as they were private prisons. But a greater difficulty was caused by the way the plague, which was identified as a contagion by H. F., was invisible to the senses, which meant it could be spread by persons who did not know they were diseased. H. F. explains that while occasionally infected persons would present “tokens,” which were “gangrene Spots, or mortified Flesh in small Knobs” (188), most persons did not present symptoms until after they were already carrying the infection in and on their bodies. Thus quarantine could not be effective, because persons who were infected unknowingly “breathed Death in every Place, and upon every Body who came near them; nay their very Cloaths retained the Infection, their Hands would infect the Things they touch’d” (184). In his worries about fomites, H. F. highlights those oft-­invisible, mediated contacts that necessarily occur when living among a collective—­contacts that, in the case of the plague, became acutely dangerous. This illumination was especially terrifying because those contacts were themselves inescapable and unavoidable. H. F. was careful to explain how populous London was during the time of the plague, because the plague arrived just after the Restoration of the monarchy. “It must not be forgot here, that the City and Suberbs [sic] were prodigiously full of People, at the time of this Visitation,” H. F. states, because “numbers of People, the Wars being over, the Armies disbanded, and

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the Royal Family and the Monarchy being restor’d, had flock’d to London” (19). And although H. F. repeats that isolating oneself would keep one healthy, he acknowledges the real impossibility of doing so: although a doctor tells H. F. “to lock myself up and my Family, and not to suffer any of us to go out of Doors; to keep all our Windows fast, Shutters and Curtains close, and never to open them” (75), he reports that he must still go outside to obtain food for his household. “And here I must observe again,” H. F. writes, “that this Necessity of going out of our Houses to buy Provisions, was in great Measure the Ruin of the whole City, for the People catch’d the distemper, on those Occasions, of one another, and even the Provisions themselves were often tainted” (76). H. F. explains that “the poor People cou’d not lay up Provisions, and there was a necessity, that they go to the Market to buy. . . . [A] great many of them that went thither Sound, brought Death Home with them” (76). The “Necessity of going out of our Houses,” of entering into mediated contact with other persons in order to survive, put bodies at risk, as both food and conversation could mediate contagion. Finally, at the end of the text, H. F. suggests that new methods were needed to deal with “such a Contagion as this, which indeed is chiefly dangerous, to collected Bodies of people” (190). In an area with “a Million of a People in a Body together” (190), both immediate and mediated bodily contact between persons—­the plague’s method of spread—­could not be avoided. In the context of the plague’s revelation of those habitual, mediated contacts that necessarily took place among a collective, Defoe’s Journal raises the question of whether printed texts can provide safety from infection by producing knowledge or whether they provide another means for contagion to spread. Are printed texts special because they render the plague visible and thus avoidable (located in particular places that then can be avoided), or are they merely another kind of mediated contact that communicates contagion? For many literary scholars, Defoe identifies print as crucial for maintaining the health of the collective by countering the movement of disease. Paula McDowell (2006) has convincingly argued that H. F.’s narrative voice in the Journal consistently directs the reader to separate print production from oral communication, by associating print with health and safety and orality with contagion and disease. Further, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (2009) have argued that the population of London becomes “self-­regulatory” (170) by moving out of the way of disease, a movement that responds to the transmission of information in print. And for Boluk and Lenz (2010), although print is initially identified with the plague, biological infection is “remediated into textual form” (133), where it legitimates print and the emerging form of the novel. There is much evidence in his Journal to support Defoe’s sanitization of print, which still counters H.  F.’s initial placement of “reading Books” as

FIGURE 5.1  Bills of mortality, August 15–­­22, 1665, from London’s Dreadful Visitation: Or,

a Collection of All the Bills of Mortality for This Present Year: Beginning the 27th of December 1664 and Ending the 19th of December Following . . . (London: Printed and sold by E. Cotes, 1665). Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

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a private activity that takes place within the home. H. F. repeatedly emphasizes that the lord mayor, magistrates, and other governmental officials helped the population of London stay healthy by producing documentation that provided knowledge about the disease. H. F. explains that “the Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs, the Court of Aldermen, and a certain Number of Common Council-­Men, or their Deputies came to a Resolution and published it, viz. That they would not quit the City themselves, but that they would be always at hand for preserving the good Order in every Place’” (176–­177). H. F. asserts that these governmental officials save the city by creating the printed documentation, particularly the Bills of Mortality, out of which people can make sense of the progress of the disease and thereby avoid it themselves. The bills—­categorized temporally and spatially, by week and by parish—­made visible when and where the plague was present and allowed people to avoid it by tracking its progress. Throughout the text, H. F. reprints Bills of Mortality from 1665, while his narrative constantly reiterates what the bills demonstrate and prove. “The Weekly Bills themselves at that time evidently discover this Truth” (199), he writes, by illustrating the progress of the plague from one end of London to the other, showing which parishes were infected and which were still relatively healthy. And he emphasizes that reading the bills was a collective, group activity: if at the outset of the text the bills “turn’d the Peoples Eyes pretty much towards that End of the town” (4), and from “St. Giles’s and the Westminster End of town” (179) to “the Eastern suburbs and the Southwark side” (181), then by the end of the text (during the height of the infection), the bills were “sufficient to alarm the whole trading part of the World . . . put the whole World, I say, on their Guard against it [London]” (206). But I suggest that this endorsement of print is strongly qualified in Defoe’s Journal. For, alongside H. F.’s laudatory remarks about print, which emphasize reading as a public, collective activity that opposes the movement of the plague by producing knowledge that moves that collective, H. F. often points out the way the bills can fail. For the bills are frequently wrong. H. F. explains that “if the Bills of Mortality said five Thousand, I always believ’d it was near twice as many in reality; there being no room to believe that the Account they gave was right, or that indeed, they were, among such Confusions as I saw them in, in any Condition to keep an exact Account” (125). More dangerously, H. F. ruminates on the way that reading the bills can actually cause death by exposing persons to information that is affectively distressing. H.  F. records that Londoners during the plague became “more addicted to Prophecies, and Astrological Conjurations, Dreams, and old Wives Tales, than ever they were before or since” (22), but it was the Bills of Mortality that caused the most distress, even mortality, as “it was seldom, that the Weekly Bill came in, but there

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were two or three put in frighted, that is, that may well be call’d, frighted to Death” (56). Reading about the disease, people succumbed to fear of its power. In drawing his reader’s attention to both the fallibility and affective dangers of the bills, H. F. undermines the power of print as a medium to counteract the disease, suggesting instead its power to raise or mediate other kinds of contagions (such as those that have been detailed earlier in this chapter). While H.  F. follows contemporary theories of contagious affect by suggesting that collectivity increases contagion’s transformative force (its ability to physically move and change the body), he upends assumptions about where the affective force of the text is located—­the affective force of the bills is inherent in the numbers of the dead rather than in figures of speech (Dennis’s “Metaphors, Dialects, Epithets”). In so doing, Defoe suggests that contagion works to undo rather than uphold generic hierarchies (such as those that separate literary from nonliterary texts). Defoe furthers this categorical undoing by gesturing toward the other aspect of reading that is so dangerous in a collective: its haptic component, the way a text’s porous pages travel between readers’ hands. H. F. records that during the plague people wore pages tied around their necks as a way to ward off infection, as some people believed “that [the plague] was to be kept off with Crossings, Signs of the Zodiac, Papers tied up with so many Knots; and certain Words, or Figures written on them, as particularly the Word Abracadabra, form’d in Triangle, or Pyramid” (33). According to contemporary theories of contagious matter, it was not the “Figures written on them” that carried danger but instead the way the paper could absorb the infected sweat of the persons on whose bodies they resided. In the end, Defoe’s Journal depicts contagion’s capacity for exploding categorical distinction both within and across different orders, a depiction that more readily aligns with contagion as a theory of infectious matter (a theory that Helen Thompson [2013] argues also rethinks emerging notions of the form of character). Defoe raises not only the contents of a text but also the porous page as dangerously transformative, as bearing or mediating the moving force of the collective. Defoe amplifies this force and its attendant categorical upending in perhaps the strangest moment of his Journal, the burial and revivification of H. F. himself. At the end of the journal, H. F. describes how, after the plague ended, many of the corpses from that year were dug up and reburied, as the cemeteries in London were reorganized: “The Distemper sweeping away such Multitudes, as I have observ’d, many, if not all the out Parishes were oblig’d to make new burying Grounds” (222). He writes that “there was a piece of Ground in Moorfields, by the going into the Street which is now call’d Old Bethlem, which was enlarg’d much” (223), and immediately below this line of text is a note: “N.B. The Author of this Journal, lyes buried in that very Ground, being at his own Desire, his Sister having been buried there

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a few Years before” (223). This strange moment in the text serves as perhaps the best example of H. F.’s compromised narrative authority and his reliance on unknown others, in that, as Peter DeGabriele (2010) notes, the necessity of his own burial requires another narrative presence—­a later editor who will add this note—­who buries H. F. within the text itself. Yet for this chapter, the text directly after the note returns to H. F.’s narrative voice, as if unaware of the interruption, which resonates all the more strangely with the final lines of the text, a short ballad signed by H. F.: A dredful Plague in London was, In the Year Sixty Five, Which swept an Hundred Thousand Souls Away; yet I alive! H.F. (238)

This final passage in A Journal represents perhaps the apogee of contagion, as it renders categorical difference of either the generic or the personal kind impossible. That is, the reader is informed that the “real” H. F. lies buried in the “ground” of Moorfields. Defoe’s Journal makes visible that burial ground by means of a typed note on the page, placed within the primary text. Both of these “literal” burial grounds (graveyard and printed note) precede the emergence a few pages later of the literary “figure” of H. F. as author and balladeer, whose personal voice and emotions are communicated to the reader in the lines of poetry. The juxtaposition—­one page bodying forth the burial ground in a note, the other presenting the figure of H. F. in verse and initials—­brings an awareness of the page itself, of the text or book, as another kind of ground. This ground muddies the distinction between the literary figure of H. F. and the fact of the note, because both appear as typeface. These passages can be seen to follow from the disordering movements of contagion, as taken together they efface not only personal and generic distinctions (such as that between H. F. and those “Multitudes” buried in London or that between poetry and prose) but also those separating the fictional and the real: H. F. is generated as both a “figure” and the “real” uncle of Defoe by the layout allowed by the printed page. In the end, Defoe’s Journal, following from eighteenth-­century contagion theory, is a supremely self-­reflexive, supremely ambivalent text. The Journal holds out the promise of print to organize and sanitize the collective and to produce useful knowledge about that collective and thereby minimize risk to the self. But at the same time, Defoe’s Journal also suggests that reading is a collective activity whose contagious force effaces generic hierarchies and risks self-­ transformation at the hands (and pages) of others. This fear of and excitement

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about the act of reading has perhaps vanished as reading printed texts has become so habitual as to be invisible in the almost three centuries since the publication of Defoe’s Journal. But returning to this act and its unsettling strangeness, its potential contagiousness, in a moment when our own mediums for reading have dramatically shifted (from pages to screens), invites us to reconsider reading as a divergent set of embodied acts that potentially communicate collective force. Such a force might work equally upon the physical integrity our bodies as upon our own categorical certainties.

References Anderson, Misty. 2012. Imagining Methodism in 18th-­Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief and the Borders of the Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse. 2009. “Sovereignty and the Form of Formlessness.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 20 (2–­3): 148–­178. Boluk, Stephanie, and Wylie Lenz. 2010. “Infection, Media, and Capitalism: Early Modern Plagues to Postmodern Zombies.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 (2): 126–­147. Chambers, Ephraim. 1728. Cyclopoedia: Or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. Vol. 1. London: printed for James and John Knapton et al. Davis, Cynthia J. 2002. “Contagion as Metaphor.” American Literary History 14 (4): 828–­836. Defoe, Daniel. (1722) 2003. A Journal of the Plague Year. Edited by Cynthia Wall. London: Penguin. DeGabriele, Peter. 2010. “Intimacy, Survival, and Resistance: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.” ELH 77 (1): 1–­23. Dennis, John. (1704) 1939. “The Grounds for Criticism in Poetry.” In vol. 1 of The Critical Works of John Dennis, edited by Edward Niles Hooker, 325–­373. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. (1968) 1981. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson, 63–­171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gilman, Ernest. 2011. “Afterward: Plague and Metaphor.” In Representing Plague in Early Modern England, edited by Ernest Gilman and Rebecca Totaro, 219–­236. New York: Routledge. Heyd, Michael. 1995. Be Sober and Reasonable: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries. New York: Brill. Irlam, Shaun. 1999. Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-­Century Britain. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Jenkins, Rhys. 1900. “Paper-­Making in England, 1588–­1880.” Library Association Record 2 (2): 577–­588. Klein, Lawrence E. 1998. “Sociability, Solitude, and Enthusiasm.” In Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650–­1850, edited by Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa, 153–­177. San Marino: Huntington Library. Lubey, Kathleen. 2012. Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660–­1760. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Lynch, Deidre. 2015. Loving Literature: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Mead, Richard. 1720. A Short Discourse concerning Pestilential Contagion. 6th ed. London: printed for Sam Buckley in Amen-­Corner and Ralph Smith at the Royal-­Exchange. Mead, Richard. 1729. A Mechanical Account of Poisons. 3rd ed. Dublin: printed by S. Powell for John Watson, a bookseller on the Merchant’s Key. McDowell, Paula. 2006. “Defoe and the Contagion of the Oral: Modeling Media Shift in A Journal of the Plague Year.” PMLA 21 (1): 87–­106. Mee, Jon. 2003. Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Politics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, Peta. 2012. Contagious Metaphor. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Nixon, Kari, and Lorenzo Servitje. 2016. “The Making of a Modern Endemic: An Introduction.” In Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory, edited by Kari Nixon and Lorenzo Servitje, 1–­17. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nutton, Vivian. 2000. “Did the Greeks Have a Word for It? Contagion and Contagion Theory in Classical Antiquity.” In Contagion: Perspectives from Pre-­modern Societies, edited by L. I. Conrad and D. Wajastyk, 137–­162. Aldershot: Ashgate. O’Connor, Erin. 2000. Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture. Durham: Duke University Press. Pelling, Margaret. 2001. “The Meaning of Contagion: Reproduction, Medicine, and Metaphor.” In Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies, edited by Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker, 15–­38. London: Routledge. Shaftesbury, Lord [Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury]. 1711. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, with a Collection of Letters. London: printed by John Darby. Sontag, Susan. 1990. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador. Thompson, Helen. 2013. “‘It Was Impossible to Know These People’: Secondary Qualities and the Form of Character in A Journal of the Plague Year.” The Eighteenth Century 54 (2): 153–­167. Trenchard, John. 1709. The Natural History of Superstition. London: sold by A. Baldwin at the Oxford Arms in Warwick Lane. Tucker, Susie. 1972. Enthusiasm: A Study in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warner, William. 1998. Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–­1750. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Well-­Wisher to the Public [pseud.]. 1721. Some Observations concerning the Plague. London: reprinted for J. Roberts, near the Oxford Arms in Warwick Lane.

6

Contagious Accumulation and Racial Capitalism in Late Nineteenth-­Century American Fiction JUSTIN ROGERS-­C OOPER

In this chapter, I explore a moment in American literary culture when literary authors, like many intellectuals, turned to the concept of contagion to explain the systemic economic and racial crises punctuating life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (van  Ginneken 1992; Sampson 2012). In three novels published around the turn of the century by Mark Twain, Frank Norris, and Charles Chesnutt, capitalist practices of accumulation, and fantasies of such accumulation, function as affectively acute contagions. While these novels are exceptional because their authors were notable commercial and literary figures at the time, they are also important because they reveal contagious accumulation to be endemic to the structure of capitalism rather than a disruption of that structure, as other nineteenth-­century intellectuals claimed. In contrast to American cultural ideas that link wealth to individual personal labor or even dynastic inheritance, these novels present contagious accumulation as intensely social projects undertaken by various types of euphoric crowds. They offer narratives of such contagious accumulation as disruptions to both financial and moral economies, in part by acting on character’s bodies as intoxication, excitement, or fever. The narratives reimagine “greed” less as an 103

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individual moral sentiment and more as a euphoric, even eroticized desire for accumulation sutured into the affective culture of capitalism. This chapter turns to these three novels because they parallel but contest the emergence of contagion as a conceptual vehicle for Victorian, Gilded Age, and World War  I–­era intellectuals who attempted to explain chronic social crises by diagnosing movements for socialism, unions, racial equality, and feminism within eugenic frameworks of human biology. For example, in the widely translated and influential text The Crowd, published in 1895, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon claimed that socialist and working-­class crowds were overwhelmingly responsible for, and susceptible to, irrational contagions circulated in emotional crowds. Le Bon argued that crowds essentially effeminized working classes into childish savages not unlike European colonial subjects. Priscilla Wald (2008) notes that, by the early twentieth century, intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud and Emile Durkheim began theorizing contagion more generally as a framework for understanding affective or libidinal bonds constituting collective identities. By turning to the “social-­problem” novels of Twain, Norris, and Chesnutt, this chapter demonstrates how their fiction anticipates the work of Durkheim and Freud by narrating contagion not only as an affective or libidinal framework for understanding manic episodes of accumulation but also as an embodied relation to capitalist culture more broadly. In the last novel most explicitly, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, we see how contagious accumulation operated through the prism of racial capitalism. Following Cedric Robinson’s (2000) claims in Black Marxism that “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions” (2), I conclude by considering how the essentially racialized forms of contagious accumulation at work during the Gilded Age and Jim Crow era (1877–­1965) were inextricably bound to racial violence and sadism. By reading these fictions next to discussions of affect and virality in the work of Teresa Brennan, Sianne Ngai, and Tony Sampson, this chapter ultimately contends that, in this context, contagion might be described as a cluster of bodily pleasures specific to cultural fantasies and practices of rapid wealth accumulation. Referred to as “intoxication,” “excitement,” and “fever” in the fictions, the euphoric sensations in all three of these novels illustrate various kinds of disruptive pleasures associated with accumulation, whether posed as credit binges, speculative finance, or even sadistic white riots. Twain and Norris’s novels show that contagious accumulation disrupts normative forms of middle-­class domesticity, particularly marriage, as well as Victorian notions of healthy bodies. In Chesnutt’s novel, we see accumulative contagion weaponized as a violent event of racial capitalism. All three novels pose these disruptions as constitutive to the pleasures of capitalist accumulation and not necessarily aberrational manifestations of routine capitalist practices.

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Contagion and Affect In her book Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Priscilla Wald (2008) writes that contagion is “more than an epidemiological fact. It is also a foundational concept in the study of religion and of society, with a long history of explaining how beliefs circulate in social interactions” (2). Noting how disease outbreaks inspire narratives about the constitution of community, Wald traces what she calls “the outbreak narrative” within the Western canon. Instructively, she pauses near the turn of the twentieth century to “register the conceptual impact of contemporary scientific research” on communicable disease and contagion in the work of Durkheim and Freud (Wald 2008, 14). She observes that both “found in the concept of contagion the principle through which to describe how the mystical force of the sacred inexorably spills into the profane through physical contact or through symbolic association,” noting too how it “supplied the logic of totemic belonging” (14). In her analysis of Freud and Durkheim, Wald reveals how contagion became decoupled from disease and emerged as a metaphor for articulating the affections sustaining collective identity. Although its parallel usage in epidemiology shades the concept of contagion with the threatening palimpsest of disease, we can see in Wald’s summary how contagion’s metaphorical resonance nonetheless signals, rather counterintuitively, more than an existential threat—­in fact, it also propels the most intimate sensations of community identity. Wald thus opens an opportunity for us to think through how literary authors writing roughly at the same time as Freud and Durkheim construed contagion not only as a force for “totemic belonging” but also as a force irrupting that belonging. As Wald notes, the idea interfaces between “us” and a threatening “them.” Wald’s analysis reveals a key contradiction, or paradox, in the idea of contagion. For Freud and Durkheim, the metaphor of contagion represented an actual “mystical force,” one imagined as autonomous and material. Wald rightly points to the ways this “force” could be circulated through “symbolic association,” including, presumably, in language or objects. Operating as both verb and noun, contagion was a force for agency and of agency. The concept appears to exist within this irresolvable tension, sliding around like ice that becomes water before becoming steam. The analogy of contagion as virus is instructive both because it suggests autonomous circulation and because it connotes the way contagion, like a virus, continually evolves while circulating. In this respect, I might briefly note the ways contagion complements the interdisciplinary turn in the speculative humanities toward theorizing “affect.” Recalling “the affective turn” may also give context to, and provide object lessons for, those working on contagion. In The Transmission of Affect, Teresa Brennan defines affect as “the physiological shift accompanying judgment,” with the important qualification that “passions and affects are themselves

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judgments” (2004, 5). Brennan sees affect articulating a “physiological” field that accompanies cognition (“judgment”) while also observing that this physiological field, with sensations typically assigned to the passions or emotions, itself constitutes a form of embodied cognition. Like contagion, affect frequently appears as both noun (“the affects”) and verb (“to be affected”). Like contagion, the representation of affect in cultural texts also often emerges alongside images of acutely excited emotions. In Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai (2007) helps us think about historicizing affect in ways that resonate for approaching contagion. Alluding to Raymond Williams’s idea about “the structures of feelings,” she writes that “feelings are as fundamentally ‘social’ as the institutions and collective practices that have been the more traditional objects of historicist criticism” (25). Ngai clarifies that affect is less “object-­or goal-­directed” than emotion and is “feeling or ‘intensity’ disconnected from meaningful sequences, from narration” (25). Ngai’s emphasis on affect’s capacity to be “object-­less” helps us imagine the autonomy of contagion. Indeed, the quixotic qualities of contagion, like affect, actually increase its value for narrations of economic and moral economies, because it too acts as a force both constituting and disrupting belonging. Like affect, contagion complicates notions of individual agency by foregrounding the autonomy of socially inscribed yet interiorized sensations of pleasure and panic within individuals. In addition, contagion too arises as both verb and noun. Finally, it is sometimes difficult to separate affect from contagion discursively, particularly when metaphors of “virus” or “fever” could reasonably be interpreted to mean either contagion or affect, or both, as if the concepts were historically or conceptually twinned. Affect rendered as “sentiment” can become contagious, while contagion experienced as sensation appears affected. In my readings of the following novels, affect and contagion act as autonomous and material forces with capacities to arrange and rearrange subjectivity by activating a range of agencies within and beyond what we understand as the “self ” of liberal philosophical and economic traditions. As the following sections will show, in Frank Norris’s The Pit, contagious accumulation acts as a force upon the body of a speculator in wheat futures both affectively and materially, simultaneously exciting the euphoric pleasures of trading while draining the body of health. Meanwhile, the novels of Twain and Chesnutt further illuminate how contagious accumulation becomes directed outward at populations, disrupting middle-­class moral economies and harnessing sensations of white power against the lives of black persons.

Contagion as Excitement First published in 1903, Frank Norris’s novel The Pit: A Story of Chicago helps demonstrate the ways capitalism works as a contagious force upon the body.

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The Pit revolves around a white trader in wheat futures, Curtis Jadwin, whose success speculating on grain prices becomes literally self-­consuming, threatening his marriage and sparking a nervous condition that leads to his physical collapse. Futures are option contracts for commodities purchased in advance of actual delivery so that the trader can profit from the difference in price between the purchase of the contract and the prices when the contract expires. To create profit, Jadwin anticipates how market conditions will affect future prices, requiring him to constantly monitor weather, climate, transportation, and political conditions. Over the course of the novel, Jadwin’s deeply embodied sensitivity to the fluctuating flow of wheat prices becomes a form of pleasure that becomes inseparable from the project of accumulating profits. Jadwin’s success comes from his canny ability to read the direction of the wheat market. Or, more precisely, he succeeds based on his ability to sense and anticipate how other traders are reacting to price movements. Norris writes that traders like Jadwin could then “‘feel’ the market, letting go small lots here and there, to test its strength, then, the instant he felt the market strong enough, throw a full hundred thousand upon with a rush before it had time to break. He could feel—­almost at his very finger tips—­how this market moved, how it strengthened, how it weakened” (Norris 2006, 80). It is instructive that Jadwin “feels” the movement of the market, not the prices of the wheat; he feels other traders’ reactions. In other moments, though, Jadwin imagines the wheat itself as a sensation: “He could almost physically feel the pressure of renewed avalanches of wheat crowding down the price” (83). He reinterprets his sensitivity to these movements as symptoms of his individual exceptionalism, believing “he had discovered that there were in him powers, capabilities, and a breadth of grasp hitherto unsuspected” (233). Tony Sampson’s claims about financial traders in his book Virality, however, help reveal those sensations as bound to social contagion: “Decisions are not therefore entirely embedded in the self-­contained cognition of economic man, but.  .  .  . become embedded in the flow of social inventions that connect self and others to objects of desire . . . subjectivity in the marketplace becomes caught up in the bubble-­ building event and its eventual overspill” (Sampson 2012, 104). Sampson’s insights suggest the degree to which contagion alters the sensations of subjectivity and agency, both in relation to the larger market and to the “objects of desire” that drive euphoric accumulation. Sampson shows how Jadwin’s trading pleasures actually become a form of knowledge about capitalist contagion. Over time, the pleasure of contagion acting on Jadwin’s body increasingly extracts affect from it; in a way, the exploiter is expropriated. As Sampson might say, Jadwin begins to “overspill.” The market obsesses him. He stops sleeping and coming home at night. When his wife confronts him, he pointedly admits money is no longer his motive, saying, “‘It is the fun of the thing; the excitement–­,’” to which she replies, “‘That’s just it, the ‘excitement.’ You

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don’t know, Curtis. It is changing you. You are so nervous sometimes’” (Norris 2006, 191). Here, the intoxicating pleasure associated with contagious accumulation disrupts the novel’s domestic moral economy and threatens Jadwin’s marriage. Ignoring his wife’s concern, Jadwin’s experiences grow even more intense as he trades in increasingly rapid cycles of rising and falling prices. Heedless, Jadwin confuses the pleasures of trading with the actual direction of the prices and goes broke attempting to corner the market. Contemplating his failure later, he believes he broke the “laws” of the Earth by trying to put “his puny human grasp” upon “the great mother” (Norris 2006, 212). While such a moral lesson is typical of naturalist literary authors like Norris, who believed great forces overdetermined individual agency, we can also interpret contagious accumulation, not the Earth, behind Jadwin’s collapse. Some readers see Jadwin’s relation to contagion as essentially tied to the crowds in “the pit” who are frenetically trading futures. David Zimmerman has postulated that Norris’s crowd descriptions in The Pit are instances of “the sublime,” which Zimmerman argues “aligns him with contemporary sociologists and crowd psychologists who studied how mass suggestion and emulation threatened the idea of a sovereign self, the self-­determining subject of classical political economy” (Zimmerman 2006, 125). Indeed, it is ironic that Norris renders Jadwin’s financial trading as a threat to the liberal self—­the same self that classical economists imagined as the rational actor guiding markets. At the same time, we might see contagious accumulation, in addition to the sublime or the crowds in the pit, as the concept that Norris has activated in his novel. In Norris’s novel, trading cultures of contagion and accumulation continue even as Jadwin grows “sick.” As an example of the contradictory practices of lived capitalist culture, Norris’s novel reveals that the reproduction of class regimes can come at the expense of individual ruling-­class bodies. Like Norris in The Pit, Mark Twain’s novella “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” also narrates contagion as a form of bodily pleasure, as the next section will show. In both stories, the authors suggest that greed is less an individual moral failing than an eroticized relation to capitalist practice. They reframe economic cycles of euphoria and panic, long acknowledged as constitutive features of financial crises, as insights into the workings of political economy at the level of the body. For them, contagion is less an experience of conscious identification than one of affective intoxication. For both authors, capitalist culture is better understood as a network of affects acting on and circulating through bodies, not a rational system of prices, supply, and demand.

Contagion as Intoxication The December 1899 issue of Harper’s Monthly featured a novella by Mark Twain titled “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” In many ways, the

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satirical story is a morality play about the vulnerability of a pious town to the corrupting temptations of easy money. Seen another way, it is a narrative about how expectations of sudden wealth can shatter an otherwise well-­regulated middle-­class moral economy. In the story, a mysterious stranger who was purportedly offended during a past visit to Hadleyburg returns to play an elaborate revenge prank on the community. He leaves a sack of gold worth $40,000 at the residence of one Mr. and Mrs. Richards, with the caveat that it is delivered to the man who once gave him life-­changing advice. To identify the right person, the stranger asks the person to submit a paper claim for the gold containing the life-­changing advice to the town’s Reverend Burgess, who, on an appointed day, will match the submitted script to a matching one inside the sack of gold. The stranger’s story soon becomes national news: “Hadleyburg the Incorruptible was on every lip in America” (Twain 2007, 22). With the town’s pride swelling from such recognition of its virtue, the stranger then sends a copy of the purported advice to nineteen different couples in the town. Each couple erroneously believes that they are responsible for the advice and that they are the unique recipients of the stranger’s advice. Dreaming of the $40,000, each couple submits their claim to the reverend and promptly goes shopping. On the day appointed to reveal the claim, however, the truth becomes comically obvious during a boisterous town hall meeting. None of the submitted claims quite matches the “real” one. Even worse, the gold is revealed as lead. In a note read to the crowd, the stranger reveals his motive and strategy. With the town humiliated, the plan has worked except for one catch: Reverend Burgess holds back from reading the claim submitted by Mr. and Mrs. Richards as a personal favor to them. Suddenly, the entire town, including the stranger, believes that they resisted the temptation to claim the gold. Despite this admiration, the Richards are mortified by the entire experience. They both grow ill and confess their “guilt.” We might easily read “Hadleyburg” as another of Twain’s satirical strikes against late nineteenth-­century American values, with money, rather than sex, corrupting the village “Eden.” Indeed, Twain composed “Hadleyburg” at the end of the 1890s, a decade he spent hustling across oceans and continents to earn money by lecturing to pay off huge debts accumulated through his bad investments in the Paige typesetting machine. But considering Twain’s personal experience with debt gives a new gloss to Hadleyburg, particularly the scenes where the nineteen couples believe they are about to become tremendously wealthy. After all, sudden access to credit can produce a similar euphoria to the prospect of imminent returns on a big investment. In a key description, Twain describes how the town’s initial “wild intoxication of pride and joy” gradually transforms into a “positive sadness” that deepens into “sick look” (2007, 24–­25). Later, he similarly describes how “the bill of future

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squanderings rose higher and higher, wilder and wilder, more and more foolish and reckless. It began to look as if every member of the nineteen would not only spend his whole forty thousand dollars before receiving-­day, but be actually in debt by the time he got the money. In some cases light-­headed people did not stop with planning to spend, they really spent—­on credit. They bought land, mortgages, farms, speculative stocks, fine clothes, horses, and various other things, paid down the bonus, and made themselves liable for the rest” (Twain 2007, 38). Twain’s account of wild spending by “light-­headed people” here could essentially describe the ascendant euphoria of financial bubbles. The “wild intoxication” leads “light-­headed people” to go on a credit binge. He deepens the point by having all nineteen couples spend in essentially the same way; this is not immoral or ignorant individual behavior but mass affliction. Contagious accumulation thus exposes uncanny contradictions in the town’s collective identity: the sack of gold that appears symbolically to relay the town’s signature virtue is an object of fantasy making everyone “sick.” Further, Twain shows that euphoric sensations of pleasure accompany the circulation of the contagious idea—­the gold in the sack. One way to interpret this “wild intoxication” is to connect the negative valence of “intoxication” to its simultaneous capacity to provide bodily pleasure. In this case, the pleasures that accompany this intoxication are inseparable from the sack of gold, even as the intoxication arises from the nineteen couples’ imagination of the gold as an imminent possession. The fantasy of the gold and the accompanying intoxication are mutually reinforcing. The intoxicating fantasy becomes “real” only because the sack confers the fantasy upon an object. Like the note the stranger sent, or like a slip of paper stock or a wheat contract, an object is required to symbolically condense the fantasy. Such objects create a material field for the fantasy, one that grows with every new purchase that the couples make on credit. At the same time, the contagious “intoxication” of the fantasy is so pleasurable, it contradicts the town’s middle-­class moral economy of debt and invites the resulting shame that the stranger anticipates as the product of his revenge. Just as important, Twain’s passage about the transformation of “wild intoxication” to “positive sadness,” which foreshadows the town’s movement from excitement to depression, also acts as a narrative microcosm for the affective circulations of capitalist accumulation cycles, in which “boom and bust” credit crises remain constitutive features of the market. We should remember that the disruption of the town’s moral economy by the accumulative contagion, however, originally arises from the stranger’s prank. This prank depends on the stranger’s correct assumption that the gold would spark the contagion that followed. In this respect, the stranger’s presence and influence in the town reminds us of what nineteenth-­century

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intellectuals like Marx called political economy. The town’s economy wasn’t “natural” but instead structured by the stranger, the same way that ruling classes and institutions shape capitalism. The stranger effectively restructures Hadleyburg’s moral economy by repositioning the town’s imaginary but pleasurable relation to a world of enchanting material objects. He shows that control over contagion is possible. At the same time, this control depends on self-­perpetuating pleasures of fantasy in the minds of others; indeed, up until he reveals himself, the couples in Hadleyburg believe they are acting autonomously. The stranger’s prank gives their actions the appearance of agency, but in reality they derive from a field of agencies inseparable from the objects, fantasies, and gold that the stranger has curated for them. Similar to the stranger, in Norris’s The Pit, Jadwin’s power to hedge profits from the entire production, transportation, and distribution of wheat reveals him as an agent of political economy. Unlike in “Hadleyburg,” however, Jadwin differs from the stranger because the accumulative contagion consumes him; the stranger’s power comes from his ability to direct the contagion toward the town’s population. The stranger’s exertion of agency over the contagion informs this chapter’s final section. For, in light of Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, we must remember that the stranger is able to exploit the town in part because of Hadleyburg’s class politics—­it’s their “pious” middle-­class moral economy that makes the introduction of the gold so powerful a trigger for fantasy. Even without being necessarily wealthy himself, the stranger is able to exert power over the town by dangling the fantasy of gold over the seemingly staid married lives of Hadleyburg’s households. Exploiting class desires through contagious accumulation for ruling class benefit also structures Charles Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition, only this time by setting white working class crowds against black Americans.

Contagion as Fever As the novels of Twain and Norris demonstrate, the pleasures of contagious accumulation have the power to restructure nineteenth-­century middle-­class moral economies, which depend on heterosexual households, fiscal discipline, restrained sexuality, and, of course, white skin color. In “Hadleyburg,” the stranger “weaponizes” his sack of gold to discipline the town’s pride in their notorious virtue, which Twain shows to be much less dependent on individual agency than the town assumed. In The Pit, we see Jadwin captured by a similar contagion. These two narratives present contagious accumulation as a field of pleasures associated with cultures of capitalist practice. They also suggest that while a ruling class might exert control over the formation of accumulative cycles, they cannot necessarily control the resulting contagion. This point

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is pronounced with emphasis in Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, published in 1901, two years after “Hadleyburg” and two before The Pit. In Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, contagious accumulation is again weaponized but this time against the black population of Wellington, North Carolina. Chesnutt’s novel is a fictionalization of the 1898 Wilmington coup d’état, in which a white supremacist riot, led by the state’s insurgent Democratic party, brutally expelled the city’s Republican officials after an election campaign of intimidation, threats, and racist fearmongering. The postelection riot killed dozens of black persons and forced the emigration of many prominent black citizens. While in all three texts white male skin authorizes the “legitimacy” of the accumulation cycle, in Wellington Chesnutt describes the pleasures propelling the riot contagion as intimately bound up with what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003), a strategy of extraction whereby ruling classes seize wealth from lower classes and colonial subjects. In his novel, Chesnutt renders the riot’s planning by three powerful conspirators, who, much like the stranger in “Hadleyburg,” create the riot as a tactic of political and economic exploitation and accomplish it by conflating the riot with contagious accumulation—­in this case, the white rioters steal homes, jobs, and businesses from the black community alongside the sadistic euphoria they experience by killing black bodies. The three conspirators mobilize the city’s white population into a riot by promising them a share of the economic spoils while also recognizing that the pleasures of accumulation are inherently bound up with the sadism of race rioting. In other words, the “pleasures” of the rioting come from the hunting and killing of black bodies, not unlike the spectacular sadism that Ida B. Wells observed in her antilynching pamphlet A Red Record. Essential to planning the riot’s racialized contagion is Major Carteret, editor of the Morning Chronicle, who consults with a former confederate, General Belmont, who is a leader of the town’s old guard, and Captain McBane, a contractor for the convict-­lease prison and a rabidly racist member of the white working class. Their mutual desire for greater political control over Wellington leads to a reversal of recent social and economic success by the city’s black population, a success that they call “negro domination” (Chesnutt 1993, 33). Chesnutt describes how the three recognize the need to exploit the resentments of the town’s white population, whom Chesnutt mostly depicts as working class and uneducated. As a representative of this class, Captain McBane during an early conversation inspires Major Carteret to reflect that there “was something prophetic in this opportune visit. The matter was not only in his own thoughts, but in the air; it was the spontaneous revulsion of white men against the rule of an inferior race” (Chesnutt 1993, 33). At first, the three wait for that revulsion to explode on its own, but when nothing much happens,

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they regret that “thoughtful men” in the town are too ready to compromise. Carteret realizes that they will need to offer something more concrete to provoke the insurgency. Itching for the opportunity to express his sadist tendencies, Captain McBane urges Major Carteret and General Belmont to dispense with formalities and simply attack the town’s black population under the banner of white supremacy. Carteret replies that “this is a modern age, and in dealing with so fundamental a right as suffrage we must profess a decent regard for the opinions of even that misguided portion of mankind which may not agree with us. This the age of crowds, and we must have the crowds with us” (Chesnutt 1993, 81). To wit, he produces a copy of an antilynching editorial from The Afro-­American Banner, Wellington’s black newspaper. The editorial dares to venture that the rape accusations used to justify lynchings likely arose from “voluntary acts” between white and black persons and that the southern obsession with racial purity unfairly criminalizes interracial marriages. Carteret proposes that the editorial act as the trigger for the riot. Once printed in his paper, the editorial will become the structuring object for contagious accumulation, like the sack of gold in “Hadleyburg” or the wheat contracts in The Pit. Chesnutt suggests the nineteenth-­century print media could activate what Sampson calls the “affective priming of social atmospheres” associated with networked subjectivity in the digital era, with newspapers acting as instruments of control (Sampson 2012, 5). In one way, the editorial, the sack of gold, and wheat contracts act as authorizing objects that trigger contagious accumulation by mobilizing euphoria that circulates even when the triggering objects, like the sack of gold, do not. This mobilized euphoria also spreads from the intimacy between people’s bodies and the other objects, amplifying the material field of the euphoric fantasy, even beyond the authorizing ones: the flow of prices for Jadwin, the stuff bought on credit by the duped couples, or even the bodies of African Americans for Wellington’s white rioters. Twain and Norris render euphoric sensations as extensions of accumulation itself; however, Chesnutt suggests that for southern whites, contagious accumulation became inextricably eroticized as sadistic pleasure, which arises from the violence (and exists aside from the political and economic dispossession of Wellington’s black community). The continued failure of a precipitating event forces the conspirators to circulate the Banner’s editorial instead. As planned, they “touched the Southern white man in his most sensitive spot,” and for those requiring the pretext for the pleasures of violence, “mere words would be no answer at all” (Chesnutt 1993, 248). Delighted, Carteret and company realize it “only remained for them to so direct this aroused public feeling that it might accomplish the desired end” (Chesnutt 1993, 249). They quickly compile a kill list and an exile

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FIGURE 6.1  White rioters pose outside the remains of Love and Charity Hall, where Alexan-

der Manly printed the newspaper The Daily Record after the 1898 Wilmington insurrection. Unknown artist. Courtesy of New Hanover County Public Library.

list, especially targeting successful African American men. Desiring the intimate pleasures beyond those of financial extraction, Captain McBane insists that any black resisters should be killed too. They fix the timing of the assault, but their ability to exercise control over the contagion soon complicates their plan. Chesnutt writes, “In stating their equation they had overlooked one factor,—­God, or fate, or whatever one may choose to call the Power that holds the destinies of man in the hallow of his hand” (Chesnutt 1993, 253). Aside from foreshadowing their loss of control over the riot, this passage defines contagion as that “whatever” force that represents a diffused agency, or agencies, beyond the scope of the liberal self or executive control. Chesnutt’s depiction of the riot speaks directly to the “whatever” power of contagion: as the carnage grows uncontrollable, Carteret’s colleague Ellis remarks that the mob “is in the fever stage, and must burn itself out. We shall be lucky if it doesn’t burn the town out” (Chesnutt 1993, 305). Here, we see the social and medical discourses on contagion collapse together; the accumulative contagion sparks “illness” at the moment it constitutes the white community. Much to Carteret’s personal horror, the white mobs assault black women and children. They burn down the black hospital administered by the town’s best doctor and one of the novel’s main protagonists, Dr. Miller, and murder his son. In an echo of the passage about the indeterminate “whatever” power, Chesnutt admonishes, “Those who set in motion the forces of evil cannot always control them afterwards” (Chesnutt 1993, 304). This conflict over how

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to control the riot, and by extension contagious accumulation, speaks to the contradiction in the coalition goals of Major Carteret and Captain McBane. The former pursues the pleasures of financial accumulation, while the latter purses the pleasures of sadistic violence. The two pleasures behind the accumulative contagion, theft and sadism, notably contradict the still prevalent discourses on riots and rioters, which often render violent crowds as spontaneous and irrational. More importantly, Chesnutt’s story demonstrates that the diffused agency operating through the white population originates from, and exceeds, the town’s ruling class conspirators. While all three novels ask readers to consider episodes of contagious accumulation as disruptive to late nineteenth-­century moral economies, Chesnutt most vividly shows accumulative contagion as essential to the reproduction of racial capitalism. He makes clear that the agencies structuring capitalist culture depend on the sadistic pleasures extracted from black bodies during cycles of accumulation by dispossession. In effect, the violence of the contagious accumulation—­the white riot—­was a transaction between the ruling class and working-­class white men. This transaction effectively offered sadism against black bodies in exchange for social, economic, and political control. While obviously horrifying, Chesnutt asks us to consider such sadistic violence as an erotic resource for the southern political economy and presumably for the nation as a whole. Like all three authors, Chesnutt shows that capitalism necessitates fantasies of contagious accumulation. Tragically, the violence and “illness” accompanying such accumulation has not collapsed racial capitalism but actually accelerated its capacities for extraction, proving essential to reproducing its ruling classes.

References Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chesnutt, Charles. (1901) 1993. The Marrow of Tradition. New York: Penguin. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press. Ngai, Sianne. 2007. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Norris, Frank. (1903) 2006. The Pit: A Story of Chicago. New York: Barnes and Noble. Robinson, Cedric. 2000. Black Marxism: The Marking of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Sampson, Tony. 2012. Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Twain, Mark. (1899) 2007. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. Hoboken: Melville House. Van Ginneken, Jaap. 1992. Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871–­1899. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press. Zimmerman, David. 2006. Panic! Markets, Crises & Crowds in American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

7

Performance and the Contagious Swirl of Dramatic Tradition Performative Revision and Subversion PATRICK MALEY

Contagion is a valuable concept for complicating traditional, linear notions of aesthetic influence, particularly for drama, an aesthetic form engaged in constant revision through performance and engagement with a variety of audiences. Because theaters produce plays from widely disparate eras and cultures side by side, and audiences experience plays from across the dramatic tradition in a haphazard, nonlinear progression, the form and dynamics of drama can never be solidified. Drama is instead always being reshaped and modified by new plays, new productions of old plays, and the responses of audiences to both. As a result, aesthetic influence swirls unpredictably backward and forward across time, allowing contemporary playwrights to influence understandings of their predecessors. This unique potential for constant revision cultivates drama’s innate subversion, making it an aesthetic form that refuses to brook secure establishment of ideas about form, function, resonance, or ideology. Any such hegemonies are constantly subject to undercutting by the contagion of the performative present. 116

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Contagion spread via performance flows unpredictably and haphazardly, allowing for a theoretical framework in which the always-­present-­tense of performance injects performers, audiences, critics, and others with “pathogens”—­ ideas about form, function, resonance—­that force a reevaluation of dramatic history. This function of performance is empowering and exciting but may not necessarily seem peculiar. For, as a mode of transmission, contagion proves a clear model of aesthetic influence. For instance, an author might possess a certain quality of structuring plot. Her work gains popularity, and a variety of other authors catch the “bug” of this plot structure, employ it in their own work, and pass it on to writers of a subsequent generation. Such a model of influence as contagion is not unfamiliar, and it can be helpful in theorizing the transmission of aesthetics. Yet despite the fact that traditions of dramatic writing, theatrical production, and performance practice can fit neatly into this model, the unique dynamics of drama allow the notion of infectious influence to operate in unexpected and productive ways. Because of the strange alchemy of theater and performance, the aesthetic body of drama is always in flux. The performance history of Othello, to take one notable example, has evolved its presentation of the title character—­early productions presented Othello as a brown-­skinned native of northern Africa, but modern productions usually cast a black-­ skinned actor—­and, as a result, the play’s social and political commentary can move in new directions. A contemporary American performance of Othello with a black actor in the lead (such as Sam Gold’s 2016 modern-­dress production at New York Theatre Workshop, starring David Oyelowo) takes on new connotations after slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and Black Lives Matter, as well as the career of playwright August Wilson and others, rendering Shakespeare’s tragedy fresh, refracted anew through modern lenses. Perhaps the best way to account for this phenomenon of historical revision is that the forces of racial history, African American theater, and other factors have infected American audiences in ways that irreparably reshape their experiences of a production of Othello. In the realm of drama, contagion as a model of aesthetic influence in fact allows for a seemingly paradoxical backward-­ looking influence. As in the case of Othello, August Wilson can influence an encounter with Shakespeare, who is four-­hundred years his senior. The long history and perpetual immediacy of performance make it a particularly potent carrier of aesthetic infection, opening productive avenues of influence that break free of rigid historical progressions and allow theater and performance to work constantly to refresh and reinvent dramatic tradition, subverting any sense of formal security and critical certainty.

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The Untidiness of Dramatic History The unpredictable and uncontainable flow of contagion proves a particularly useful model for thinking about drama, because its fundamental association with performance and reliance on audience makes it an aesthetic form occupied in the interminable process of becoming. We may be able to identify a rough genesis for the form in fifth-­century Athens, but we are never at a point where we can totalize the nature of drama with any certainty because contemporary playwrights are consistently destabilizing and forcing modification upon any speciously clear definition. What this means is that contemporary dramatists are active interlocutors with their long tradition of predecessors in the ongoing dialogue about what drama is and how it acts. Certainly stalwarts like Shakespeare and Sophocles have more influential voices in that discussion, but the possibility always exists for contemporary dramatists to change the way their audiences think about drama. If they do that (as Shakespeare and others like Samuel Beckett or Tennessee Williams did during their lifetimes), they are by necessity altering an understanding of the very long tradition, even if only subtly. Whatever drama is—­however we use that term—­it must be capacious enough to include both Sophocles and Beckett, Shakespeare and Suzan-­Lori Parks, and because that is the case, it engenders unique, fascinating, and important connections between playwrights in its haphazard, interminable journey of becoming. This journey is haphazard because over the course of several thousand years, and countless performances before audiences, lines of influence have been muddied and have grown disordered. Frequently and understandably, discussions of influence focus on how a predecessor influences a successor, recognizing Shakespearean echoes in Eugene O’Neill or examining the Chekhovian stylistics of Annie Baker’s plays. But as these lines of influence move across countries, and as audiences experience plays from a variety of eras and cultures side by side and out of temporal order (rarely, after all, do theaters dedicate their seasons to playwrights from a single nationality or organize their offerings chronologically), influence shakes free of chronology’s shackles. A playwright like the twentieth-­century American dramatist Eugene O’Neill might begin to influence his Early Modern English predecessor Shakespeare; Annie Baker may remake Chekhov. On the surface, this operation of influence seems counterintuitive and anachronistic: Shakespeare was long dead and his work complete by the time O’Neill lived or wrote any plays, and so O’Neill could not have influenced Shakespeare’s work. But the peculiarities of performance, combined with the capacious minds of audiences and the theoretical notions fomented by the present volume allow for a transformative strategy of thinking about aesthetic influence.

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Conceiving influence less in the obvious way of one artist shaping the aesthetics of a successor and more as a large collective of artists constantly contributing to a complex and steadily evolving whole allows productive space for considering a reciprocal flow of influence. T. S. Eliot (2001) laid the groundwork for this type of thinking in 1919 with his seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” There, Eliot asserts that “if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged” (100). Eliot and forward-­thinking modernists like him in the early part of the twentieth century faced the double bind of desiring, on the one hand, to make poetry new, distinct, and special and, on the other hand, to perform due reverence to the long poetic tradition that preceded them. So Eliot rethought tradition, arguing that “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead” (101). This assertion does not on the surface seem all that radical, as Eliot is arguing the commonplace notion that context matters. But Eliot goes on to insist that the living artist is more than a receptacle of the past and a forward-­ moving vehicle. Eliot says, famously, that “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted” (101). Eliot’s ideas are shot through with problematic notions of canonization and gender—­he is, for example, entirely discounting the oppressive social history of patriarchy, Western imperialism, and white dominance so central to the critiques of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1980), Edward Said (1980), and others—­but his theoretical grounding remains perceptive in its consideration of the contemporary’s effect on the past. He is suggesting that some unified whole of poetic tradition is at all times both complete and primed for alteration from a new contribution that fundamentally changes the characteristics of the whole. A giant ball of wax is a unified whole, but the addition of a new wax deposit, even if quite small, makes the ball fundamentally new, and all the existing deposits have a new relationship to the whole of the ball. Thus for Eliot, “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (101). The addition of the influential new necessitates modification of the individual and collective past, which may have seemed settled or complete.

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Eliot’s ideas push back against a rigid notion of historical influence by positing a metaphysical concept that he calls the existing or ideal order. For him, this order is a body of canonized works of great literature, deemed so by a coterie of intelligent literati. Of course, there are problems with this process that render it untenable, but his notion of the end result is nonetheless a productive way of conceiving aesthetic form. Because although Eliot uses words like ideal and complete to discuss his notion of an order, his most telling term is existing, a word whose participial form underscores the order’s vibrancy: it exists continually and therefore in a constant state of change. Eliot is talking here about form: not poems, but poetry. His point is that a long historical collective of many poems combines to evince some metaphysical notion called poetry and that when important new poems insist upon consideration and inclusion in that collective, the notion must evolve, even if only slightly. By this logic, when Emily Dickinson altered the existing order of poetry, Homer’s relationship, proportion, and value to that whole altered slightly—­but unmistakably and irreversibly. After Dickinson, Homer made a different contribution to the metaphysical notion of poetry. On the one hand, then, Eliot’s ideas provide the tools to claim that later artists affect their predecessors in such a way that earlier work must exist in a different relationship to the whole once that whole evolves. This is a useful idea for conceiving of the complex relationships between works of art but an incomplete one because Eliot does not offer a model for putting his theories into critical practice. For, except in cases like new manuscript discoveries or radical editing projects, the text of a dead writer is not going to change. We can debate all we want about the textual variants in Shakespeare’s quartos and the folio, but we cannot say that Shakespeare’s work is revised after giving some serious thought to Eugene O’Neill’s plays. Not even somebody who revised as obsessively as Tennessee Williams can rewrite from beyond the grave. Of course, such revision is not part of Eliot’s argument, but the claim that an existing early work can alter its relationship to a whole also asserts that something new or different exists in the alchemy between work and form, that the evolution of the whole forces a reevaluation of the individual. What we need in order to open this productive avenue is a way to think about how contemporary work redefines classic work. The model of contagion opens that avenue by serving as a theoretical heuristic that elucidates peculiar processes throughout aesthetic history. As we can observe in the flow of dramatic tradition, contagion moves in manners and directions that resist prediction and conscription, floating as it does silently and imperceptibly, defying any efforts to impose rigid pathways. A model of influence-­as-­contagion therefore allows for recognition of how a contemporary dramatist’s contribution to the whole body of drama directly

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influences the dynamics of that existing drama. Drama and performance rely fundamentally on an audience, made up of a variety of people including casual playgoers, ardent theater fans, critics, scholars, and others. These are the people infected by the contagion of performance, and it is through them that its pathogens can travel against the tide of time. For, in the mind of an audience member well versed in the dramatic tradition, a play like August Wilson’s (1985) Fences will inescapably point to Arthur Miller’s (1949) Death of a Salesman. Despite Wilson’s claim to be unfamiliar with Miller’s landmark play before writing Fences, the latter play bears strong resonances of its predecessor. Wilson’s Troy Maxson struggles just like Willy Loman to maintain his dignity; both characters stray into infidelity and, partly as a result, find themselves in violent Oedipal struggles with their sons. Certainly Miller’s play helps contextualize Wilson’s, but thinking in the other direction is also productive. Troy Maxson is a 1950s African American garbageman living in a ramshackle home. Thinking about Salesman through the lens of Fences helps elucidate the white privilege underscoring Miller’s play. Willy Loman might not have the life of which he dreams, but his white-­collar job has earned him a car, a house, and the ability to free himself from debt, if only belatedly. We can also see greater depth in Miller’s critique of the American dream, as Troy’s struggles to stay afloat cast Willy’s eagerness to get ahead in a more disparaging light. This process of thinking about somebody like Miller through the lens of somebody like Wilson cannot work if analysis is married to a rigid historical model of influence. But the erratic nature of contagion does not obey such rigidity. Rather than a linear, historical model, thinking about drama and performance as an aesthetic of contagion invokes the model of a matrix, something Houston A. Baker Jr. (1984) calls “a point of ceaseless input and output, a web of intersecting, crisscrossing impulses always in productive transit” (3). Like the pathogens of contagion, forces in a matrix travel irregularly and unreliably, resisting strict, conservative mapping. Baker points to the railroad station as an example of this matrix, a place he says is “marked by transience. Its inhabitants are always travelers—­a multifarious assembly in transit” (7). Perhaps the best railway station to model an aesthetic matrix is an unreliable one: trains coming and going without a clear schedule, junctions crisscrossing without consistency or logic, and passengers willfully submitting themselves to the caprice of the matrix. Artists pass through the matrix constantly and irregularly. Perhaps dramatists do so first when they initially write a play or have one produced; not only do they return throughout their career, but they also pass through again and again as their plays populate theaters during or after their lifetimes. Each of these events is a locus of contagion, performatively infecting both future performances and the living memory of those in the past. Audiences, critics, scholars, fans, and so on watch from the junction’s platform as

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the irregular rhythm of the matrix constantly infects their thinking, enabling them to make unique, enlightening connections. Their responses contribute to the dynamic, evolving shape of the matrix. This shape and operation of an aesthetic matrix recalls Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of the rhizome, a concept that helpfully complements Baker’s matrix by elucidating how such a model resists traditional linear transcription. Deleuze and Guattari associate such familiar linearity with a rooted tree that lays down a foundation and then grows predictably up and out. They argue that “the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the One that becomes two, then of the two that become four . . . Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-­tree” (5). In deconstructing this notion, the theorists suggest thinking about the development of art as a rhizome, which “ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles” (7). For Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizome demonstrates a much freer and less rigidly logical flow of influence and reception; “unlike trees or their roots,” they say, “the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature” (21). Thus the chronological predecessor need not by necessity lead into its immediate successors; instead, the later work can travel far afield and eventually loop back, developing in unpredictable ways that reshape earlier work. Such unruly development happens when art engages with, acts upon, and is influenced by the forces of its social sphere. A treelike anthology of drama might organize plays in a neat chronological order, but in the untidy world of performance, plays swirl more freely throughout an aesthetic and social field. Deleuze and Guattari insist that a rhizome is a map rather than a tracing, arguing that “what distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious” (12). If the unconscious here is the chronological dramatic tradition neatly traced in bound anthologies or history of drama syllabi, the map of performance works more effectively to create and constantly revise and recreate that tradition. This is because within the matrix, the tradition is always in transit, always reshaping itself while resisting teleology. A rhizome, say Deleuze and Guattari, helpfully modeling the dynamics of the dramatic tradition, “has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills” (21). Contemporary dramatists are not arriving at the end of a tradition that began several thousands of years ago; they are instead joining Shakespeare and Sophocles on the perpetual plateau that will always be in the middle of a developing and overspilling tradition.

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Still, this theoretical model necessitates the active involvement of an audience. Deleuze and Guattari insist that “literature is an assemblage” created in concert with other assemblages and the social structures that enable them (4). They explain that “an assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections. There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines” (8). Thus novels, for instance, are always constructing lines of connection between themselves and the vast matrix of literature and the society into which they are entering. The readers, who receive, redistribute, and draw connections between books, are at least as influential as the art itself in this process. The agency of the audience is ramped up for drama and performance because the experience is at once more immediate and communal. In a theater, plays present themselves before an audience, usually one that evolves nightly—­“Every night when a curtain comes down,” says Sarah Ruhl (2014), “a world dies” and thereby necessitates a new world for the next show (145)—­and then send that audience out into the world to think, talk, write, and even teach about that encounter with the art. Audience members thus actively spread the contagion that fuels the rhizomatic development of drama. Hans-­Georg Gadamer (2004) is helpful here in demonstrating how the aesthetic qualities of a work of art rely a great deal on lived experience. “The experience of art,” he says, “should not be falsified by being turned into a possession of aesthetic culture, thus neutralizing its special claim” (85). Such an aesthetic culture can be time-­bound and historical, as if to say that Eugene O’Neill’s plays belong strictly to early twentieth-­century American culture or Shakespeare’s to Early Modern English culture. Rather, Gadamer continues, “All encounter with the language of art is an encounter with an unfinished event and is itself part of this event” (85, original emphasis). If to encounter art is to contribute to the event of that art, then to engage with a body of art is to participate in drawing lines of connection, to join in the untidy construction of an aesthetic matrix. For drama in particular, the contagion of reaction and discourse occasioned by performance carries art across those lines and facilitates productive dialogue between plays and what Eliot calls the existing order. Every time a play appears on stage, it presents itself anew, initiating a fresh dialogue with the dramatic tradition. In her work on contemporary drama, Soyica Diggs Colbert (2011) rightfully rejects “the idea of influence as a one-­way street,” arguing instead that we should “conceptualize it as a feedback loop that infuses dramatic works with fragments that disrupt a linear formulation of influence” (203). That feedback results from a long and continued history of performance and production, and Colbert’s notion of the loop speaks to the musical practice of harnessing and deploying the sounds of feedback. Reuben Santiago-­Hudson’s

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2012 production of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, for example, feeds back through landmarks like Lloyd Richard’s premiere 1987 staging and the 1995 television adaptation, all of which connect with an earlier dramatization of African American family like Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, itself making a fresh statement with Kenny Leon’s 2014 Broadway production. At each step along the way, the rhizomatic motion of the matrix invites audiences to reinvestigate and rethink the earlier plays. “Performance,” says Colbert, “enables an active engagement with the past that transforms not only what will be but also what was” (271). Indeed, performance insists that not even long-­ago written monuments of the stage are immune to the contagion of influence, as the dramatic tradition remains consistently dynamic and evolving.

Drama’s Contagious Subversion Drama’s strange evolution helps elucidate its social operation, revealing that the form’s potential for subversion lies in the very peculiarity of its work. For, although drama and performance are among our oldest and most consistent artistic forms, they are also among our strangest civilized activities. For thousands of years, humans have been standing up in front of other humans, affecting strange, exaggerated movements and language, and pretending to be somebody or something that they are not. This is odd behavior to be sure, but what is perhaps even stranger is that for the same long stretch of history, audiences have gathered in groups to watch these performances, willfully participating, even if only by their silent presence, in the bizarre game that is performance. Playwright Sara Ruhl (2014) insists that “theater is at its roots some very brave people mutually consenting to a make-­believe world, with nothing but language to rest on” (98). The people in question are at least performers and audience (if not any of the many others who make theater possible), and Ruhl generously finds bravery where others might justifiably find dementia: audiences know the people on stage are not who they pretend to be and performers know they are not alone, pondering their existential malaise in some castle or drawing room, but the charade continues as it always has nonetheless. This willing and communal suspension of disbelief facilitates an operative performative space that can upset existing orders. Out of these charades emerge productive contributions to a constant rethinking of form and context. Rather than a simple recitation of a dramatic script, performance works actively to reshape a play as well as its historical and aesthetic context. Joseph Roach (1996) says that performance creates what he calls “vortices of behavior,” as if audiences, performers, ushers, technicians and others are all sucked by a “gravitational pull of social necessity” into the behavioral practice that legitimizes performance. Roach argues that these vortices

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“canalize specified needs, desires, and habits in order to reproduce them,” underscoring the fundamental role performance has played in human society (28). Consistently throughout history, desires to perform and to participate in performative events have driven humans to street corners, community centers, bandstands, gazebos, theaters, and countless other locations of assembly in order to step outside of dominant behavioral norms as a community. These actions enable the history of drama to swirl creatively and unpredictably, encouraging reevaluation of any number of precepts in the process. In many ways, this swirl makes the history of drama fundamentally subversive, working against potentially dangerous exertions of power. Standard one-­way infectious influence, after all, always threatens to smother creativity through hegemony. Edward Said’s (1979) concept of orientalism, for example, is gravely concerned with the effects of Western power aggressively infecting the political and aesthetic character of the Near East: “Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment” (6). Harold Bloom (1997) famously formulates the process of influence as swerving in order to avoid being overpowered by a great literary predecessor, but in offering an important rejoinder to Bloom, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1980) demonstrate the danger inherent in his theory. Pointing out that “Bloom’s model of literary history is intensely (even exclusively) male, and necessarily patriarchal,” they ask, “If the Queen’s looking glass speaks with the King’s voice, how do its perpetual kingly admonitions affect the Queen’s own voice?” (46–­47). For Gilbert and Gubar, the patriarchal influence infects and threatens to paralyze the female poet by greatly impeding her ability to identify powerful precursors. This infection—­what Gilbert and Gubar call “dis-­ease”—­is so powerful that the theorists suggest that a female poet can only counteract it by at least in part embracing it; the successful female poet may only avoid being overwhelmed by infection “by simultaneously conforming to and subverting patriarchal literary standards” (73). In this regard, then, one-­way historical influence proves deleterious, posing a threat that one must struggle to avoid. Working against the pull of traditional, one-­way influence in favor of a performative matrix of contagion facilitates the upsetting of this hegemony. Indeed, the history of social and political thought shows that the contagious spread of ideas can be productively subversive, and the history of theater proves it to be a vehicle for just such productive contagion. As Ellen MacKay (2011) and others have shown, there is power in performed ideas, the sort that early modern authorities feared would spread through the theater like contagion, infecting the masses with notions of subversion. For religious and moral authorities, says MacKay, “the plague is a manifestation of the theater, and vice versa,” because “both countervail against history, by loosening their

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victims from the grid of truth and consequences” (104). Such a potential is the sort of epidemiological thinking that fueled antitheatricalists in early modern England and myriad other authorities attempting to censor theater across history and cultures, and it shows that theater’s contagion can be productive of social progress. Certainly Gilbert and Gubar’s concern for the struggle of female poets extends to female playwrights, but as Una Chaudhuri (1997) has shown, the immediacy and embodied realness of performance allows for a clearer response to oppression than other aesthetic forms, and Jill Dolan (1991) argues that female playwrights like Caryl Churchill who break the inherently masculine traditional form of Western drama carve out a space of feminist resistance and progress. Through embodied theatrical performance, a productive contagion of ideas flows more freely. As Said’s concern demonstrates, however, the threat of the past over­ whelming the present lies more with scholars than artists. Said argues that dangerous infection comes from Western critics who initially foist constructed narratives upon Near Eastern art and then perpetuate those characterizations in the annals of criticism. Dolan’s important work extends the critiques of Gilbert and Gubar to theater criticism, but Said’s concern remains salient. Witness only how many more new plays either fit neatly into or gently test the limits of the Western realist form rather than rejecting the form drastically. Surely, for every new tradition-­defying play produced, there are at least ten quite reminiscent of Sophocles, and the latter are often better received by critics and ticket-­buyers. The weight of a tradition as long as that of Western drama threatens to overpower the minds of critics and audiences, thereby bullying each new age of drama into compliance with the form’s history. But the longevity of the Western dramatic tradition, in unison with its constant historical dialogue and its emphasis on productive performativity, arms drama to challenge the overwhelming power of the past and to subvert social hegemonies. The remarkable consistency of the dramatic form means that the work of a contemporary playwright like Lynn Nottage, for instance, can be discussed side by side with the work of Sophocles, who predates her by roughly 2,500 years, without the necessity of attending to the countless dramatists who worked in the interval between these two playwrights’ careers. Responsible attention to historical, social, political, and other contexts must of course be made, but on at least one very important level, it is possible to recognize and discuss how Sophocles and Nottage share a form, each making different contributions to the same art and, by so doing, each contributing to the nature of that form. Thus when Nottage raises her playwright’s voice in critique of complex contemporary social challenges as she regularly does in her plays, she is also critiquing the history of drama and contributing to the form’s evolving response to and characterization of injustice.

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Conclusion: Theater and Its Symptoms Conceptualizing the influence of dramatic performance as contagious in this way validates and empowers the complex web of reception woven by audience, critics, scholars, and others, recognizing this process as an active and important contributor to the dramatic tradition. It is here that contagion compels restrictive chains of chronology to give way to swirling currents of infectious influence. Genre and the social operation of art, after all, find purchase for the most part in responses of audience and critics. Aristotle was no playwright, and he lived two hundred years after the height of Attic tragedy, but he has had at least as much influence on the history of tragedy as Sophocles. If, then, we concentrate on how art infects audiences and explore how their responses act as contagion for other critics, scholars, teachers, and artists, we can begin to see a rhizomatic flow of an aesthetic matrix. We can in fact consider the work of critics, scholars, teachers, discursive audience members, and the like—­people who are talking and writing about and in response to drama—­as the engine driving that matrix. In the same way that so much contemporary thinking about Sophocles and his relationship to his predecessor Aeschylus originates in the work of the critic Aristotle, so much thinking about somebody like Tennessee Williams has its roots in audiences’ minds, the guidance of teachers, Williams’s critics, and scholars who have written about his work rather than in the plays themselves. The legacy of a playwright, like most artists, exists predominantly in responses to his or her work. Critics, scholars, and audience members respond to and debate about the work and, in the process, contribute mightily the public perception of the artist. This is how history has constructed and received a Shakespeare who was a revolutionary genius, an O’Neill who was a brooding forefather of American drama, a Williams who was an introspective existentialist, and an August Wilson who was the bard of African American life. None of these notions come from the playwrights themselves; they come from long traditions of response to their work, and they have currency because they have spread like contagion through the work and minds of critics, scholars, teachers, audiences, and students. Thinking of aesthetic influence as contagion therefore opens up unexpected and fruitful discourse throughout the dramatic tradition, an immeasurably valuable capability for approaching a field as vast and varied as drama and performance. After several thousand years of globetrotting, the integrity of historical, social, and cultural contexts begins to wane. But contagion moves across those borders with little care or motive other than the irrepressible drive for transmission. And by so doing, the traces of contagion’s transmission reveal a vibrant dialogue between playwrights, performers, and audiences, one constantly reinventing the tradition and its components. Consider as one brief

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example Michael Sexton’s 2012 production of Shakespeare’s Henry V at Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey. Sexton, as he did with Titus Andronicus at New York’s Public Theater in 2011 and even with As You Like It at Two River in 2014, located and accentuated the grit underlying the triumphalism of Shakespeare’s play. The playwright gives us a bold national hero of classical proportions, but Sexton’s production examined Henry as a timid king and uncertain general who was nonetheless driven by a lust for power. By stylizing and accentuating death during battle scenes, and by casting a stark red light over the final stage tableaux, Sexton suggested that Henry’s empire grows only at the expense of mercilessly spilled blood. This is evidence of Shakespeare influenced by realist modernism, postmodern notions of imperialism, and perhaps most specifically by the plays of Bertolt Brecht. Having been infected with the contagion of modern theater as an audience member and practitioner, Sexton proves himself a carrier of contagion to Shakespeare, inviting his audiences to consider the modern horrors of war rather than its romanticized, premodern glories. Within such a swirl, Brecht influences Shakespeare and subverts English pride in the warrior king, Henry V. Drama’s popularity and social currency have risen and fallen in various locations at various times, but although “a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot,” say Deleuze and Guattari, “it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (9). Because of the constant, free-­flowing dialogue, drama is always at the ready to start a new stratum or revive a dormant one. To continue the metaphor, there is no vaccine against the contagion of drama

FIGURE 7.1  Jacob Fishel as Henry V with members of the company

in Two River Theater’s 2012 production of Shakespeare’s Henry V, directed by Michael Sexton. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

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and performance. Instead, plays flow through theaters, infecting performers and audiences with a critical disposition, allowing us to be perpetually dissatisfied with pat, settled understandings of all that we know about the dramatic tradition. The contagion of aesthetic influence insists instead that drama as an order exists fundamentally in flux, bending and adjusting to myriad new contributions. The lifeblood of the dramatic tradition turns out to flow through the transmission of contagion.

References Baker, Houston A., Jr. 1984. Blues Ideology, and Afro-­American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bloom, Harold. 1997. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Chaudhuri, Una. 1997. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Colbert, Soyica Diggs. 2011. The African American Theatrical Body: Repetition, Performance, and the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dolan, Jill. 1991. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Eliot, T. S. 2001. The Wasteland and Other Writings. New York: Modern Library. Gadamer, Hans-­Georg. 2004. Truth and Method. 2nd rev. ed. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Continuum. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. 1980. Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-­Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press. MacKay, Ellen. 2011. Persecution, Plague, and Fire: Fugitive Histories of the Stage in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-­Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Ruhl, Sarah. 2014. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write on Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

8

Viral Murder Contagious Killings and Epidemic Beliefs MARLENE TROMP

Murder, Contagion, and Cultural Consciousness We share a cultural belief that murder is contagious. After James Holmes killed twelve people in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in 2012, Caren and Tom Teves, the parents of one of his victims, Alex Teves, founded “No Notoriety,” which discourages the publication of murderers’ images and names on the grounds that the “quest for notoriety and infamy is a well-­ known motivating factor in rampage mass killings and violent copycat crimes” (www​ .nonotoriety​ .com). Caren Teves explained, “One shooter inspires another,” and murder has “a contagion effect” (Sickles 2015). Many people believe that any contact with a criminal can induce criminality in others, a phenomenon the National Research Council calls “violence transmission.” Our culture has a declining faith in the reformatory power of prisons, reading them and the people in them as vectors of contagion both in their physical spaces and across the public consciousness. When crimes are reported, the public reads the stories of suspects and their family life, friends, and home communities as “hot zones” of criminal activity. We assume that people exposed to the contagion of criminality are likely to become criminals themselves, in spite 133

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of the ways that our assumptions may lead us astray. However, there may be other forms of “contagion” in murder cases that are more apposite in assessing criminality. When we fail to comprehend these other varieties of contagion in a murder case, we develop inadequate strategies to respond to them. Developing a better understanding of the varieties of “contagion” in murder cases is critical if we hope to meaningfully engage and respond to murder in our own cultural moment.

Theorizing and Historicizing Viral Murder There are deep roots to the perception that crime itself is contagious. In his study of social codes, behavior, and punishment, Michel Foucault (1995) spoke to the production of criminality in the prison across the centuries. As he put it, “Although it is true that prison punishes delinquency, delinquency is for the most part produced in and by an incarceration which, ultimately, prison perpetuates in its turn. . . . The delinquent is an institutional product” (301). Foucault also spoke more broadly about disciplinary networks of relations: the “power to punish,” as he described it, “ran the whole length of the social network [and] would act at each of its points” (130). In other words, people watch themselves and one another, and this network of observation and condemnation both maintains social expectations and becomes largely invisible because of its pervasiveness and familiarity. This integration of disciplinary networks and punishment are central to Foucault’s assessment of the operation of culture. Crime, in this sense, is viral: interpersonally, as well as socially, contagious. One criminal teaches another, but—­just as significantly—­as a culture, we also assess one another and learn the ways to identify “criminals” before they ever commit a crime. How do these Foucauldian concepts relate to “viral murder,” the notion that murder itself is contagious, as Caren Teves and the National Research Council have argued? How do we understand criminality and identify criminals? Foucault’s theories suggest that the stories we tell of murder might be the most powerful place to locate those codes that make the identification of both crime and perpetrator possible. For this reason, I explore not just the facts of violence, killing, and crime but also the narratives that circulate in the public consciousness and the ways those narratives define criminal acts. These stories can be just as important as, for example, quantitative studies of trial outcomes. My scholarship examines the nineteenth century as a means of better understanding our current cultural moment, and the cultural articulation of murder in the nineteenth century can help us discover the roots of the stories we believe today. Victorian studies has historically sought to understand how the premier form of nineteenth-­century narrative, the Victorian novel, shaped beliefs in

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the period and, in Foucault’s terms, “disciplined” the culture. Classic works by D. A. Miller (1988) and Nancy Armstrong (1987) describe the novel as operating to sanction and maintain social practices—­that is, to properly discipline subjects and identify those who fail to meet the social expectations. Miller saw the novel as “another, informal, and extralegal principle of organization and control [that produces] the notion of delinquency” (3). Armstrong argued that even seemingly benign domestic fiction operated to “contain forms of political resistance within liberal discourse” (26). In this way, they suggest, fiction is not so unlike institutions such as prison or crime-­ridden communities, where our mainstream culture often imagines criminality is spread like a disease. In fact—­and far more insidiously—­the story often cloaks its function as a form of power or social discipline, becoming invisible as a means of defining criminality and violence even though it has a potent effect. Not limited to the novel, Victorian stories of murder were told in newspapers, journals, and the courts. Today, they are also told in film, through social media, and in multiple forms across the limitless space of the internet. Consider, for example, the way that the 1999 Columbine school shooting has been perceived not only as a tragic event in its own right but also as a deadly “contagion,” a story that “infected” the nation. Many have argued that it has become an inspiration for other schoolhouse murders as it continued to spin across our television screens and the internet. Mother Jones reports that Columbine inspired seventy-­four plots or attacks, many of which were planned for the anniversary of the event, explicitly named the perpetrators, or aimed to exceed the Columbine body count (Follman and Andrews 2015). Indeed, the magazine chose only to publish data rather than their full reporting on the event to avoid inspiring more copycat crimes. The journal explicitly identified the danger of a contagion effect in discussing these murders. Just as the Teves sought to suppress information from the Aurora, Colorado, shooting to avoid inspiring more violence, Mother Jones feared that telling this story would “communicate,” like a communicable disease, the act of murder. Mathematical analysis on mass killings suggests the wisdom in this choice. A large-­scale study in 2015 found “significant evidence of contagion in mass killings and school shootings” (Towers et al. 2015). One set of murders, it showed, begat another. In the wake of a school shooting, the likelihood of another school shooting increased in the next thirteen days. The lead author of this study noted that “the body count of a given shooting is not important in itself . . . It is whether a shooting receives local or national news coverage. ‘It’s the attention, not the numbers’” (Adee 2015)—­attention, of course, is the visual and narrative repetition of the story for a viewer or reader. The more broadly a story was told, in other words, the more likely it is for a similar kind of murder to be committed. This concept may help us understand how we narratively come to create and to communicate crime—­both

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materially, as if a germ, from one perpetrator to the next, and socially, by transmitting information. The critical point I wish to contribute to this conversation is that, in all this discussion of murder’s virality, we often fail to see a significant component that sometimes deeply underlies our analysis: we often think we know, even before a crime is committed, who the perpetrator might be, based on our sense of who inhabits the space with the greatest risk of contagion. Tragically, these presumptions are heavily laden with race and class biases. Priscilla Wald’s (2008) fascinating work on the “outbreak narrative” provides some insight into the processes by which this storytelling helps shape a cultural understanding of murder. In her discussion of bacterial and viral outbreaks, she remarks, “It is no wonder, then, that outbreaks and carriers . . . yield such enormous imaginative power and elicit a complicated array of interconnected anxieties: social and cultural biases as intimately interwoven with the fear of biological contagion as social and cultural communities are with their biotic bases” (155). For Wald, the story is critical. Her work focuses on the story of public health—­whereas my argument focuses on the role of the institutions of criminal justice—­from the police to the courts and the public shaping of and responses to crime. Here, I suggest that the narratives we tell in our culture about murder operate in two ways. First, they offer a social model for violent deviance, as Columbine did. Narrative helps provide—­even if just potentially—­a silent network of poisoners, accident makers, and body hiders, who do not need to meet in dark corners to share information like prisoners who share physical space and trade secrets. Instead, from the comfort of one’s home, anyone could learn how to murder well. Second, and less visibly, depictions of murder (rather than real danger itself ) help create a “criminal class” and a paradigm for understanding the crime. Homicide narratives become the means for making the story of murder go viral and for teaching the populace how to recognize a crime. Stories articulate a difference between noble killing (rendering it largely invisible as murder at all) and murder and offer ways to identify a perpetrator. Such narratives shape our understanding of who merits punishment when a death occurs, rendering some kinds of murder (and some kinds of murderers) permissible. Murder, then, is not simply killing; it is a construct embedded in the codes of our culture, and we have been establishing the narratives that frame our sense of these constructs for hundreds of years. Exploring our history and understanding how those narratives have been built and become so naturalized that they seem invisible are the first steps in gaining the capacity to critique the most pernicious of those structures.

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Our Historical Handbook for Murder We are often better at seeing clearly those cultural moments that are not our own, particularly if they are close enough to be recognizable, and this makes a turn back to our intellectual forebears in the nineteenth century compelling for several reasons. Not only the laws of the Victorian period but also its legal and courtroom practices, its forensic and medical structures, and, more subtly, its fascination with homicide and paradigms for understanding it literally form the foundation for our own today. The Victorians had the nineteenth-­ century equivalents of the television shows CSI and Making a Murderer and docudramas about murderers and their victims. Just as we do today, the Victorians loved to tell stories of murder, and these stories produced (and continue to produce) a more significant effect than we have realized. In nineteenth-­century fiction and sensational news coverage and specialty papers like the Illustrated Police News, stories of both real crimes and fictional ones became internationally known. Nineteenth-­century newspapers and novels were littered with stories of murder, bigamy, adultery, and immorality. The Times, meditating on such cases in both life and fiction, noted that it was “an unhappy fact that adultery and murder are often found together” (1869, 9). An entire genre of fiction grew up around such events. Called “sensation fiction” because of the way that it played upon the affect of the reader, it was described as a dangerous, infectious, and contagious—­as “poisonous” as the murder weapon in real criminal cases. One of the most eminent reviewers of this genre, H. L. Mansel (1863) noted in his scathing critique that linked fiction to infamous cases that should an author find “the materials for sensation” in “crime[s] of recent date. . . . Let him only keep an eye on the criminal reports of the daily newspapers” (501). Mansel referred specifically to the “carpet-­bag mystery of Waterloo Bridge,” in which the remains of a man’s body and clothing, minus the head, feet, and hands, were discovered in a carpetbag in London in 1857. The victim had died from stab wounds, and the body had been dismembered, boiled, and salted. Though a fabulous £300 reward was offered, the victim was never identified and the murderers were never discovered. It did not take much, however, to inspire speculation about the “foreigner” who might have engaged in such a crime, a xenophobic and often racist impulse that imagined the perpetrators of such horrifying crime as non-­Britons. The imagined foreign perpetrator was often the focus of the case. On the other hand, when Mansel criticized tales about the Road Murder and the Glasgow Poisoning, he shifted attention from the perpetrators to the masses, decrying the public’s “unspeakably disgusting[,] ravenous appetite for carrion” (501–­502). Mansel’s shift in focus drew attention away from two

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white middle-­class murderers. The “Road Murder” in 1860 had captured the nation’s attention when a wealthy factory inspector’s four-­year-­old son had his throat slit in the middle of the night and his body dropped down a privy. After years of failed investigations and damaging rumors that indicted a large range of people, the case was finally solved when the man’s twenty-­one-­year-­ old daughter, Constance Kent, admitted to committing the crime when she was sixteen. The police had suspected Kent, but the public expressed outrage due to the mainstream belief in the impossibility of a white middle-­class girl performing such a horrible act. In the same year as Kent’s confession, the eminent Dr. Pritchard was accused of the slow, torturous, and deliberate poisoning of both his wife and his mother-­in-­law. His social position and his smooth self-­presentation made it likely that, if he had he only murdered his wife, he would have remained free. He was only caught when several people died in his home. These stories in both the news and fiction served as a handbook for murder—­not just the act of killing but also the act of remaining free. Mansel’s complaints about the public’s hunger for murder stories—­a hunger often driven by a deep fear and a desire to avoid the same fate as the victim (e.g., as the victim-­blaming question “What was she wearing?” in rape cases mistakenly tries to create a road map for safety: “I won’t/don’t wear those things”)—­ entirely ignored the perpetrators as well as the culture context that made the crimes possible (as an analog, we live in a culture that rarely punishes sexual assault and permits some perpetrators to act with impunity, as well as one in which some murderers are harder for us to detect). Indeed, this focus on the public’s voracity in a murder case veils the inability to see both the perpetrator and the social context of murder. These kinds of circulating stories helped shape the larger story of how murder was understood and illustrated the kinds of murderers who got ignored. Mansel’s anxiety focused on attention to these stories and their circulation in part because they undermined narratives of criminals as foreign, dark, and dangerous and potentially replaced such figures with the wealthy, white, and socially powerful—­a key component of the case I dissect below.

Murder, Respectability, and Impunity The perpetrator of the Whitechapel Murder of 1871, Henry Wainwright, drew upon the dismemberment strategies of the Waterloo Bridge mystery as well as other murderers’ successful exploitation of their class standing and sophistication to remain above suspicion (as in the Road Murder and Pritchard cases I described above). A clever student of sensational news and fiction, Wainwright was so successful that, just as in the cases that almost certainly inspired his own crimes, he would not have been discovered but for a later misstep. Wainwright, a respectable and prosperous brushmaker, husband, and father, wooed

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FIGURE 8.1  Henry Wainwright. Unknown artist. Photo from author’s personal collection.

and married a second woman, Harriet Lane, under the pseudonym Percy King without inspiring any suspicion in his legal wife or friends. Together, he and Harriet had two daughters. He supported both of his families separately and in style. After a series of complicated economic turns, however, his business failed, his brother dissolved their partnership, and he became increasingly overwhelmed by the economic and emotional costs of keeping up two households.

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He had, at one time, given Harriet £5 per week, a sum on which she and her children could live very well. As his fortunes declined, however, he gave her less and less—­and sometimes, nothing at all. He began to visit her with a man who he called Edward Frieake—­the name of a real auctioneer friend of his, but who was, in fact, his own brother, Thomas, under the assumed name. He may have already been planning Harriet’s murder at this time. In desperation, she appeared at his workplace, demanding support for herself and their children. She had pawned her most valued possessions and was still behind on the rent. He descended to violence to repel her, and it attracted the attention of a neighbor, who discovered Harriet lying on the floor. Given his long success in deception and the double life, his frustration must have peaked when he failed to control not only her but also himself. Finally, in September of 1874, Henry ordered a large bag of chloride of lime and then invited Harriet to meet him at his warehouse. She left her beloved children with a trusted friend, Miss Wilmore; packed a nightgown in a parcel; and left to meet the man to whom she had pledged lifelong devotion. There, Wainwright shot her three times in the back of the head and cut her throat. Nearby workmen heard the shots. Wainwright buried her body in a shallow grave under the floor, mixed with chloride of lime. This chemical would absorb much of the odor, but it also had the effect of mummifying the corpse. When Harriet’s family pursued him for answers, he claimed she had run off with “Teddy Frieake” and abandoned the children. He showed Harriet’s father telegrams “Frieake” had sent, which indicated that he and Harriet had departed to the continent on a wild spree and that he would marry her under the condition that she never contacted her family or friends again. Harriet’s father sought out Mr. Frieake, who was shocked at the charge and confronted Wainwright. Wainwright implausibly argued that he had meant a different Edward Frieake, though the London directory (unsurprisingly) had no other man by that name. In spite of this outrageous story and the ongoing distress of her relatives and friends, no investigation took place into Wainwright or the disappearance of Harriet Lane. She was, after all, a woman who had lived as a married man’s mistress, and she had borne him two illegitimate children. Though Harriet’s disappearance had publicly revealed Wainwright’s illegal and unethical double life, he was a man—­and, moreover, a man who had once commanded some wealth. His reputation remained untainted in spite of the facts. Gender and class expectations—­and, put quite simply, the broad and general sexism and classism of the public—­made Harriet seem like the villain instead. It was easier to believe that a woman of her reputation had slipped off with another man and abandoned her daughters than that a respected middle-­class business­man could have committed murder.

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This respected man’s business, however, was only getting worse. He had already given up his brushmaking shop and become an employee there. He now had to sell his warehouse, the very place in which Harriet Lane’s body lay. Exactly a year to the day of Harriet’s murder, Wainwright relocated the corpse to avoid discovery. He chopped up her remains, wrapped them in waterproofed cloth, and planned to transfer them to his brother’s property. Soliciting the help of a former employee, now coworker, named Stokes, he moved the parcels to the street. He handed Stokes a hatchet soiled with putrefied matter and a shovel marred with dirt, lime, and what appeared to be human hair and asked him if he’d like to sell the tools (as if Stokes’s own) to the new owner of the space. Because Wainwright was so cautious about being observed, Stokes thought he might be stealing something that was meant to belong to the new owner of the warehouse, perhaps human hair to be used in making brushes. The parcels, after all, stank terribly. He peeked into one of the bundles as Wainwright went to call a cab and—­to his horror—­saw a human head and hand, a body chopped up and portioned into the parcels. He pretended nonchalance and let Wainwright enter the cab and proceed on his way. Once his former superior had ridden off with the remains, he pursued the cab on foot, trying to persuade several police officers that he passed to investigate. It took a great distance on foot, however, and many dismissals from police until two officers agreed to approach the handsome and well-­ spoken Wainwright as he was alighting from the carriage with one of the parcels. Wainwright’s indignant rejection and well-­practiced entitlement might have rebuffed some men and almost certainly cowed the working-­class officers, as some journalists noted (Chronicles 1895, 10). Remarkably, the officers persisted and soon discovered what was in the parcels. Even in prison, with the volume of evidence against him, Wainwright seemed the “hero of the hour.” He was admired by other prisoners and was described as a “celebrity” (Prisoner 1875, 238). Even at this late date, Wainwright did not give up his access to a good story. He was “an omnivorous reader of newspapers and books—­of which he always has a good supply” (238). He was playing the part of a respectable businessman, no matter his circumstances, and this was no foolish strategy. The queen and the state sometimes commuted death sentences and reprieved prisoners. Not seeming like a murderer was very wise, even behind bars. Given his respectability, how had he ended up in jail in the first place? The risks that Stokes took to investigate and apprehend Wainwright were probably possible because of Wainwright’s sinking social position. Would Stokes have opened the parcel of a superior? Would he have chased his boss’s cab? As Wainwright’s bank account dwindled, so did the cultural capital that might have rebuffed inquiry. Strikingly, it was still no simple thing to convict him. Though

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the overwhelming evidence against him secured a guilty verdict, the foreman of the jury audibly sobbed throughout the reading of the sentence, along with several others in the court. Moreover, Wainwright had lived a full year as a free man after the murder, in spite of all the evidence against him. Each minute of the year that passed between Harriet’s Lane murder and the discovery of her body was filled by the social incapacity to imagine Wainwright was a murderer despite the evidence that pointed directly to him. Naturalized sexist and classist beliefs made it easier to condemn Harriet than Wainwright. Similarly, the voice of a lower-­middle-­class man in the street, doggedly following the evidence of a murder, could barely raise the interest of the police. It was only when Wainwright was seized with the cold, hard evidence of his former lover’s dismembered body that he could be charged—­and still the jury wept.

Learning from History: The Stories We Tell I propose that the most important element of this case is not that Wainwright was able to learn from newspaper stories of murder or novels depicting crime how to successfully and with impunity murder his lover—­the kind of contagion documented in most contemporary studies, including those I detail in the first section of this chapter. Rather, I want to look at another kind of contagion that we rarely study or even consider, and in this way, I hope to challenge our responses to viral murder. While we are culturally prepared to imagine that people mired in murder or stories of murder might think to do the same, we often fail to examine the ways in which we have also thoroughly incorporated a narrative of murder that imagines some people to be (inherently) perpetrators and others to be (inherently) innocent. The murderers I describe above—­Kent, Pritchard, and Wainwright—­escaped detection for years as a result of the social expectations surrounding their identities: middle-­ class businessmen and their daughters could not be murderers, no matter the evidence against them, whereas working-­class people and people of color were often easily perceived as murderers. The Innocence Project (2016), for example, has exonerated 337 people, some from death row, of whom a disproportionate percentage are people of color. Throughout our history, tales of murder have been circulated in a variety of forms and voraciously consumed by a public hungry for them. The stories they tell are critical to our social understanding of murder. Victorian novels and the newspapers took for granted the criminality of working-­class men and people of color, as well as “fallen” women, who because of their sexual behaviors (which men might have enacted with impunity) were understood to be capable of any crime, including murder. Today, we often do the same. Take the 1995 case of Susan Smith, who accused an imaginary black attacker of stealing her car with her children inside and then driving it into a lake. It is difficult to

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imagine this situation in the reverse: a black man making this argument about a petite white woman like Smith, who remained free, appearing on talk shows and appealing for the life of her small sons, until her own story fell apart. Our collective cultural shock when we discovered that she was the perpetrator of the crime (in order to rid herself of her children and to pursue an affair) was predicated in large part on our racist sense that a person of color might be savage enough to kill children in order to steal a car and our social story that motherhood is sacred and women do not kill. We then told a new story about Smith, making her sexual behavior a subject of scrutiny (facts that did not change from the time she first told her story) and fitting our assessment to the cultural narrative about sexually promiscuous women’s infanticides. Similarly, Scott Peterson, convicted of the 2002 murder of his pregnant wife, Laci Peterson, and her unborn child, maintained the trust of his in-­laws, the police, and the press for months, though he had carried on several sexual affairs. People rallied behind him and participated in a manhunt for Laci. He had told his most recent lover, Amber Frey, that he had “lost his wife” weeks before Laci had been murdered. Frey felt compassion for him in his first Christmas alone. When she learned that he had been married to the woman who had been found brutally murdered and dismembered, she went to the police and ultimately testified against him in the trial. The stories we tell in our own moment—­well-­grounded in the sexism, racism, and classism from more than a hundred years of these kinds of narratives— ­form our cultural codes for murder. They are fairly simple: If you are poor or a person of color who commits murder, you cannot expect to get away with it if your victim is wealthy or white. 2 If you are someone wealthy and white who murders someone of your own class or below, you must go on coolly and aloofly with your everyday life. If you do so, you will likely remain unsuspected, regardless of your possible motives. 3 If you are a woman, you may not desire or inspire desire in anyone else, as this will become a socially perceived index of a deeper flaw that makes you capable of murder. 4 Once you have committed murder, immediately leave off other explicitly illegal behavior, so as not to attract additional legal attention. Navigating social context makes or breaks the case. (This may sound flippant, but I’m deadly serious.) 1

Silicon Valley billionaire Raveesh Kumra was murdered in his home during a robbery. Accused was a homeless, handicapped African American man, Lukis Anderson, whose DNA was found under Kumra’s fingernail. Though he protested his innocence, Anderson was convicted and went to prison. Anderson

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fit, after all, our story of violence and murder. It took his lawyer years of unpaid work to discover that he had been in an emergency health care facility all night on the night of the murder. She was later able to determine that Anderson’s DNA was transferred from the ambulance crew that had taken him to the hospital to Kumra’s finger by the pulse oximeter used on both men. Constance Kent’s silence and chastity—­she lived in an Anglican nunnery—­could have kept her forever out of prison. In the wake of multiple murders, the illegal and illicit sexual behavior of Dr. Pritchard could render him socially legible as a suspect. Wainwright’s professional standing, good looks, and smooth performance kept him free from suspicion in spite of the damning evidence in the case. The long freedom of these murderers, however, teaches us that the stories we have been telling for well over a hundred years make it hard to see a wealthy, white teenage girl or a respected white man as a murderer. While these few were caught and created a special kind of fascination in disrupting our expectations, we will never know how many have escaped detection by following the rules for murder more closely. In contrast, the racist dehumanization and sexualization of people of color make it easier to fit them into our cultural narratives of perpetrators rather than victims. These are viral stories of murder that are even more contagious than the kind of copycat violence or criminal “training” we already recognize. We have so ingested the narrative of murder that it has come to seem natural. It has taken dozens—­hundreds—­of stories of violence and the murder of black people to begin to challenge the narrative of black people as perpetrators of crimes and to make it possible to imagine them as victims of more powerful white people. The coalescing help of the Black Lives Matter movement called into question the violence of our own narrative of racism. Erin C. Tarver (2014) explains in her analysis of Michael Vick’s dog-­fighting convictions, “The implicit claim, then, is that the contagion of criminality one can inherit from growing up in the ‘ghetto’ results in the pathologising of all those associated with it, through a kind of proximity-­transmission” (279). Perceiving violence as contagious rather than understanding our own prejudices as viral can actually increase prejudice. My argument here aims to reach for a means of understanding how people not only come to know how to murder but know murder at all—­in other words, What can be identified under the rubric of “murder,” and what cannot? Indeed, we often describe the killing of a woman or a lover as a “crime of passion,” an act that is labeled justifiable in some sense because of the context and that is not necessarily a murder at all. We have struggled culturally to begin to see assaults on civilians in war zones by our own soldiers as murder rather than “collateral damage.” In the American South of the post–­Civil War era, white men murdered black men with impunity. The most dangerous contagion is that, across the sea or over a hundred years later, we tell the same stories about

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murder, in which the people who most closely resemble those in power are innocent and those who are poor, brown, or foreign are a threat. Murderers, in our minds, are the people who the mainstream culture sees as enemies of our values, endangering the well-­being of society. These people do not typically include soldiers fighting on our behalf or middle-­class white businessmen. We have often read fiction as inspired by murder cases in the press, but what made them murder cases in the first place and not unfortunate incidents or just acts of violence? This is the form of contagion we do not often articulate and therefore rarely address. The implicit biases that drive our very definition of murder are often dismissed as a part of this process, in spite of the fact that “implicit processes underlie all conscious processing and have been shown to be more valid predictors of top-­of-­the-­head, like-­dislike evaluations when affectively charged cognitions are available and strong” (Enrisen, Lodge, and Taylor 2014, 189). As psychologist Bargh et al. (2012) tells us, “impression formation and stereotyping . . . have efficient and unintentional components (that is, influences that operate outside of one’s conscious awareness) [and this concept] has now become a staple and indispensable construct for the explanation and prediction of almost all psychological phenomena” (593). The stories we tell in our fiction and in our news coverage play a key role in teaching us whether to call those cases murder at all, and this is driven by our social sense of the value of particular groups of human beings and the preservation of structures of power. Murder is not only contagious as a practice. It is contagious in its presumptions. We tell and retell those stories that make sense to us and then read the world around us in the framework of those stories. What is powerful about conceiving of this phenomenon as a function of stories is that it empowers us to change the narrative, as Black Lives Matter and the Innocence Project have done. If social justice activists and the culture at large can recognize the power of stories to make meaning in our world, we can begin to tell the story anew. There is no question that we have begun to conceive of police violence against black people in our culture differently. This is not simply because black men and women were killed—­a problem that has plagued this country since its inception. It is because a movement brought together these cases to tell a new story, one in which “black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise” (Black Lives Matter 2015). Our collective resistance to a racist, classist, homophobic, or sexist narrative of murder can change the world we inhabit, as well as the lives of individuals in it. When we refuse to assume that a Muslim perpetrated a terrorist attack (as only a small portion of the public did when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, by a former white veteran Timothy McVeigh), we begin to tell a different story. When we treat the murder of an African American woman with the same seriousness and concern with which we treat the loss of a wealthy white man, applying the

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same kinds of resources to each case, we begin to tell a different story. When we fight our own prejudicial and often unshakable belief in the absolute innocence of white men and attractive (sexually “pure”) white women and instead pay attention to the evidence, we begin to tell a different story. We must transform the stories we tell to reshape our cultural beliefs about murder and for justice to be done.

References Adee, Sally. 2015. “What to Do When Murder Goes Viral.” New Scientist 227:10–­11. Armstrong, Nancy. 1987. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press. Bargh, John A., Kay L. Schwader, Sarah E. Hailey, Rebecca L. Dyer, and Erica J. Boothby. 2012. “Automaticity in Social-­Cognitive Processes.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16:593–­605. Black Lives Matter. 2015. “Guiding Principles.” http://​blacklivesmatter​.com/​g uiding​ -principles/. Chronicles of Crime and Criminals. [1895]. Toronto: Beaver. Erisen, Cengiz, Milton Lodge, and Charles S. Taber. 2014. “Affective Contagion in Effortful Political Thinking.” Political Psychology 35:187–­206. Follman, Mark, and Becca Andrews. 2015. “The Columbine Effect.” Mother Jones. http://​ www​.motherjones​.com/​politics/​2015/​10/​columbine​-effect​-mass​-shootings​-copycat​-data. Foucault, Michel. (1977) 1995. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Innocence Project, The. n.d. “The Cases.” Accessed March 16, 2016. http://​www​ .innocenceproject​.org/​cases​-false​-imprisonment/​front​-page​#c10​=​published​&​b​_start​=​0​ &​c4​=​Exonerated​+by​+DNA. Mansel, H. L. 1863. “Sensational Novels.” Quarterly Review 113:482–­514. Miller, D. A. 1988. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: University of California Press. National Research Council. 2013. “Contagion of Violence: Workshop Summary.” Forum on Global Violence Prevention, Board on Global Health, Institute of Medicine. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. No Notoriety. n.d. Home Page. Accessed March 16, 2016. www​.nonotoriety​.com. Prisoner, A. 1875. “Colonel Baker and Henry Wainwright in Horsemonger-­Lane Gaol.” Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, October 9, 1875, 238. Sickles, Jason. 2015. “Parents of Colorado Theater Shooting Victim Fear Copycat Massacre.” https://​www​.yahoo​.com/​news/​parents​-of​-a​-colorado​-theater​-shooting​-victim​-fear​ -another​-massacre​-043500512​.html. Tarver, Erin C. 2014. “The Dangerous Individual(’s) Dog: Race, Criminality and the Pit Bull.” Culture, Theory and Critique 55:273–­285. The Times. 1869. “The Shocking Crime Committed Last October at Wood-­Green.” November 25, 1869, 9. Towers, Sherry, Andres Gomez-­Lievano, Maryam Khan, Anuj Mubayi, and Carlos Castillo-­ Chavez. 2015. “Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings.” PLOS One 10:1–­12. Tromp, Marlene. 2000. The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press.

9

Am I a Psychopath? SADIE MOHLER

Discursive Foundations of the Dangerous Individual On the Public Radio Exchange podcast Criminal, the host Phoebe Judge interviews Axton Betz-­Hamilton, a woman who recently determined that her mother was a psychopath. Axton explains, “I went to my doctor just completely freak[ed] out about this and said, ‘Am I at risk? If I am, what do I do?’ and she [the doctor] said, ‘There is no way you have psychopathy.’ And I said, ‘Well how do you know that?’ [ . . . ] and she said, ‘You can’t because you have a severe anxiety disorder and psychopaths don’t feel anxiety’” ( Judge, Spohrer, and Mennel 2016). Within North American culture, the psychopath is understood as a fundamentally aberrant personality pitted against the rest of society. However, as exemplified by Axton and as discussed through my work, we are at a cultural moment where people are pausing to wonder “Am I a psychopath?” The occurrence of this specific question is the catalyst of my curiosity into the discursive history of the psychopathic identity. Through this chapter, I will trace the history of the psychopath as a way to illuminate and problematize the diagnostic category. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s work, I use his theories to deconstruct and unpack the label psychopath. Understanding the history and dubious foundation of this clinical and cultural character allows for the contextualization of the myriad (and paradoxical) ways in which this powerful category is applied today. Finally, by framing the psychopath as a 147

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contagious force, we can reconceive how the personality has garnered such significance and credibility over the last three decades and therefore can consider why this popularity is not only a point of social concern but also a potential subversion of the label’s accumulated power. To trace the psychopath’s history, I will start with Foucault’s work on crime and illness in the 1800s. Foucault discusses the relationship among psychiatry, psychology, and law in his essay “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19th Century Psychiatry.” In his work, he describes the joining of these two disciplines in a process he terms “the psychiatrization of crime.” Through the 1800s, the legal system shifted its attention from a crime as an act to the criminal as an identity, with the person him-­or herself defined as a criminal. With the emergence of the criminal character, courts began to analyze personal history and motives to explain crimes and justify legal sentencing. However, within this new system, the court encountered a problem: there were individuals committing crimes without an identifiable motive. Foucault cites nineteenth-­century case studies in his essay that exemplify these halting legal moments: In Vienna, Catherine Ziegler kills her illegitimate child. On the stand, she explains that her act was the result of an irresistible force, [after Catherine is released from prison,] she declares that it would be better if she were kept there, for she will do it again. Ten months later, she gives birth to a child whom she kills immediately, and she declares at the trial that she became pregnant for the sole purpose of killing her child. She is condemned to death and executed . . . In New England, out in the open fields, Abraham Prescott kills his foster mother with whom he had always gotten along with very well. He goes home and breaks down into tears in front of his foster father, who questions him. Prescott willingly confesses his crime . . . A retired officer who lives a solitary life becomes attached to his landlady’s child. One day, “with absolutely no motive, in the absence of any passion, such as anger, pride or vengeance,” he attacks the child and hits him twice with a hammer. (Foucault 1990, 3–­4)

The existence of such indefinable, unthinkable, and unknowable acts of violence undermined the court’s linear logic and functioning. In an effort to maintain its structure, law called upon psychology to help diagnose these moments, and psychology, in an effort to solidify its credibility and power as a discipline, “invented an entirely fictitious entity, a crime which is insanity, a crime which is nothing but insanity, an insanity which is nothing but crime . . . this entity was called homicidal monomania” (Foucault 1990, 5–­6). Homicidal monomania provided a location to reintegrate such “illogical” moments of deviance; the diagnosis created space for these events to be woven

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back into the pre-­existing psycho-­legal narrative grounded in binaries—­sane and insane, moral and immoral, innocent and criminal. Not only did the creation of the category preserve the contemporary psycho-­legal discourses, but it also solidified the necessity of clinical intervention and further yoked psychology and law. Homicidal monomania embodied the Foucauldian idea of the “dangerous individual,” a character so removed from culture that he or she is impervious to any socialization, a person not just outside social rules but outside of humanity. The dangerous individual does not reside on the fringes of normalcy; rather, the dangerous individual constitutes the defining opposition to normalcy. The identity lives beyond the spectrum of any recognizable behavior, and as such, this monstrous personality occupies a space that can only be contextualized as other. As a result of the character’s erratic “otherness,” the expertise of psychology is needed to identify this person and the rule law to confine him or her. Psychology’s invention of the homicidal monomaniac drew a bold boundary between the safe and the unstable, thus cementing the binary of us, the sane, and them, the insane. The creation of this category and the subsequent polarizing delineation created fertile ground to cultivate fear that there were deeply aberrant and threatening individuals lurking among us capable of violence simply because of, as Ziegler stated, an “irresistible force” (Foucault 1990, 3).

The Dubious “Discovery” of the Psychopath Homicidal monomania was a diagnosis for half a century until it was later replaced by what is legally, psychologically, and culturally recognized as the psychopath (or its variant, the sociopath). The “discovery” of the psychopath—­ and subsequent research supporting the diagnosis—­was not in fact a scientific uncovering of an undiscovered abnormality but a permutation of the Foucauldian dangerous individual, an identity deeply entrenched in psychiatric and legal discourses. In the essay “Deconstructing the Psychopath,” authors Federman, Holmes, and Jacob critically analyze psychopathy as a diagnostic category. The essay asserts that the psychopath is not a clinical reality of the empathetically void person predisposed to violence. Rather, the psychopath is a cultural reality constructed out of shifting discursive contexts of deviance: “By the middle of the 20th century, the term psychopath had become popularly synonymous with evil itself, representing depths of abhorrence and symbolizing the dark side of the human psyche” (Federman, Holmes and Jacob 2009, 48). The psychopath’s representation of pure corruption mandates that people maintain an anxious and vigilant posture and presumes that there is always a looming threat. Homicidal monomaniacs, psychopaths, sociopaths, and dangerous individuals all serve as vessels to propagate the fear that there

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is an insidious moral disease that plagues our society. The homicidal monomaniac, a hybrid of mad behavior cloaked by a façade of sanity, first fractured the belief that an aberrant individual could be detected by a distinguishing phenotype or symptom. By the twenty-­first century, this fracture has turned into a potent fear that there are dangerously insane people who, until they commit a crime, do not appear ill. Throughout the twentieth century, North American psychologists and psychiatrists attempted to clarify the diagnosis. Researchers and clinicians strived to identify specific behaviors and better understand what constitutes a psychopathic person. Most significant is psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley’s book The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues about the So-­Called Psychopathic Personality. First published in 1941 and with five subsequent editions, Cleckley wrote descriptive case studies of individuals with psychopathic personality disorder. Cleckley discusses the ambiguous and indefinable nature of his work, saying, “I have attempted to make clearer my concepts of the psychopath’s confusing and paradoxical disorder. It is not easy to convey this concept, that of a biologic organism outwardly intact, showing excellent peripheral function, but centrally deficient” (1955, 7). Cleckley articulates the inherent struggle of attempting to describe a disease with a paradoxical structure, highlighting the troubled and unstable foundation of the category. In the last two decades, research has moved away from qualitative descriptive efforts like Cleckley’s and focused on attempts to scientifically and empirically validate the diagnostic category. Most significantly, during the 1980s, psychologist Robert Hare studied psychopathic personality disorder within Canadian prisons and, through his research, designed the Psychopathy Checklist—­Revised (PCL-­R), a diagnostic screening instrument (Glass 2011). In a National Public Radio (NPR) interview, Hare explains that the scientific community was lacking a consistent form of measurement for psychopathic behavior, and thus he focused his research on creating a tool to quantify psychopathy. Hare’s PCL-­R consists of twenty diagnostic questions focused on criminal history, childhood behavior, and family life, all of which correspond to certain “psychopathic” personality traits—­for example, lack of empathy, parasitic lifestyle, egocentricity, and manipulation (Glass 2011). Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hare administered the test to prisoners and identified a strong correlation between a high score on the PCL-­R and criminal reconviction. “This was a huge finding,” Hare states. “For years, criminologists had labored to dissect the environmental causes of crime. Then, suddenly, here was the PCL-­R , a personality test  .  .  . that appeared to identify the world’s most serious chronic criminals, the people we really needed to worry about” (Glass 2011). Since the formal publication of the PCL-­R in 1991, the test has been used to do just that: identify the most dangerous, severe criminals.

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Administered in courtrooms and prisons, the checklist is most significantly used to calculate which prisoners are eligible for parole; a “psychopathic” score on the PCL-­R will likely result in parole denial. As explained by NPR’s Alix Spiegel, “This test has incredible power in the American criminal justice system. It’s used to make decisions such as what kind of sentence a criminal gets and whether an inmate is released on parole. It has even been used to help decide whether someone should be put to death” (Spiegel 2011). The PCL-­R has become an incredibly effective tool to make correlations between convictions and psychopathy in order to justify judicial consequences. The psychopath serves to pathologize crime and criminalize pathology, and within this dynamic, the diagnosis has grown into such an expansive label that a large range of socially deviant behaviors can be interpreted as symptomatically psychopathic. Traits listed within Hare’s twenty item Psychopathy Checklist include “glibness/superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-­worth, need for stimulation/proneness to boredom, pathological lying, conning/manipulative, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, callous/lack of empathy, parasitic lifestyle, poor behavioral controls, promiscuous sexual behavior, early behavior problems, lack of realistic long-­term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, failure to accept responsibility for own actions, many short-­term marital relationships, and juvenile delinquency, revocations of conditional release, criminal versatility” (Ronson 2011, 97–­98). The diagnostic labeling of the psychopath did not create a containable aberration; conversely, it produced an amorphous threat that left room for various behaviors to be understood as symptoms. The psychopath stands on the same dubious foundation as all dangerous individuals: “a crime which is nothing but insanity, an insanity which is nothing but crime” (Foucault 1990, 5–­6). Given this coconstitutional relationship, the only “remedy” for the psychopath’s illness is confinement, a literal maintenance of the rigid binary of the sane and the insane. This framework lays bare the social consequences of relying on a diagnosis with a strong propensity for tautology as a tool to guide decision-­making: you are a criminal because you are a psychopath; you are a psychopath because you are a criminal. Within that cyclical explanation, a psychopath can never reform. By the start of the twenty-­first century, psychopath had become an effective label to spread fear and promote exclusion.

The Outbreak of Psychopathy In 2006, clinical psychologist Martha Stout published The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless versus the Rest of Us. Three sets of glaring eyes adorn the cover of Stout’s book, with text below that reads, “1 in 25 ordinary Americans secretly has no conscience and can do anything at all without feeling guilty.

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Who is the devil you know?” (Stout 2006). Without even opening her book, the cover interpolates the reader and articulates its noxious object: the reader—­in danger—­and the sociopath—­the danger. Written in accessible language, her text serves less as psychological research and more as a descriptive handbook informing the public how to detect pathological behavior in order to avoid the pervasive psychopath. Stout’s book is not the only one of its kind. In 2011, former FBI agent Joe Navarro published How to Spot a Psychopath, a twenty-­one-­page informative e-booklet marketed under the description, “Easy to use, intended for the average layperson. You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to use this.” Navarro introduces his text with the incredulity that current descriptions of psychopathy “may be adequate for clinicians, but it leaves the rest of us in a lark. It doesn’t help us properly identify these individuals until their actions are so egregious either we, or someone we know, are victimized” (Navarro 2011). Other works such as Snakes in Suits (Babiak and Hare 2007), Corporate Psychopaths (Boddy 2011), and Without Conscience (Hare 1999) all address the average citizen, the population deemed most vulnerable to the psychopath’s danger. The last text, authored by PCL-­R creator Robert Hare, concludes with an admonitory chapter titled “A Survival Guide,” which lists tips and advice on how to protect oneself from the psychopathic personality. This genre of popular paraprofessional literature not only invites but also sternly warns the public to learn about psychopathy, thereby greatly expanding the breadth and scope of the discourse. In Michael Keesler’s dissertation, “Pop-­Culture Psychopathy: How Media and Literature Exposure Relate to Lay Psychopathy Understanding,” he traces the dissemination of the psychopath through the media and culture, stating how “each year we have seen more professionally authored publications written for the lay consumer . . . less expensive than a professional textbook or collection of research, and written to be understood by anyone regardless of formal psychology education” (2011, 12). Keesler continues, “As the public’s interest for professional information on psychopathy has increased, popular media has also found psychology to be a topic with entertainment value” (2011, 12). The prevalence and popularity of the psychopath within news, media, and culture has spread the psychopath from the psycho-­legal space into the sociopolitical sphere. Popular knowledge subscribes to the same logic: a psychopath’s madness is so dangerous because he is void of restraint, empathy, and conscience. Furthermore, his insanity is threatening to us because he can deceivingly perform normalcy. It is this deceitful performance that justifies the general public’s concern and fear. According to Hare, “people with this personality disorder are fully aware of the consequences of their actions and know the difference between right and wrong, yet they are . . . terrifyingly self-­centered, remorseless, and unable to care about the feelings of others” (Hare 1999, 35). The crux

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of psychopathic discourse hinges on the notion that, while a psychopath might acknowledge a lack of empathy, there is simply no internal capacity to feel concerned. Hare describes psychopaths as “social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations and empty wallets. Completely lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret” (Hare 1999, xi). Articulated as a dual force, a predator and a charmer, these descriptions reflect the psychopath’s political, clinical, and cultural currency, a currency that affords the label a contagious effect. The psychopath has the properties of the most terrifying type of contagion—­once infected, the contaminated person loses the capacity to care. Understood as a rabid psychological state, the psychopath is overcome with an extreme, maniacal, and overzealous self-­ interest. This form of totalizing infection is troubling in both its immunity to dismissal as well as its resistance to the notion of a cure—­the label is so transmittable that, once applied, it permanently taints an entire individual, and thus any behavior, even an effort to recover, can be understood as symptomatic. In Jon Ronson’s popular book on psychopathy, The Psychopath Test, he writes about an interview with Tony, a resident in the Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder Unit at Broadmoor Hospital, a high-­security inpatient psychiatric hospital: “I’m not a psychopath,” he [Tony] said. There was a short silence. “How do you know?” I asked. “They say psychopaths can’t feel remorse,” said Tony. “I feel lots of remorse. But when I tell them I feel remorse, they say psychopaths pretend to be remorseful when they’re not.” Tony paused. “It’s like witchcraft,” he said. “They turn everything upside down.” (2011, 62)

Once labeled a psychopath, there is no conversation of a return to sanity or reform, and as such, the psychopath’s options are either lifetime confinement or death. Understanding the psychopath as a contagion, the lacking clinical definitions cannot hold relevance as a point of criticism; the illness is already so prevalent that we must be alert and equipped with whatever knowledge, even faulty, is available. By the early 2000s, the psychopath was understood to be so infectious that the public was no longer safe to solely rely on the clinical eye for protection; we all must be equipped with the knowledge to identify the psychopaths lurking among us and the sociopath residing just next door—­or,

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FIGURE 9.1  Over the span of two weeks, the artist reproduced the word psychopath nearly

fifty times via scanners, cameras, and copiers to document the inherent mutation through replication. Artist: Sadie Mohler.

as a Huffington Post article is demonstratively titled, we must learn the “5 Ways to Spot the Psychopath in Your Life” (Lefferts 2012). It is no longer a question of if there is a psychopath you know but rather who is already infected.

Contagious Mutations of the Dangerous Individual On October  26, 2010, David, a twenty-­year-­old male, posted to an online forum, “My question is quite short. It is simply: Is there actually any way I can help myself ?” He continued, “To explain, I am a sociopath.” David lists symptomatic personality traits as a justification for his self-­diagnosis: “I am a compulsive liar, a proficient thief, a good manipulator and actor with a sharp tongue, people regularly call me arrogant, I dislike authority, I am constantly compulsive, I used to terrorize my animals as a child.” He proclaims that he is in the midst of a psychological breakdown, and he has turned to the forum to help him (David 2010). David is not an anomaly. Starting in the early 2000s, there was a noticeable trend of people using blogs and online discussion sites to inquire about their identities in regard to psychopathy. Begin to key “Am I a” into Google, and the search engine will likely guess psychopath before you can start typing the diagnosis—­and it will even offer a few suggestions: “Am

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I a psychopath quiz,” “Am I a psychopath test,” or “Am I a psychopath book.” In August 2011, an online user, under the alias “kid who needs help,” submitted a post on Yahoo! Answers titled, “Am I a Psychopath or Sociopath or Narcissist?” The entry is essentially a list of about forty self-­described behaviors and personality traits, including, “I am an amazing liar, I have never been caught in my life for anything, mainly due to my lack of emotion and guilt” (Kid Who Needs Help 2011). Others who have posted similar questions are notably distressed by the potential diagnosis. In a post titled “Am I a Psychopath or Is There a Cure?,” the anonymous poster anxiously explains, “I’m scared that I might be one because the more I research it, the more I flash back to what I have actually done.” He or she concludes dramatically, typing in all caps, “This post is my last and final attempt to see if I can possibly cure myself . . . I would like to feel things . . . IS THERE A CURE FOR PSYCHOPATH DISORDER? OR IF I AM EVEN A PSYCHOPATH? .  .  .  IS THERE A CURE FOR EMOTIONALLY DEAD FOLKS?” (IIxWOLFxII 2010). There are thousands of such online posts, and though worded differently, they each reflect a noticeable trend toward the self as the dangerous individual, with people asking the question “Am I a psychopath?” Within this trend, the psychopath continues to spread. The diagnosis is no longer applied to another but has mutated in a way that the label can be applied to the self—­and within the mutation, there is discursive movement and potential. In September 2011, Robert Hare published an article in Reader’s Digest titled “Are You a Psychopath?” The article features the psychologist’s popular PCL-­R and a scoring guide for readers to calculate their own level of psychopathy (the checklist was subsequently pulled because of copyright issues). Hare’s article calls out the reader to consider his or her own mental stability. The article ironically proceeds to overview his book Without Conscience, which heavily focuses on how a psychopath is relentlessly consumed with his or her own success and thus would not care about his or her condition—­one reason why the psychopath is so scary. Following the discursive reasoning, a psychopath would never be inclined to respond to the question “Am I a psychopath?” In the logic laid out by psychiatry and law, the dangerous individual perpetually remains the other. Articles should propose questions like “Is Your Boyfriend a Psychopath?” and posts should proclaim, “My Friend Is a Sociopath!” However, there has been a bend in the logic, a transformation in the narrative. Within the paradox of self-­diagnosis of psychopathy, there is a mutation and expansion in the discourse. This new contagious momentum breaks the previous cyclical movement—­you are a criminal, so you are mentally ill; you are mentally ill, so you are a criminal. When applied to the self, the psychopath expands in an entirely new direction. This new direction and discursive mutation unsettles the foundational “us versus them” paradigm that first grounded the dangerous

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individual in the nineteenth century. From this unsettled terrain, the discourse of the psychopath starts to fissure and splinter, breaking away from the rigid binary of “other” and “self.”

The Subversive Spread: The Psychopathic “Other” to the Psychopathic “Self” Foucault’s work on self-­identity further illuminates the implications of this discursive shift. In the fall of 1982, Foucault presented a seminar at the University of Vermont titled “Technologies of the Self.” In the two years preceding his death, Foucault began to examine the topics of the self, the subject, and the ways in which people understand themselves as subjects. Foucault makes the important distinction that people are not simply passive subjects molded by external power; rather, they can only see themselves as subjects because of power. In performing “technologies of the self,” people are constantly engaged in the active internalization of power and knowledge that molds their subjecthood. “I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others and in the technologies of individual domination,” Foucault writes, as well as in “the history of how an individual acts upon himself, in the technology of the self ” (Foucault 1988, 19). Foucault died before he could compile his final theories into a book, but since then, academics have worked to assemble and organize his newer theoretical ideas. The text, Technologies of the Self, published in 1988, serves as one of Foucault’s crucial posthumous works on the subject. Foucault explains that his objective is to understand the different ways people develop knowledge about themselves, and he cites biology, psychology, and medicine as sources: “The main point is not to accept this knowledge at face value but to analyze these so-­called sciences as very specific ‘truth-­games’ related to specific techniques that human beings use to understand themselves” (Foucault 1988, 18). The psychopathic identity is constituted by these “truth-­games.” The PCL-­R , Without Conscience, and psychopaths’ frequent parole denial each reveal how the diagnosis follows the particular historical narrative of the dangerous individual. However, self-­diagnosis of psychopathy contradicts this narrative and highlights the fragility of the psychological category and multiplicity of scientific “truth.” With acuity to recognize the existence of multiple truths, various explanations and numerous possibilities for self-­understanding emerge. The reasoning supporting psychopathy’s danger—­and subsequent power—­hinges on the rigid understanding that we identify ourselves as sane so that the dangerous individual remains the threatening “other,” requiring our vigilant attention to psychology’s expertise. Thus when the shift is made to self-­application, it transforms the rigid discourse and reshapes the narrative followed; the psychopath has been appropriated as a

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way to understand the self rather than just the other. Within the mutation of the psychopath, the discourse has proliferated from the diagnosis of the other to a possible feature of the self, presenting us with a radical new potential to move beyond the diagnosis’s troubled discursive history. Many possibilities rise to the surface, as the psychopath shifts, ferments, and inverts when it is applied to the self. The label’s contagiousness has accelerated in a way that erodes its very foundation. Contagion has afforded the psychopath the ability to spread and become a powerful clinical, social, and political entity; however, the relentless spread also created space for the diagnosis to thrive in a contradictory context. As pointed out, the self-­diagnosis of psychopathy is inherently contradictory to the diagnostic narrative: in declaring a psychopathic identity, one is automatically excluded from the subscribed discourse. By questioning “Am I a psychopath?,” one is renouncing the ability to be a psychopath. Thus in declaring such, an individual can independently coordinate the clinical power dynamics—­diagnosis and cure—­all within a singular space. The psychopath’s discursive lineage exists in a symbiotic relation­ ship to normalcy. However, once a person assigns the category to him-­or herself, this coconstitutional logic breaks and the other and the self are held together. A person’s belief that he or she has “caught” psychopathy simultaneously immunizes that person from the illness. Within this paradox of self-­ diagnosis, a remedy is conceived. In confessing an identity as a psychopath, one is not just exempting oneself from the identity but reconfiguring and expanding the discourse. Comprehending the self as a psychopath smudges the line that was originally drawn between the self and the other and allows the diagnostic label to expand across both. The question “Am I a psychopath?” not only reveals the diagnostic emptiness of the label but also its discursive potency; the psychopath is garnering power from self-­diagnosis while simultaneously losing it. The dangerous individual is exploding and imploding. As the psychopath goes into the hands of the self, the diagnosis disconnects from the narrative and begins to reshape. This discursive mutation reminds us of the unstable foundation of the homicidal monomaniac and confirms the ill-­defined, malleable status of the dangerous individual. However, it also affirms the fact that the psychopath remains powerful, even in this new mutated application. We stand at a contradictory moment: the psychopath’s ill-­defined characteristics have allowed him or her to expand into the all-­consuming, contagious category that exists today. However, as the label continues to inflate, it becomes increasingly hollow. Within this discursive moment, more than ever before, the troubling consequence of continuing to apply such an empty category in hopes of awareness comes to light. Whether applied to another or oneself, the “psychopath” diagnosis creates solipsistic logic and produces little knowledge or self-­understanding (Why do I do bad things all the time? Because I am a psychopath. Why am

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I a psychopath? Because I do bad things all the time). This logic’s topography leads us down a vacant loop that conceals more about human complexity than it could possibly reveal. The myriad possibilities, multitude of complexities, and meaningful nuances are shoved away as the singular rationale moves along this cyclical opaque path protected from critical examination. The label psychopath, a hazardous synecdoche, affords a totalizing effect to a singular moment of deviance. One act of perversion is understood to infect and taint an entire person (Foucault 1988). When this label appears, either to help understand others or the self, it results in a reductionary comprehension of behavior. By rationalizing abnormality through the dangerous individual, a dull understanding of deviation emerges. Hurried to contextualize the “indescribable” deviant, we have found ourselves caught in a shallow whirlpool of events that have already been present for some time. Merely a myopic lens to understand the world, the psychopath diagnosis dangerously distracts from the ability to discern meaningful answers to questions about human behavior. As a result of this nearsighted capacity, the psychopath has generated a vigorous fear of others and, most recently, the self. The psychopath has become, most prominently, a contagion, and in its contagious state, it has been problematically bolstered in its spread, just as it has created space for contradictory, paradoxical, and subversive utilizations. Through all its iterations, the psychopath has been exhausted. Since its conception in the nineteenth century, diagnosis has yet to provide deep and fruitful insight into humanity but rather has reified deviance and pathologized crime. The emergence and prevalence of the question “Am I a psychopath?”—­ discursively and in its “viral” form online—­begs the larger cultural question: How can we develop more nuanced, complex, and comprehensive ways to understand transgression?

References Babiak, Paul, and Robert D. Hare. 2007. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. Repr. ed. New York: Harper Business. Boddy, C. 2011. Corporate Psychopaths: Organizational Destroyers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bundy, McGeorge. 1990. Interview by Robert MacNeil. MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. Public Broadcasting System, February 7, 1990. Cleckley, Hervey M. 1955. The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues about the So Called Psychopathic Personality. 3rd ed. St. Louis: C. V. Mosby. David. 2010. “I Am a Sociopath. Can I Ever Learn to Love?” Ask Dr. Robert. Accessed October 24, 2011. http://​askdrrobert​.dr​-robert​.com/​sociopath​.html. Federman, Cary, Dave Holmes, and Jean Daniel Jacob. 2009. “Deconstructing the Psychopath: A Critical Discursive Analysis.” Cultural Critique 72 (1): 36–­65. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

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Foucault, Michel. 1990a. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–­1984. Edited by Lawrence Kritzman. Rev. ed. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1990b. “The Dangerous Individual.” In Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–­1984, edited by Lawrence Kritzman, 125–­151. Rev. ed. New York: Routledge. Glass, Ira. 2011. “The Psychopath Test.” By Alix Spiegel. This American Life. National Public Radio, May 27, 2011. Hare, Robert. 2011. “Are You a Psychopath?” Reader’s Digest Canada, September 2011. http://​www​.readersdigest​.ca. Hare, Robert D. 1999. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths among Us. New York: Guilford. IIxWOLFxII. 2010. “Am I a Psychopath or Is There a Cure?” Uncommon Knowledge, March 22, 2010. http://​www​.uncommonforum​.com/​viewtopic​.php​?t​=​56087. Judge, Phoebe, Lauren Spohrer, and Eric Mennel. 2016. Interview by Phoebe Judge. Criminal. Public Radio Exchange, October 7, 2016. Keesler, Michael. 2013. “Pop-­Culture Psychopathy: How Media and Literature Exposure Relates to Lay Psychopathy Understanding.” PhD diss., Drexel University. Kid Who Needs Help. 2011. “Am I a Psychopath or Sociopath or a Narcissist?” Yahoo! Answers. https://​answers​.yahoo​.com/​question/​index​?qid​=​20110617092203AAQVWPl. Myhrvold, Nathan. 1997. “Confessions of a Cybershaman.” Slate. http://​www​.slate​.com/​ CriticalMass/​97​-06​-12/​CriticalMass​.asp. Navarro, Joe. 2011. How to Spot a Psychopath. Los Gatos: Smashwords. Kindle Edition. Ronson, Jon. 2011. The Psychopath Test: A Journey through the Madness Industry. New York: Riverhead Books. Spiegel, Alix. 2011. “Can a Test Really Tell Who’s a Psychopath?” All Things Considered. National Public Radio, May 26, 2011. Stout, Martha. 2006. The Sociopath Next Door. New York: Harmony.

10

Cult of the Penis Male Fragility and Phallic Frenzy MICHELLE ASHLEY GOHR

Introduction Men—­and, more broadly, male-­dominated societies—­generally react defensively when faced with concepts and images that are contrary to their own gendered reality. This defensiveness is, in part, acted out by inundating society with phallic imagery. The dominant (i.e., patriarchal) culture succeeds in concealing femininity and reinforcing masculinity (and the power associated with it) through symbolic order. In this chapter, I explore the history of phallic imagery, specifically “dick pics.” Drawing from evolutionary biology (i.e., viral replication), feminist theories such as the notion of hegemonic masculinity (Campbell 2000; Potts 2000), and cultural theories on symbolic systems and symbolic order (Gallop 1985), I discuss how this imagery and symbolic representation have resulted in misogynistic attitudes and practices as well as their contemporary manifestations. While this symbolic order has historically manifested in a variety of forms, in contemporary society, one prominent example is the transmission of “dick pics” across social media platforms and through mobile technologies. Dick pics, as the name suggests, are most often self-­ taken photos of a man’s own penis, which are then, often without invitation, 160

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sent to women through social media or mobile devices (Vitis and Gilmour 2016; Salter 2015). Although this definition only broadly describes the context in which dick pics occur, they can take many forms and often function to reinforce a very specific symbolic order of hegemonic masculinity. As such, dick pics symbolically represent a deep-­seated fear about the loss of (societal and political) privilege and power and the idea that failed masculinity and/or femininity is transmissible (contagious) and dangerous. Unlike the unsolicited and frequent sending of dick pics, the presence of yonic imagery (what we could call a “vulva vignette” found often in artistic depictions of fruits or flowers or, by contrast, female mythical monsters) disrupts this phallocentric power and thus is often met with violent and vulgar backlash that seeks to erase and demonize not only female genitalia but femininity or femaleness altogether. Examples of such backlash can be found within myths and folktales of predominantly patriarchal cultures throughout history. The myth of vagina dentata, as one example, conveys the idea that women harbor hidden teeth inside their vaginas that are used to physically castrate men. As a result, those cultures in which this myth was most prevalent (Russian, Indian, Samoan, New Zealander, Native American, the Ainu of Japan, etc.) manifested traditions and festivals celebrating the heroic men of the stories who “cured” the affected women by using violent and manipulative means (e.g., stabbing out the teeth with blades; Gohr 2013). Such myths continue to influence the social attitudes and understandings of people within these cultures, so it comes as no surprise that the myth of vagina dentata can be linked to attitudes surrounding rape and sexual assault and practices that seek to control female sexuality such as FGM (female genital mutilation; Raitt 1980). My central claim in this chapter is that phallocentric power and privilege serves as an emotional contagion (i.e., a socially infectious belief and attitude) throughout modern culture, which disrupts and suppresses efforts to value or celebrate not only yonic imagery and impulses but by extension women and femininity (Plummer and McCann 2007; Swan 2008; Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson 1994). While there is a prolific history of female demonization globally and historically, I argue that phallic obsession and frank phallic worship directly derive from the fragility of masculinity and the threat that the vagina—­or, more specifically, public images of the vulva—­poses to existing power structures.

Brief History of Phallic Symbolism and Gendered Mythology Globally, patriarchal cultures are overwhelmed with phallocentric imagery and symbolism, from more overt and deliberate celebrations, such as Kanamara Matsuri in Japan, to subtle renditions, such as the xenomorph in Ridley

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Scott’s Alien film franchise. Phallic imagery pervades architecture (Greenbie 1982; Wainwright 2009), popular culture (Ostberg 2010; Trujillo 2000; Jones 1994; Lehman 1998; Derose 2005), art (Monick 1987; Wescott 1962; Mattelaer 2010; Turnbull 1978), advertising (Schroeder and Borgerson 1998; Berger 2015; Messner and De Oca 2005), religion (Leach 1958; Czaja 1974; Delaney 1994), and our everyday lives cross-­culturally, historically, and globally (Keuls 1993; Thompson 2004; Stanovsky 1998; Stephens 2007). As a result, “men are indoctrinated into phallocentric discourse, through the infusion of corporeality and phallic culture” (Potts 2000, 87). For example, as a broader push in the nineteenth century to distinguish the female body from the (default) male body, Cambridge researcher Walter Heape wrote a hyperbolic and violent explanation of menstruation, in which he argued that it “would seem hardly possible to heal satisfactorily without the aid of surgical treatment” (Tomlinson 2010, 148). This argument established a broader societal understanding that because women’s bodies functioned counter to the more “stable” male bodies, women were unfit for public life and could not possibly manage to be rational human beings (Gervais 2012). In contrast, early Greeks considered the vagina merely an “inside out penis.” While not as violently motivated, the Greek belief in the vagina as an “inside out penis” reinforces the cultural ideology that maleness/men are the “factory default” state of being, while women are merely poor or backward copies of men and thus less deserving of equal treatment. In many ways, the sex determination of intersexed infants still functions in this way. To determine the sex of an intersexed infant, doctors base the decision on whether the genitalia is a “good enough penis” that can “function normally during intercourse”; otherwise, it becomes a vagina regardless of shape, size, or other factors (Kessler 1990). Such prominent societal myths, which are often counter to actual biological truths, have influenced our understanding and performance of gender and, by extension, the importance that most global cultures place on bodies as reduced to their sexual parts. First, let us consider the pervasive idea that men are physically, emotionally, and intellectually stronger than women in order to frame phallic symbolism as a mechanism to reinforce the myth of masculinity through subversion of biological truths (Courtenay 2000; Iacuone 2005). According to a study published in the British Medical Journal, “The human male is, on most measures, more vulnerable than the female. Part of the explanation is the biological fragility of the male fetus, which is little understood and not widely known” (Kraemer 2000, 1). Contrary to popular belief, males may be more biologically and emotionally fragile than females. Under this system, both males and females are disadvantaged in very serious ways because these “cultural beliefs about gender function as part of the rules of the game, biasing the behaviors, performances, and evaluations . . . in systematic ways” (Ridgeway et al. 2004, 510). In other words, males are not stronger

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than females, as our culture perpetually reinforces, and they are likely more fragile than females starting as early as conception. Even after birth, social and cultural attitudes that regard masculinity as naturally reckless and violent (as perpetuated through the media) significantly decrease the longevity of males (Kraemer 2000; Regan and Partridge 2013; Stanistreet et al. 2005). Similarly, male genitalia itself, although often a symbolic representation of power and health, is by contrast highly fragile as a function of existing externally. This fragility not only applies to males biologically but also symbolically. On the other hand, females have shown to be historically powerful, not just in terms of biological robustness in utero but also in their defiance or resistance to sociopolitical adversity in areas such as political disenfranchisement, lack of legal recourse, and property ownership (Rowbotham 2014). To begin to explain this seemingly conflicting logic, biological anthropologist Agustín Fuentes (2013) argues that, despite the fact that there is no biological basis for the social disparity between genders, our society, for some reason, still “associates the penis with social power, and worth” (para. 1). For example, dick pics are highly representative of the idea that our current culture not only values but places immeasurable worth on the penis, especially in contrast to the treatment of images of female genitalia: “Digital images of bodies circulate online in a manner that reinforces gender inequalities, as the public feminine body is conflated with pornography in contrast to the range of meanings that can append to the public masculine body” (Salter 2015, 2). This represents a glaring disconnect between the biological realities of what it means to have a penis and sociocultural assumptions. Annie Potts (2000) states, “The very sexualization of bodies—­that is, the differentiation of bodies into two types, male and female—­is not based on anatomical differences per se, but on a division created within/by phallocentric discourse; a division represented by presence or absence of the phallus” (86). Fuentes (2013) further argues that “the phallus fallacy, the ubiquitous focus on the penis in popular media and culture, may be acting to reinforce social and gender inequities,” yet it “is not compulsory due to evolutionary or biological realities and thus reflects not our nature, but our ability to superficially use aspects of biology to reinforce, or enforce, patterns of social power.” (para. 12) By focusing societal attention on the phallus as a symbolic representation of masculinity and maleness, and by subsequently invoking a biological “reality” in order to legitimate this claim, patriarchal culture can simultaneously justify and reinforce the position of men. Tracy Rosenthal (2016) has argued that “for centuries, at-­birth gender assignments have violently enforced a binary schema on a continuum of genital cues. What modernism added to the farce of gender was the absurd idea that masculinity could exist as a rational quality on a scale, which makes some ‘more men’ than others, and it proliferated the even more absurd idea that that ‘more’ could be marked by the visual cue of a larger

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FIGURE 10.1  Marginalia from a fourteenth-­century

copy of “Roman de la Rose” depicts a nun plucking penises from a phallus tree, which she collects in a basket (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS. Fr. 25526, f. 106v).

cock” (para. 7). Although phallic symbolism (in its varying forms and states) functions as a social tool to legitimize the sociocultural standing and significance of men through the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity (Trujillo 2000; Potts 2000; Campbell 2000), why then does such symbology have such impact, not just today, but throughout much of human history?

Modes of Spread: Phallic Imagery as a Viral Infection A closer look at viral replication as a metaphor for emotional contagion and socialization can help address the question of why phallic worship has remained strongly embedded within global cultures. Specifically, proviruses (a virus genome that is physically integrated into the DNA of a host cell) are able to infect, and even pass on infection to descendants at the genetic level (Belshaw et al. 2004). Many of the beliefs and “truths” that we understand today result from thousands of years of transmission and reinvention through oral and written traditions, which in turn informs our socialization. Our society has constructed the human body (as an extension of our symbolic understanding of gender) as a fantasy, yet people learn to see many of these harmful cultural beliefs and practices through discourses of “nature” and “the natural.” Gamergate (an online harassment campaign against women in video gaming), revenge pornography (nonconsensual posting of sexual images or videos of women and girls online), and gendertrolling (online gendered sexual threats and slurs; Mantilla 2015) are all excellent examples of how threats to

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symbolic understanding of gender (such as women asserting their opinions freely online) engender a violent and virulent response from those benefiting from the current social order (i.e., white heterosexual cis men). For example, following the Gamergate controversy and harassment campaign in August 2014, numerous women in the video game industry known for their outspoken feminist commentary such as Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, and Anita Sarkeesian were targeted with rape and death threats. An email to Utah State University threatened that a “Montreal massacre style attack will be carried out,” a reference to a 1989 university shooting in which a male gunman killed fourteen female students while yelling that he hated feminists, resulted in the cancelation of a talk to be given by Sarkeesian (Curry 2014). Similarly, Brianna Wu, a female game developer, was tweeted rape and death threats such as Ian Miles Cheong’s “I’m going to murder you both and fuck your dead corpses” (Curry 2014). The perceived threat to men in the gaming industry showcases responses to symbolic attacks on hegemonic masculinity. Responses to such perceived threats are wildly infectious within online communities (Mantilla 2015). This consistency in gender-­based violence—­all too often focused on femaleness as represented through genitalia (e.g., revenge porn, rape)—­reflects deeper institutionalized and cultural beliefs that genitals determine one’s gender, power, and status. Threats are directed at, and experienced through, genitals. Not surprisingly, cyber harassment disproportionately affects women, while both revenge porn and sexting carry substantially higher negative social consequences for girls and women (Franks 2011). In other words, while men like Anthony Weiner—­who was involved in a sexting scandal during his time serving in the U.S. House of Representatives and even continued such behavior following his resignation—­ can experience relatively few consequences for their actions, women have suffered incredibly violent misogynistic threats to their lives simply for discussing these issues publicly. Instances such as Anthony Weiner’s sexting scandal have had far steeper consequences for women involved and uninvolved in the case than it has for the disgraced politician. Reporting on the scandal further victimized the girls involved, as seen through the publication of an open letter by one of the victims, and others argue that the scandal even cost Hillary Clinton the presidency (Prestigiacomo 2016). Conveniently, the concept of contagion, or “going viral,” now allows for quick transmission of cultural symbolism as an emotional contagion (Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson 1994) within the context of a technologically pervasive landscape. Trending and “going viral” carries immense importance and a particular kind of power (in the form of groupthink) within online cultures. Because of the heightened sociocultural standing of men and their symbolic representation (the phallus), dick pics are “shared” widely and frequently,

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moving at a rapid pace across technologies and media platforms. More than that, those who share dick pics believe that these phallic selfies are actually wanted by others: “As an index, the dick pic registers not only the sender’s body, but also the relationship between sender and receiver, and the larger system in which the dick pic is exchanged. What emerge [sic] are not just tried and true tokens of patriarchy, but also a patriarchal system of capitalist circulation that operates constantly without our consent” (Rosenthal 2016, para. 16). In a study on adolescent sexting, Salter (2015) illustrated that women and girls are often expected to “deal” with dick pics as a normal part of internet use. That expectation “[obscures] the harassing and coercive dimensions of sending an unwanted ‘dick pic’ to a girl who was positioned instead as just ‘unlucky’ rather than victimized” (Salter 2015, 11; Vitis and Gilmour 2016). Such disguised and internalized misogynist expressions are integrated into our culture as a “natural” or “accepted” reality (i.e., something women and girls “just deal with”) rather than being recognized as acts performed to maintain order and reinforce the existing power structures. Indeed, nonconsensual sending of dick pics exists along a continuum of rape and sexual abuse but rarely garners serious attention as a form of gendered violence. Within these contexts of fabricated reality, women are positioned as agents upon which heteronormative masculinity must be performed using newly available technologies as modes of spread (Hall et al. 2012; Ringrose et al. 2013). The absurdity of these assumptions can only be laid bare through an imagined reversal; the mere idea of unwanted “vulva pics” circulated similarly and spread as an assumed mode of dominance seems funny or strange. It is difficult for us to imagine a male gamer being harassed by women sending unsolicited images of angry, swollen vulvas in response to him merely being male or having masculine qualities in an online game or threatening him with abusive slurs like “suck my clit.” Alternatively, we rarely see vulvas carved into desks, marked on bathroom stalls, or drawn on the cheeks and foreheads of sleeping or passed out fraternity pledges. We have difficulty seriously imagining these situations because our society is coded to view penises as dominant, powerful forces and vulvas as the direct contrast. However, while we can point to the use of dick pics today to illustrate the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity, using a phallic display to intimidate or reinforce power structures is not unique to our current time and culture (Tziallas 2015; Vitis and Gilmour 2016; Gardiner 2012). For example, ancient Pompeiian “graffiti” (Harvey 2006) frequently depicted “penis as power” imagery akin to dick pics. Similarly, medieval manuscript marginalia is well known to feature exaggerated artistic dick pics well before the invention of Snapchat (Mattelaer 2010), and the mortal remains of King Tutankhamun’s mummified and erect penis reflect sociopolitical attitudes about symbolic masculinity for ancient Egyptians (Williams 2014). In short, that which we

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understand to be the “natural order” is a socially constructed fantasy passed down as a “biological” truth to maintain male dominance.

Masculine Fragility and Hypermasculinity Stereotypical masculinity is actually defined by the idea that it is inherently fragile, and this fragility often results in hypermasculine behaviors and sometimes intense cultural overcompensation. In other words, “boys and men harbor great insecurity about their male credentials. This insecurity exists because maleness is equated with masculinity; but the latter is a figment of our collective, patriarchal, surplus-­repressive imaginations” (Kaufman 1987, 587). Consequently, men and boys internalize these oppressive messages regarding this “imaginary” masculinity and subsequently outperform one another in increasingly exaggerated ways. Masculine fragility increases rather than decreases with power and privilege, resulting in a state of failed masculinity in which men are also punished by a patriarchal system that privileges only certain forms of masculinities (Messner and De Oca 2005). The more patriarchal a culture is, the more it overtly overcompensates for this fragility. The disproportionate privilege allowed to men, especially powerful men, in the public sphere surrounding discussion and vindication of their genital exhibition is perhaps best summed up through the 2016 Republican primary debates, in which Marco Rubio and Donald Trump discussed the size of their penises. During the Republican presidential primary debate on March 3, 2016, Donald Trump, in response to a comment by Marco Rubio stated, “And, he referred to my hands—­‘if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee” (Mccrum 2016). This overarching cultural attitude that the broader culture and society as a whole must protect and shelter masculinity pervades all aspects of our social system and is constantly reinforced through our cultural products. Thus it can be argued that masculinity becomes more fragile when under greater threat. The longer cultures celebrate masculinity, the more sociopolitical fragility of maleness will also increase, which in turns engenders an ever-­larger push to promote masculinity and maintain the current societal momentum. Hand-­ wringing by conservatives who believe culture has fallen into immoral chaos (usually as a direct result of threats to masculinity by overt displays of femininity) only serves to further reiterate this point. The trending Twitter hashtag #MasculinitySoFragile is an excellent example of the direct relation­ship between fragility and threatened masculinity (Pittman 2015). For example, unnecessary gendering of products meant to remove “stigma” of a particular product being “too girly” or feminine for a man to use is hugely pervasive in contemporary American culture. #MasculinitySoFragile and its associated

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blogs has served to provide important commentary and shed light on products such as the “man grenade bath blaster,” a bath bomb (compact ball of ingredients that effervesces when wet) shaped like a hand grenade and Hero Clean’s Ultra Liquid Dish Soap, which is “built for men” and “makes great soapy water” (Bailey 2015). The fragility of masculinity can be exploited to sell dish soap because engaging in work viewed as “women’s work” is powerful enough to ruin masculinity in its current iteration. However, while it is easy to point to the simple gendering of products as an illustration of the fragility of masculinity, such fragility can manifest in more nefarious ways as well. While the hashtag was meant to increase societal awareness regarding the physical and emotional consequences of male privilege and masculinity and its damaging effects on both men and women, it was instead received as “male bashing” by “feminazis.” For example, while some responses misconstrued the notion of masculinity with being a male—­such as @Mechof JusticeWZ, who tweeted, “I challenge any female tweeting unironically with #MasculinitySoFragile to last three rounds against me in a fight. We’ll see who’s fragile”—­many other users resorted immediately to violence, such as @cgrgry’s comment that “#MasculinitySoFragile any Bitches this Uses this HashTag can Suck My Dick you #FeministFuck” (Futrelle 2015). As evidenced through such harsh, immediate, and often uninformed backlash, male fragility and the resulting consequences of such threats to masculinity may become more prominent or triggered by societal changes or shifts that threaten to diminish male societal power and control. These consequences include a defensive and aggressive insistence on stereotypical masculine qualities and reinforcement of the inherent “correctness” of these qualities through our cultural products (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). This reinforcement has been carried throughout human history via our sociocultural heritage and continually promotes heteronormative, hypermasculine behaviors in spheres such as sports, gaming, war, Hollywood, advertising, and even gay subcultures; “After all, media does not only reflect cultural norms, but can and does transform social reality” (Ben-­Zeev 2012, 59). We can easily point to examples of hypermasculinity in advertising campaigns such as Old Spice, Axe Body Spray, perfume and alcohol ads, and even McDonald’s ads that read, “Quarter pounder? I barely knew ’er.” Similarly, these spheres reinforce this dominant cultural attitude by not only promoting but also encouraging and rewarding physical strength, aggression, competitiveness, and (hetero)sexuality, as illustrated directly by blatant and often violent exclusion of women and women’s participation in these arenas. Thus hypermasculinity has some bizarre parallels to the biological hypothesis of “runaway ornament diversity,” which posits that males in some species are so overly ornamented in order to attract mates that they sacrifice

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functionality and survivability (Pomiankowski and Iwasa 1998). When considering the paradoxical fragility of contemporary masculinity, men are sacrificing survivability to attain perceived power and status within society, much like a peacock (Gardiner 2012). This connection is especially evident in phallomorphic weaponry: “The connection between men and weapons often takes on highly sexualized characteristics. The notion of a sword, a gun or a nuclear missile being a phallic symbol or a penile extension has become something of a cliché” (Myrttinen 2003, 39). Not only does our culture reinforce the patriarchal heterosexual imperative via imperialist weaponry, but it also makes a clear connection to violent misogynist rhetoric that male bodies—­and, more specifically, the penis—­are weapons. “The violent strand of masculinity, however, not only sees weapons as phallic extensions, as female sex objects or fetishes of male prowess, but also sees the body itself as a weapon” (Myrttinen 2003, 40). Although “idealized accounts of penis size—­a bodily feature that plays a crucial role in how masculinity is constructed today—­gets produced and reproduced through advertising and popular culture,” the penis’s association with violence further problematizes the dick pic (Ostberg 2010, 45). In phallic imagery throughout history, penises are enshrined, worshiped, celebrated, sculpted, entombed, exaggerated, constructed, displayed, and inherited; it thus comes as no surprise that cultures who celebrate phalluses in these ways in turn experience significant viral misogyny over generations, resulting in a system that privileges males at the expense of females. While there are many ways that patriarchy establishes and maintains dominance, transmission of power through cultural heritage and symbolic phallic imagery is one of the most dangerous and pervasive of these methods. Ultimately, by looking at the interwoven dimensions of evolutionary biology, feminist theory, cultural studies, and the modes and spread of contagion, dick pics and their roots in phallic worship shed light on the pervasive qualities of gendered power imbalances and their (deadly) consequences.

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Berger, Arthur Asa. 2015. Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture: Advertising’s Impact on American Character and Society. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Campbell, Hugh. 2000. “The Glass Phallus: Pub(lic) Masculinity and Drinking in Rural New Zealand.” Rural Sociology 65 (4): 562–­581. Connell, R. W., and J. W. Messerschmidt. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity Rethinking the Concept.” Gender and Society 19 (6): 829–­859. Courtenay, Will H. 2000. “Constructions of Masculinity and Their Influence on Men’s Well-­ Being: A Theory of Gender and Health.” Social Science and Medicine 50 (10): 1385–­1401. Curry, Colleen. 2014. “Violent Threats against Women Are Getting Even Worse in the Gamergate Controversy.” Vice News. Accessed October 15, 2014. https://​news​.vice​ .com/​article/​violent​-threats​-against​-women​-are​-getting​-even​-worse​-in​-the​-gamergate​ -controversy. Czaja, Michael. 1974. Gods of Myth and Stone: Phallicism in Japanese Folk Religion. New York: Weatherhill. Delaney, Carol. 1994. “Untangling the Meanings of Hair in Turkish Society.” Anthropological Quarterly 67:159–­172. Derose, Maria. 2005. “Redefining Women’s Power through Feminist Science Fiction.” Extrapolation 46 (1): 66–­89. Franks, Mary Anne. 2011. “Unwilling Avatars: Idealism and Discrimination in Cyberspace.” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 20:224–­261. Fuentes, Agustín. 2013. “The Phallus Fallacy.” Psychology Today, July 15, 2013. https://​www​ .psychologytoday​.com/​blog/​busting​-myths​-about​-human​-nature/​201307/​the​-phallus​-fallacy. Futrelle, David. 2015. “The 10 Most Ridiculous Responses to the #MasculinitySoFragile Hashtag.” We Hunted the Mammoth (blog). September 25, 2015. http://​www​ .wehuntedthemammoth​.com/​2015/​09/​24/​the​-10​-most​-ridiculous​-responses​-to​-the​ -masculinitysofragile​-hashtag/. Gallop, J. 1985. Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gardiner, Judith Kegan. 2012. “Female Masculinity and Phallic Women—­Unruly Concepts.” Feminist Studies 38 (3): 597–­624. Gervais, Sarah J., Theresa K. Vescio, Jens Förster, Anne Maass, and Caterina Suitner. 2012. “Seeing Women as Objects: The Sexual Body Part Recognition Bias.” European Journal of Social Psychology 42 (6): 743–­753. Gohr, Michelle A. 2013. “Do I Have Something in My Teeth? Vagina Dentata and Its Manifestations within Popular Culture.” In The Moral Panics of Sexuality, edited by Breanne Fahs, Mary L. Dudy, and Sarah Stage, 27–­43. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Greenbie, Barrie B. 1982. “The Landscape of Social Symbols.” Landscape Research 7 (3): 2–­6. Hall, P. Cougar, Joshua H. West, and Emily McIntyre. 2012. “Female Self-­Sexualization in MySpace​.com Personal Profile Photographs.” Sexuality and Culture 16 (1): 1–­16. Harvey, Brian. 2006. “Graffiti from Pompeii.” Pompeiana. http://​www​.pompeiana​.org/​ Resources/​Ancient/​Graffiti​%20from​%20Pompeii​.htm. Hatfield, Elaine, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson. 1994. Emotional Contagion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iacuone, David. 2005. “‘Real Men Are Tough Guys’: Hegemonic Masculinity and Safety in the Construction Industry.” Journal of Men’s Studies 13 (2): 247–­266. Jones, Amelia. 1994. “Dis/playing the Phallus: Male Artists Perform Their Masculinities.” Art History 17 (4): 546–­584. Kaufman, Michael. 1987. “The Construction of Masculinity and the Triad of Men’s Violence.” In Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by Men on Pleasure, Power, and Change, edited by Michael Kaufman, 1–­29. Toronto: Oxford University Press.

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Kessler, S. 1990. “The Medical Construction of Gender: Case Management of Intersexed Infants.” Signs 16 (1): 3–­26. Keuls, Eva C. 1993. The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kraemer, Sebastian. 2000. “The Fragile Male.” BMJ: British Medical Journal 321 (7276): 1609–­1612. Leach, Edmund Ronald. 1958. “Magical Hair.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 88 (2): 147–­164. Lehman, Peter. 1998. “In an Imperfect World, Men with Small Penises Are Unforgiven the Representation of the Penis/Phallus in American Films of the 1990s.” Men and Masculinities 1 (2): 123–­137. Mantilla, Karla. 2013. “Gendertrolling: Misogyny Adapts to New Media.” Feminist Studies 39 (2): 563–­570. Mattelaer, J. J. 2010. “The Phallus Tree: A Medieval and Renaissance Phenomenon.” Journal of Sexual Medicine 7:846–­851. Mccrum, Kristie. 2016. “Naked Picture of Donald Trump with ‘Small Penis’ Is Removed from Facebook.” Mirror. Accessed March 11, 2016. http://​www​.mirror​.co​.uk/​news/​world​ -news/​naked​-picture​-donald​-trump​-small​-7536775. Messner, M. A., and J. M. De Oca. 2005. “The Male Consumer as Loser: Beer and Liquor Ads in Mega Sports Media Events.” Signs 30 (3): 1879–­1909. Monick, Eugene. 1987. Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine. Toronto: Inner City Books. Myrttinen, Henri. 2003. “Disarming Masculinities.” Women, Men, Peace, and Security 4:37–­46. Ostberg, Jacob. 2010. “Thou Shalt Sport a Banana in Thy Pocket: Gendered Body Size Ideals in Advertising and Popular Culture.” Marketing Theory 10 (1): 45–­73. Pittman, Taylor. 2015. “The Reaction to Twitter Movement about Masculinity Is Exactly Why It’s So Important.” Huffington Post. Accessed September 23, 2015. http://​www​.huffingtonpost​.com/​entry/​masculinity​-so​-fragile​-hashtag​ _5602d4cae4b0fde8b0d0bdee. Plummer, David, and Pol Dominic McCann. 2007. “Girls’ Germs: Sexuality, Gender, Health and Metaphors of Contagion.” Health Sociology Review 16 (1): 43–­52. Pomiankowski, Andrew, and Yoh Iwasa. 1998. “Runaway Ornament Diversity Caused by Fisherian Sexual Selection.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95 (9): 5106–­5111. Potts, Annie. 2000. “‘The Essence of the Hard-­On’: Hegemonic Masculinity and the Cultural Construction of Erectile Dysfunction.” Men and Masculinities 3 (1): 85–­103. Prestigiacomo, Amanda. 2016. “15-­Year-­Old Sexting Victim of Anthony Weiner Blasts FBI in Open Letter.” Daily Wire. Accessed November 3, 2016. http://​www​.dailywire​.com/​news/​ 10481/​15​-year​-old​-sexting​-victim​-anthony​-wiener​-blasts​-amanda​-prestigiacomo. Raitt, Jill. 1980. “The Vagina Dentata and the Immaculatus Uterus Divini Fontis.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48:415–­431. Regan, Jennifer C., and Linda Partridge. 2013. “Gender and Longevity: Why Do Men Die Earlier than Women? Comparative and Experimental Evidence.” Best Practice and Research Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism 27 (4): 467–­479. Ridgeway, Cecilia L., and Shelley J. Correll. 2004. “Unpacking the Gender System a Theoretical Perspective on Gender Beliefs and Social Relations.” Gender and Society 18 (4): 510–­531. Ringrose, J., L. Harvey, R. Gill, and S. Livingstone. 2013. “Teen Girls, Sexual Double Standards and ‘Sexting’: Gendered Value in Digital Image Exchange.” Feminist Theory 14 (3): 305–­323.

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Rosenthal, Tracy Jeanne. 2015. “Towards a Theory of the Dick Pic (NSFW).” Rhizome. Accessed February 25, 2015. http://​rhizome​.org/​editorial/​2015/​feb/​25/​towards​-theory​ -dick​-pic/. Rowbotham, Sheila. 2014. Women, Resistance and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World. New York: Pantheon Books. Salter, Michael. 2015. “Privates in the Online Public: Sex(ting) and Reputation on Social Media.” New Media and Society 18 (11): 1–­17. Schroeder, Jonathan E., and Janet L. Borgerson. 1998. “Marketing Images of Gender: A Visual Analysis.” Consumption, Markets and Culture 2 (2): 161–­201. Stanistreet, Debbi, Clare Bambra, and Alex Scott-­Samuel. 2005. “Is Patriarchy the Source of Men’s Higher Mortality?” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 59 (10): 873–­876. Stanovsky, Derek. 1998. “Fela and His Wives: The Import of a Postcolonial Masculinity.” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2 (1): 1–­14. Stephens, Elizabeth. 2007. “The Spectacularized Penis: Contemporary Representations of the Phallic Male Body.” Men and Masculinities 10 (1): 85–­98. Swan, Elaine. 2008. “‘You Make Me Feel like a Woman’: Therapeutic Cultures and the Contagion of Femininity.” Gender, Work and Organization 15 (1): 88–­107. Thompson, Craig J., and Douglas B. Holt. 2004. “How Do Men Grab the Phallus? Gender Tourism in Everyday Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Culture 4 (3): 313–­338. Tomlinson, Barbara. 2010. Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Trujillo, Nick. 2000. “Hegemonic Masculinity on the Mound.” In Reading Sport: Critical Essays on Power and Representation, edited by Susan Birrell, 14–­39. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Turnbull, Percival. 1978. “The Phallus in the Art of Roman Britain.” Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology 15:199–­206. Tziallas, Evangelos. 2015. “Gamified Eroticism: Gay Male ‘Social Networking’: Applications and Self-­Pornography.” Sexuality and Culture 19 (4): 759–­775. Wainwright, Emma. 2009. “Manufacturing Space: Gendered Cityscapes and Industrial Images in Dundee.” Environment and Planning 41 (2): 336–­352. Wescott, Joan. 1962. “The Sculpture and Myths of Eshu-­Elegba, the Yoruba Trickster: Definition and Interpretation in Yoruba Iconography.” Africa 32 (4): 336–­354. Williams, A. 2014. “King Tut’s Mummified Penis Hints at Political Struggle?” National Geographic News. Accessed January 11, 2014. http://​news​.nationalgeographic​.com/​news/​ 2014/​01/​140110​-king​-tut​-mummy​-penis​-osiris​-archaeology​-science/.

11

Fear of the Diseased Immigrant Contagion, Xenophobia, and Belonging LOUIS MENDOZA The border serves a hegemonic function for nation-­states. It gives juridical-­ political power to regulating the passage of “strangers” by defining whom to admit and whom to exclude on a temporary and permanent basis. A close examination of U.S. immigration history reveals that debates on immigration regulation are also debates about national identity and national culture. This chapter explores how anti-­immigrant rhetoric and policy have often been articulated in the media through an explicitly medical language framework, one in which the line between perceived and actual danger is often difficult to discern and thus lends itself easily to hysteria and hyperbole, with entire populations become stigmatized as disease carriers and a threat to the nation’s health. Erving Goffman (1963) has noted that the stigmatization of would-­be immigrants serves a political purpose because “we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discriminatory practices, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce his life chances, we construct a stigma-­theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority and account for the danger he represents, sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences such as those of social class” (16). 175

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Since the late nineteenth century, the discourse of disease control has been yoked with popular discourse on immigrants. Immigrants from Latin America and other regions of the world have been stigmatized as disease-­ridden, infested, a contagion, and a threat to the body politic and the cultural integrity of the nation. An assessment of how the discourse of contagion has been deployed against Latina/o immigrants offers insight into people’s sense of nationhood and belonging. The United States has two traditions of immigration control: the establishment and policing of geographical boundaries and selective immigration restriction. These two means of control are, of course, intimately linked. Immigration history in the United States is rife with examples of how it reflects social attitudes and cultural anxiety about national identity. This history is also full of examples where the perceived threat of Latinos is mitigated by an even greater fear of economic instability. Latino immigrants have thus become subject to a flexible policy that accommodates new immigrants in times of economic growth, when cheap labor is essential to economic prosperity, or treats them as expendable when a weak economy shrinks the job market. At the turn of both the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, the United States witnessed sweeping social, political, economic, and demographic transformations, changes that were accompanied by rises in xenophobia and rhetoric that sought to link social ills with foreigners and foreigners with germs and contagion. The discourse of contagion is a particularly effective way to incite a fear of outsiders as a threat to one’s individual well-­being and to the collective well-­being of one’s nation. Leo Chavez (2008) has noted that threat narratives serve to foster an “us versus them” binary that situates citizens of the host country as victims of invasions, floods, and parasites whose rights and very citizenship are being eroded by outsiders. New immigrants have been and are consistently associated with germs and contagion and thereby maligned in the popular imaginary. These powerful anti-­immigration narratives linking foreigners to disease thrive despite facts and empirical studies that refute these claims. By examining how immigrants have been stigmatized as the source of a wide variety of physical and societal ills at critical junctures in national history, my objective is to explore questions about the shifting nature of citizenship and national belonging. As Alan Kraut (2004) has noted, some nativists strive to legitimize their prejudices by raising the specter of a possible threat to public health and well-­being posed by particular groups. He notes that the Irish were charged with bringing cholera in 1832, Italians were stigmatized for bringing polio, and tuberculosis was called the “Jewish” disease (5). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “Asians were portrayed as feeble and infested with hookworm, Mexicans as lousy, and eastern European Jews as

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vulnerable to trachoma, tuberculosis, and . . . [possessing a] poor physique” (Markel and Stern 2002, 766). Howard Markel and Alexandra Stern (2002) assert that in each significant era of U.S. immigration, a series of interrelated factors shaped immigrant health and health care in American society. First, the social perception of the threat of the infected immigrant was typically far greater than the actual danger. Indeed, the number of “diseased” immigrants has always been infinitesimal when compared with the number of newcomers admitted to this country. Second, Americans have tended to view illness among immigrants already settled in the United States as an imported phenomenon. Third, policymakers have employed strikingly protean medical labels of exclusion. If authorities and anti-­immigration advocates found that one classification failed to reject the “most objectionable,” they soon created a new one that emphasized contagion, mental disorder, chronic disability, or even a questionable physique. (758)

Examples of this association are abundant. “Every ship from China brings hundreds of these syphilitic and leprous heathens,” wrote an editor in of the Medico-­Literary Journal. Likewise, one columnist in an Oct. 3, 1907, edition of the Princeton Union wrote, “[German immigrants] produce large and swarming hives of children who grow up dirty, ignorant, depraved, and utterly unfit for American citizenship” (Bouie 2014, para. 10). As these quotes make clear, excluding people based on nationality or perceived sickness is not mutually exclusive. In fact, this chapter will focus on the intersection and conflation of these two conditions—­particularly on the legal and social impact that this medicalized discourse has on demonizing its targets. Today, the contempt and ire of people who are anti-­immigrant are primarily focused on new immigrants from Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and people of Muslim faith. I will address contemporary examples of how Latin Americans are targeted as disease carriers later on in this chapter.

The Convergence of Race and Contagion as the Basis of Immigration Policy The link between immigration and disease has persisted through the twentieth century and into the twenty-­first century. In her important work on contagion, Priscilla Wald (2008) reminds us that Alan Kraut coined the term medicalized nativism “to describe how the stigmatizing of immigrant groups is justified with their association with communicable disease; it implies the almost superstitious belief that national border can afford protection against

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communicable disease” (8). Wald’s creative spin on Benedict Anderson’s (1983) concept of imagined communities, turning them into imagined immunities, enables us to discuss the intersection of anti-­immigrant xenophobic discourse and nationalism. National boundaries have been the first tool of defense against disease and degeneracy. The oldest means of regulating immigration to the United States has been the inspection and exclusion of individual immigrants based on behavior, mental condition, socioeconomic status, medical history, or national origin. Thus one’s worth and risk as a new immigrant have always been examined side by side. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was the first overt federal law that proscribed entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the “good order” of certain localities. Ironically, the disruption of good order resulting from the presence of Chinese in a certain area was the result of racist attacks against Chinese. A full 153 anti-­Chinese riots erupted throughout the American West in the 1870s and 1880s, with some of the worst episodes of violence in Denver, Colorado; Los Angeles, California; and Seattle and Tacoma, Washington (Goyette 2014, para. 6). What was intended as a ten-­year moratorium on Chinese immigration lasted forty years. It is also important to note that efforts to restrict immigration from areas of Europe also increased shortly after the passage of this law. Concurrent with the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1882 Act to Regulate Immigration was also passed. This law provided for the exclusion of convicts, lunatics, idiots, paupers, and those likely to become a public charge; in 1903, Congress expanded the list of social misfits to include epileptics, beggars, prostitutes, and anarchists. The Immigration Act of 1891 expanded upon the 1882 immigration law to broaden categories of exclusion to turn back immigrants who suffered from “loathsome or . . . dangerous contagious disease[s]” (Fairchild and Tynan 1994, 2011). The Bureau of Immigration was founded to administer and enforce these new restrictions. In 1892, Ellis Island opened, and in accordance with the 1891 law, the island included facilities for medical inspections and a hospital. The explicit limitation on the number of immigrants from particular, supposedly undesirable nations became a hallmark of U.S. immigration law. For instance, in 1924, after three decades of massive immigration from southern and eastern Europe, Congress passed legislation restricting immigration from these countries based on the alleged genetic inferiority of their people. Fairchild and Tynan (1994) noted that “selective immigration restriction, driven by a complex set of social, cultural, professional and scientific motivations, flourished in a political environment openly hostile to particular groups of foreigners. Eugenicists and immigration restrictionists sought to prevent the genetic deterioration of future generations by protecting superior American germ plasm from adulteration with inferior foreign genes; they also sought to

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prevent the degeneration of American society and culture” (2012). In this way, the discourse of contagion and the threat narrative surrounding immigrants from non-­Western countries, buttressed as they were by social and cultural prejudices, were ratified and institutionalized as they became integrated into American immigration law. Cristobal Silva (2011) has noted that health and sickness are deeply narratological events—­events that define communities, map social practices, delimit norms, centralize power, and reconfigure biology into cultural narratives. Silva further asserts that “the very structure of these narratives relies on what he calls ‘immunological syntax,’ a supple yet formalized set of linguistic practices devised in response to the local, embodied, and changing contours of disease” (14). Silva’s work speaks specifically to early New England narratives in the context of life-­threatening diseases, but his assertion that there is a “relationship between immunology and ideology in the formation of communal identity” (4) enables us to apply this to different historical contexts and phenomena that reveal assumptions about the nation, nationalism, and the ongoing process of nation formation. In this manner, we can gain insight into “representational practices that encode specific ideological assumptions about what it means to be healthy or sick, but also a means for creating narratives that identify a healthy ‘we’ and a sick ‘they’ to mark and differentiate worthy and unworthy subjects” (Silva 2011, 63). From this vantage point, we can see the political economy of creating a national narrative that has the power to exclude and include. Given the highly ambivalent relationship the United States has with its immigrant heritage, one can see how at any given time, contemporary immigrants occupy a liminal space in which they can be represented as either new insiders or unwanted outsiders whose presence is defiling an otherwise pure space and body politic. Contemporary anti-­immigrant discourse utilizes the outbreak narrative to provoke hysteria. And as Wald (2008) has made clear, outbreak narratives have consequences. One way in which this narrative is achieved is through the collapsing of time and space—­to suggest that the primitive is encroaching on the modern, that the past is in geographical proximity to the present. In this way, as Wald argues, the specter of disease is always posed as a threat to “our modernity, our progress, our future” (7). As we shall see, recent examples of the outbreak narrative—­whether the swine flu, Ebola, the Zika virus, or other diseases including many assumed by the broader public to be “ancient diseases”—­ contain a perceived threat to modernity.

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FIGURE 11.1  Inverting the discourse of contagion against anti-­immigrant protesters.

Alcaraz, Lalo. “Infected Hate.” © 2014 Distributed by Universal Uclick. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.

Contemporary Discourses of Contagion against Latin American Immigrants The coupling of contagion and anti-­immigrant discourses has a long history in the United States. For the last thirty years, metaphors of Latinas/os as a threat have pervaded national discussions of immigration and demographic change. This casting of Latinas/os as a threat to national well-­being only increased when Latinas/os became the nation’s largest ethnic group shortly after the turn of the twenty-­first century. Latina/os were cast as the unstoppable brown tide, the menace that threatened the cultural and linguistic purity of America. Additionally, they were seen as perpetual outsiders who were still immigrants despite numerous Latina/o populations having been present in the United States for generations, including many whose presence precedes the founding of the United States (Mendoza 2012, 2). In discussing the difference in social and cultural reception between different immigrant groups, Ted Brackemyre has noted that two distinct waves of immigrants came to the United States in the nineteenth century. He asserts, “‘Old’ immigrants were those who migrated to the United States between the 1820s and 1870s. It was during this time that many Britons, Germans, and those of Scandinavian descent crossed the Atlantic and landed in America. These immigrants were typically English speaking, literate, Protestant or

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Jewish—­except for the Irish Catholics—­and could blend fairly easily into American society. ‘New’ immigrants, however, did not merge into American culture as easily” (Brackemyre 2015, para. 2). “New” immigrants came to America between the 1870s and the 1920s. According to Brackemyre, these immigrants came in large numbers from southern and eastern European countries such as Italy, Greece, Poland, and Russia, as well as Asian nations. These immigrants were “typically poorer and less educated than earlier immigrants. Moreover, these immigrants were very different than the typical American because they were overwhelmingly Catholic or Greek Orthodox, or Jewish, and unfamiliar with democratic government. These cultural differences prevented the ‘new’ wave of immigrants from fully assimilating into American culture. Instead, ‘new’ immigrants often congregated in close-­knit communities that consisted only of members of their ethnicity” (Brackemyre 2015, para. 6). In the nineteenth century, a lack of social and geographical integration meant new immigrant groups were vulnerable to being scapegoated. Nativist organizations like the American Protective Association and the Native American Mutual Protection Association supported immigration restriction policies because they opposed the movement of Catholics and Asians into the United States. “These organizations contested the immigration of different ethnicities for cultural and economic reasons, but also because of rising health concerns,” says Brackemyre (para. 16). This linking of racial and cultural differences with the perception of a threat to national health has served as a staple of an immigrant threat narrative that has been repeated numerous times throughout the twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries. Brackemyre’s observations on the cultural anxiety of the mainstream about new immigrants can be insightful for understanding today’s anti-­immigrant discourse. In 2014, a year when almost one-­hundred thousand unaccompanied minors entered the United States seeking asylum from violence in Central American countries, internet articles like “Illegal Immigrants Bring Risk of Ebola and Global Array of Viral Illnesses” (Vliet 2014) and “Unloading Disease-­Carrying Immigrants in Large U.S. Cities a ‘Perfect Storm’ for Pandemic Disease Outbreak” (Adams 2014) stoked the flames of controversy and promoted restrictionist immigration policies rather than compassion for these youths, who were well within the legal parameters established by former president George W. Bush. U.S. policy allowed Mexican child migrants to be sent back quickly across the border, but in 2008, President George W. Bush signed into law the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which said that unaccompanied minors from countries noncontiguous with the United States (i.e., countries other than Mexico and Canada) would be afforded greater legal protections. However, under a 2008 law meant to combat child trafficking, the Trafficking Victims Protection

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Reauthorization Act, children from Central America had to be given a court hearing to determine if they were to be deported or allowed to stay (Avila 2014, para. 5–­6). The 2014 so-­called crisis of unaccompanied minors became a media spectacle when protests against the immigrants began occurring. Conservative media figures stoked tensions with inflammatory and dishonest rhetoric on the perceived threat of new arrivals. “Dengue fever, 50 to 100 million new cases a year of dengue fever worldwide. In Mexico, it is endemic. It’s a terrible disease, for anyone that’s had it,” said Fox News host Marc Siegel, who continued with a warning. “There’s no effective treatment of it. It’s now emerging in Texas because of the immigration crisis” (Bouie 2014, para. 3). Likewise, on her radio show, Laura Ingraham declared, “The government spreads the illegal immigrants across the country, and the disease is spread across the country” (Bouie 2014, para. 3). Such incendiary statements set the stage for opportunist politicians to jump into the fray and try to exploit and frame the issue as a crisis that represented an immediate and large threat to the American public. Republican politicians quickly jumped on the bandwagon: “Reports of illegal immigrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus, and tuberculosis are particularly concerning,” wrote Georgia representative Phil Gingrey in a letter to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Texas representative Randy Weber echoed these sentiments in an interview with conservative pundit Frank Gaffney: “I heard on the radio this morning that there have been two confirmed cases of TB—­tuberculosis—­and either one or two confirmed cases of swine flu, H1N1. . . . We’re thinking these are diseases that we have eradicated in our country and our population isn’t ready for this, so for this to break out to be a pandemic would be unbelievable” (Bouie 2014, para. 4). In their hysterical responses, not only is the nation’s immediate health in jeopardy, but we are at risk of losing historical progress that has been made against eradicating these diseases. In the midst of this news coverage about the influx of Central American youths seeking asylum in the United States, a July 2014 article in the Austin, Texas–­based independent newspaper the Texas Observer quoted U.S. representative Louie Gohmert (R-­TX) as stating: “Our schools cannot handle this influx, we don’t even know what all diseases they have” (Pearson 2014, para. 2). Likewise, by asking if the unaccompanied minors “pouring over the border . . . have brought with them proof of vaccination,” Fox News commentator Cal Thomas accused these children of harboring vaccine-­preventable diseases such as “mumps, measles, rubella, polio, tetanus and diphtheria” (Pearson 2014, para. 3). These claims were made in the face of facts that refuted these assertions. In fact, the same Texas Observer article notes:

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The vast majority of Central Americans are vaccinated against all these diseases. Governments concerned about health, and good parents investing in their kids, have made Central American kids better-­vaccinated than Texan kids. . . . Guatemala has universal health care. Vaccines are 100 percent funded by the government. By comparison, one in six kids in Texas is uninsured, and even insured families often must pay for vaccination. That means that many Texas kids fall behind on vaccinations, or miss them altogether when their family can’t afford a doctor’s visit. Other families refuse vaccination. (Pearson 2014, para. 5–­6)

While it is true that some children came with illnesses like measles and tuberculosis, the vast majority of these minors were healthy and vaccinated ( Jacobson 2015, para. 17–­18). As is their practice, border agents were required to screen all incoming detainees for any symptoms of contagious diseases of possible public health concern. In short, the odds that migrant children would cause a general infection of a contagious disease were almost nonexistent. What we were hearing, put simply, was an update on an old script—­one that has been recycled intensely for the last ten years. For instance, in 2005, an episode of Lou Dobbs Tonight falsely asserted, “We have some enormous problems with horrendous diseases that are being brought into America by illegal aliens” (Bouie 2014, para. 14), including seven thousand cases of leprosy in the past three years. On his radio show, Bill O’Reilly agreed that immigrants were crossing the border with “tuberculosis, syphilis, and leprosy,” and in 2006, Pat Buchanan claimed “illegal aliens” were responsible for bedbug infestations in “26 states” (Bouie 2014, para. 14). In reality, health officials attributed the growth in bedbugs to “widespread use of baits instead of insecticide sprays” for pest control (Bouie 2014, para. 14). (Ironically, such claims echo the actual history of the spread of disease by Europeans among indigenous populations in the Americas during the colonial era.) Perhaps Buchanan and others believe that resurrecting a familiar narrative is an effective measure for impugning new arrivals as a threat to nativist populations. The maligning of immigrant communities as carriers of disease (a strategy to halt or at least greatly restrict the flow of immigration) is exposed as a xenophobic tactic when one considers that access to health care and health services is indeed one of the central issues that new immigrants advocate for and organize around (Sandoval and Jennings 2012). If those who protest so vociferously against new immigrants truly believe they represent a health threat, then one would think that these same people would advocate for greater access to health screening, immunizations, and general health care for all to ensure that the general population receives maximum protection from potentially dangerous disease carriers. Rather than supporting the expansion of public health

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interventions to protect the broader population, however, anti-­immigrant people would prefer to see immigrants go without medical care even if it means enhancing the risk to the general public. Anti-­immigrant protesters hold signs exclaiming “Protect our children from diseases” while right-­wing lawmakers and conservative media pundits stoke fears of infection and contamination. As recently as July 2015, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stated that “tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border . . . The United States has become a dumping ground for Mexico and, in fact, for many other parts of the world” ( Jacobson 2015, para. 2). In making these kinds of statements, scaremongers draw from a long history of ugly nativism and prejudice disguised as concern for public health. Pre-­existing narratives of immigrants and contagion lend themselves to being exploited for political purposes by conservative lawmakers and immigration restrictionists. Even a superficial scan of the internet reveals numerous websites dedicated to promoting public health hysteria. Websites with titles like “The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Facts, Figures and Statistics on Illegal Immigration” make claims such as “illegal aliens are not screened and many are carrying horrific third world diseases that do not belong in the USA. Many of these diseases are highly contagious and will infect citizens that come in contact with an infected illegal alien. This has already happened in restaurants, schools, and police forces” (Wagner, para. 1) Embedded within the hyperbole and inaccuracies, the discourse of modernity versus primitivism becomes evident. The author of this website provides numerous examples, but none are more extreme than the following misinformation: “Leprosy, a scourge of Biblical days, is caused by a bacillus agent and is now known as Hansen’s Disease. In the 40 years prior to 2002, there were only 900 total cases of leprosy in the US. In the following three years there have been 9,000 cases and most were illegal aliens” (Wagner, para. 4). Amy L. Fairchild (2004) has noted that “at both the dawn and dusk of the 20th Century, the most consequential public policies responded to disease and its economic burdens by seeking to control the behavior of immigrants within our borders rather than excluding immigrants at our borders. That this theme of inclusion marks two such different eras underscores its significance in American Public Policy” (529). While many politicians brazenly represent the views of immigration restrictionists and anti-­immigrant rhetoric and hate crimes have spiked in the last decade, Fairchild is correct in noting that federal policy has not conformed to public hysteria. For this reason, the government is often cast as part of the problem, as evidenced by the quote from the Natural News website: “The federal government’s policies of allowing the mass migration of infectious disease-­carrying people into the United States while transporting them to America’s largest cities is a ‘perfect blueprint’ for seeding a deadly pandemic. Right now, we are witnessing the engineering of a public

Fear of the Diseased Immigrant   •  185

health and humanitarian disaster optimized for rapid disease transmission that puts all Americans at risk” (Adams 2014, para. 1). This narrative of contagion is so strong that there is a shocking refusal to accept evidence refuting these claims by scholars and practitioners of medicine.

Resisting the Narrative and Creating Alternative Paradigms of Belonging In this section of the chapter, I would like to shift focus to a brief discussion of responses to the anti-­immigrant discourse of contagion via political cartoons. As I have outlined above, the insidious contagion narrative has been used against immigrant groups quite effectively. It is also true, however, that immigrants and a significant number of citizens disagree with this rhetoric, and they find ways to challenge the hype and propaganda through their daily practices and the creation of oppositional art. One result of the sustained era of anti-­immigrant sentiment we find ourselves in has been the cultivation of a pan-­Latina/o solidarity. This solidarity was formed among activists, religious leaders, politicians, Latina/o rights groups, community-­based organizations, and artists. In a number of cartoons addressing the perception of immigrants as disease-­ridden, Chicano artist Lalo Alcaraz co-­opts the discourse of contagion by turning a critical lens toward U.S. history and those who would exploit the fear of others to shape policy and arouse public hysteria. In a 1995 cartoon titled “Smallpox Infested Blankets! Thank You, John Smith!,” Alcaraz recalls for us the phenomenon of the intentional spreading of disease among indigenous peoples in the United States as a strategy of warfare and genocidal colonialist policy. In his famous 1994 “SOS” cartoon, created during a period when California residents were voting to adopt Proposition 187, known as the Save Our State initiative, Alcaraz mocks this initiative—­which sought to deny taxpayer-­funded health care and education to illegal immigrant residents of California—­by portraying politicians spraying a can of “Fraid” at immigrants. Here, he targets politicians who would exploit anti-­immigrant sentiment for political gain. In “Infected Hate,” a 2014 cartoon, Alcaraz deftly and directly inverts the labeling of the diseased to target anti-­immigrant protesters, showing them as being diseased with racism. Such a move recasts the discussion in a different light and characterizes the ugliness of racism as reflecting on those who would spout vitriol against children seeking asylum and opportunities for a better life. The latest era of anti-­immigrant sentiment has been buttressed by a sustained period of political polarization, which has resulted in a political stalemate on immigration reform across the nation. It has also given rise to a proliferation of scholarship on how anti-­immigrant sentiment has impacted the Latina/o community. In the qualitative scholarship, two important

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concepts have emerged to explain how Latina/o communities across the nation have found ways to create a home in the United States despite an often cold reception. Elsewhere, I have discussed how many Latinas/os, particularly those in what has been labeled “new destinations” in the Midwest and the South, have thrived because a negative reception has not been universal (Mendoza 2012). Many immigrants successfully integrate into communities because they intentionally build cohesive communities, and non-­Latina/o local residents and their civic leaders have understood the positive impact of new immigrants to their local economies and communities and have embraced their presence (Mendoza 2012). Today’s migrants from Latin America have reconstructed traditional notions of citizenship within a framework that transcends their legal status. Instead, through various forms of civic engagement, they create experiences of belonging, advance community well-­being, and advocate for communal health and community integration on their own terms. Through their actions, they develop a stronger sense of place and home to reflect their lived circumstances. The concepts of belonging and cultural citizenship have emerged to characterize how recent migrants establish community and lessen the social, political, and discursive violence they face. Renato Rosaldo (1994) introduced the notion of cultural citizenship in the early 1990s. Noting that it is a deliberate oxymoron resulting from a pairing of words that do not fit together comfortably, he asserts, “Cultural citizenship refers to the right to be different and to belong in a participatory democratic sense. It claims that, in a democracy, social justice calls for equity among all citizens, even when such differences as race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation potentially could be used to make certain people less equal or inferior to others. The notion of belonging means full membership in a group and the ability to influence one’s destiny by having a significant voice in basic decisions” (Rosaldo 1994, 402). This definition of citizenship, unhinged from the myopic lens of immigration status, accounts for the numerous ways that people contribute to their communities, be it through civic organizations, nonprofits, church, or even community building practices such as participating in sports events in local parks and community centers. The efforts by Latinas/os to create a sense of belonging and exercise democratic rights in local communities—­even as they are disproportionately undereducated, have less access to health insurance, are politically underrepresented, and are disproportionately represented in lower socioeconomic sectors and the prison industrial complex—­coincides with phenomenon like the Latino health paradox. The paradox refers to the epidemiological finding that Latina/o Americans tend to have health outcomes that are comparable to, or in some cases better than, those of their white U.S. counterparts, even though

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Hispanics have lower average income, education, and health-­care access (Franzini et al. 2001, 280). Researchers have been unable to definitively explain why this is so. A theory proposed by Kyriacos Markides, the doctor who originally coined the label for this paradox in 1986, speculates that Hispanic culture may have some protective effect. He argues that “tight-­knit families and immigrant communities offer crucial support to people battling illnesses. Hispanics, especially recent immigrants, also tend to behave in more healthy ways, smoking and drinking less. This may explain why second-­and third-­generation Hispanics, who are more plugged into the mainstream culture, see less of a boost to their health” (Guo 2014, para. 3). In addition to a higher mortality rate, Latina/os have particular health challenges, such as higher incidences of diabetes, but many scholars continue to work to better understand whether or not cultural practices (e.g., strong, supportive, and cohesive communities and extended families) and healthy behaviors (e.g., a retention of dietary practices that are more closely aligned with indigenous practices) are underlying explanations. If this is the case, perhaps U.S. society has something to learn about a healthy lifestyle and positive cultural practices from new immigrants.

References Adams, Mike. 2014. “Unloading Disease-­Carrying Immigrants in Large U.S. Cities a ‘Perfect Storm’ for Pandemic Disease Outbreak.” Natural News, June 29, 2014. http://​www​ .naturalnews​.com/​045773​_pandemic​_outbreak​_mass​_migration​_public​_health​_risk​ .html. Avila, Jim. 2014. “Analysis: What’s the Real Reason behind Central American Immigrant Wave? U.S. Law.” ABC News. http://​abcnews​.go​.com/​blogs/​politics/​2014/​06/​analysis​ -whats​-the​-real​-reason​-behind​-central​-american​-immigrant​-wave​-u​-s​-law/. Bouie, Jamelle. 2014. “America’s Long History of Immigrant Scaremongering.” Slate. http://​www​.slate​.com/​articles/​news​_and​_politics/​politics/​2014/​07/​immigrant​ _scaremongering​_and​_hate​_conservatives​_stoke​_fears​_of​_diseased​.html. Brackemyre, Ted. 2015. “Immigrants, Cities, and Disease.” U.S. History Scene. February 23, 2015. http://​ushistoryscene​.com/​article/​immigrants​-cities​-disease/. Chavez, Leo. 2013. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Fairchild, Amy L. 2004. “Policies of Inclusion: Immigrants, Disease, Dependency, and American Immigration Policy at the Dawn and Dusk of the 20th Century.” American Journal of Public Health 94 (4): 528–­539. Fairchild, Amy L., and Eileen A. Tynan. 1994. “Policies of Containment: Immigration in the Era of AIDS.” American Journal of Public Health 84 (12): 2011–­2022. Franzini, Luisa, John C. Ribble, and Arlene M. Keddie. 2001. “Understanding the Hispanic Paradox.” Ethnicity and Disease 11 (3): 280–­310. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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Goyette, Braden. 2014. “How Racism Created America’s Chinatowns.” Huffington Post, January 11, 2014. http://​www​.huffingtonpost​.com/​2014/​11/​11/​american​-chinatownshistory​ _n​_6090692​.html. Guo, Jeff. 2014. “Why Hispanic-­Americans Live Longer: The Mystery That Has Puzzled Researchers for Decades.” Washington Post. http://​www​.washingtonpost​.com/​news/​ storyline/​wp/​2014/​10/​02/​hispanics​-in​-the​-u​-s​-live​-longer​-than​-white​-people​-why/. Jacobson, Louis. 2015. “Are Illegal Immigrants Bringing ‘Tremendous’ Disease across the Border, as Trump Says? Unlikely.” Politifact, July 23, 2015. http://​www​.politifact​.com/​truth​-o​ -meter/​article/​2015/​jul/​23/​are​-illegal​-immigrants​-bringing​-tremendous​-diseas/. Kraut, Alan M. 2004. “Foreign Bodies: The Perennial Negotiation over Health and Culture in a Nation of Immigrants.” Journal of American Ethnic History 23 (2): 3–­22. Markel, Howard, and Alexandra Minna Stern. 1999. “Which Face? Whose Nation? Immigration, Public Health, and the Construction of Disease at America’s Ports and Borders, 1891–­1928.” American Behavioral Scientist 42:1314–­1331. Markel, Howard, and Alexandra Minna Stern. 2002. “The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society.” Milbank Quarterly 80 (4): 757–­788. Mendoza, Louis. 2012. Conversations across Our America: Talking about Immigration and the Latinoization of the United States. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pearson, Rachel. 2014. “Disease Threat from Immigrant Children Wildly Overstated.” Texas Observer, July 10, 2014. http://​www​.texasobserver​.org/​disease​-threat​-immigrant​-children​ -wildly​-overstated/. Rosaldo, Renato. 1994. “Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy.” Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 402–­411. Sandoval, Juan Simón Onésimo, and Joel Jennings. 2012. “Latino Civic Participation: Evaluating Indicators of Immigrant Engagement in a Midwestern City.” Latino Studies 10:523–­545. Silva, Cristobal. 2011. Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narratives. New York: Oxford University Press. Turner, Adam. 2014. “Paranoia on the Border: Immigration and Public Health.” Nursing CLIO, July 17, 2014. https://​nursingclio​.org/​2014/​07/​17/​paranoia​-on​-the​-border​ -immigration​-and​-public​-health/. Vliet, Elizabeth. 2014. “Illegal Immigrants Bring Risk of Ebola and Global Array of Viral Illnesses.” Christian Post, August 5, 2014. http://​www​.christianpost​.com/​news/​illegal​ -immigrants​-bring​-risk​-of​-ebola​-and​-global​-array​-of​-viral​-illnesses​-124329/. Wagner, P. F. n.d. The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Facts, Figures and Statistics on Illegal Immigration. http://​www​.usillegalaliens​.com/​impacts​_of​_illegal​_immigration​_diseases​ .html. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press.

12

Prophylactic Policing and the Epidemiology of Dissent in the Soviet-­Era Baltic States EDWARD COHN

On June  2, 1970, a twenty-­two-­year-­old bank teller named Alfredas Ačius was “invited” to the KGB’s office in the Lithuanian city of Klaipeda for a supposedly informal “chat.” Several months before—­on the night of February  15—­­Ačius had noticed a series of anti-­Soviet leaflets that attacked the regime and commemorated Lithuania’s pre-­Soviet Independence Day. Soviet citizens—­including those in regions that had been forcibly integrated into the USSR, like Lithuania—­were expected to contact the KGB immediately when they noticed an anti-­Soviet crime, but Ačius failed to do so. Instead, he took several of the leaflets home and showed them to his friends, one of whom informed the police. Strikingly, the KGB did not accuse Ačius of making anti-­ Soviet comments or endorsing the leaflets; he was merely accused of showing the pamphlets to his friends and bringing their contents to a wider audience. Ačius apologized for his oversight and said that he did not attach any political significance to his actions and regarded them as an example of “youth and stupidity.” He was released when he promised to change his ways and be a “Soviet person” in the future.1

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This case was a typical example of a KGB tactic known as profilaktika—­a Russian term for “prophylaxis.” In profilaktika cases, citizens accused of minor political crimes were not arrested or imprisoned but “invited” to the KGB for a “conversation” or “chat.” A KGB officer then convinced his target to confess and warned that if the offender broke the law again, he or she would be subjected to “more severe measures.” Although the tactic was rarely discussed publicly, internal KGB sources describe profilaktika in euphemistic terms and hail it as a sign of the agency’s “humanity.” In reality, however, the prophylactic chat was an intensive form of discipline intended to change its victims’ behavior and prevent minor offenders from becoming hardened foes of the regime. KGB officials often bragged about profilaktika’s effectiveness, citing reports showing that only 150 of the 121,406 citizens subjected to the tactic between 1966 and 1974 were arrested for subsequent crimes (Pikhoia 2000, 328–­329). Prophylactic chats outnumbered arrests for political crimes throughout the USSR by a margin of five or even ten to one, targeting citizens who consorted with foreigners, formed dissident youth groups, told anti-­Soviet jokes, spread anti-­Soviet rumors, or revealed state secrets (Hornsby 2013, 211–­212, 218–­221; Fedor 2011, 51–­56; Harrison 2016, 125–­162; Cohn 2017). The case of Alfredas Ačius adds a new layer to historians’ understanding of profilaktika. Scholars have usually emphasized the tactic’s direct impact on its victims, but in many cases, “prophylaxis” was intended to stop the spread of dangerous ideas by preventing low-­level political offenders from influencing other citizens. (Ačius, after all, was unlikely to become involved in dissent himself, but his actions spread anti-­Soviet ideas to others.) This chapter uses evidence from the USSR’s Baltic republics of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia (with a particular focus on Lithuania), taking advantage of the most accessible KGB archives in the former USSR; although anti-­Soviet opinion appears to have been relatively widespread in the Baltic region, the KGB sought to contain dissent with the same methods it used throughout the Soviet Union (Misiunas and Taagepera 1993; Kozlov et al. 2011). Several scholars have briefly pointed out the medical connotations of the KGB’s use of the term prophylaxis, and Mark Harrison has even suggested that the KGB sought to understand the origins of anti-­Soviet activity through a contagion model of dissent (Fedor 2011; Lewin 2005; Harrison 2016). This chapter will build on those ideas, showing that the KGB’s use of profilaktika was based on the belief that unrest could spread through society like an epidemic and should be isolated, contained, and eliminated like a disease—­through targeted interventions that drew upon the language and methodology of medicine. The chapter’s first section will argue that the theory behind profilaktika resembled present-­day theories of epidemiological criminology, which argue that the spread of violence can be understood through the “epidemiological triad” of agent, host, and environment. The second section will compare profilaktika to broken-­windows

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policing—­another form of crime-­fighting that relies on a theory of social contagion. The chapter will conclude by demonstrating that the KGB was especially worried by one particular threat, the contamination of Soviet society by dangerous ideas from abroad. An epidemiological approach to crime, in short, was extremely appealing to the KGB as it fought anti-­Soviet activity in the Baltic republics, in part because of its modern, even revolutionary overtones and in part because it offered officials the hope that they could forestall political dissent through the careful—­even scientific—­management of wrongdoers. To the KGB, dissent was not a permanent feature of Soviet society, but a temporary ailment that could be treated through “prophylaxis”—­a message that allowed the regime to project an image of self-­confidence during troubled and turbulent times.

The Epidemiology of Dissent in the Late Soviet Union The Russian word profilaktika has almost exactly the same connotations as the English word prophylaxis: it is a clinical term, typically used for preventative measures designed to stop the spread of a disease. Even in Soviet times, the word appeared more often in medical journals than in discussions of KGB tactics—­although, as early as the 1920s, the secret police did use the term social prophylaxis for efforts to prevent crime by profiling the social origins of potential criminals (Gliksman 1954). Until recently, historians have been slow to analyze the KGB tactic known as profilaktika, largely because of the inaccessibility of secret police archives in Moscow. Scholars have shown that the tactic became common after Joseph Stalin’s 1953 death, when the regime sought both to de-­emphasize the repressive politics of the past and to attack the root causes of crime, and they have begun to analyze it using Lithuanian KGB files (Fedor 2011; Hornsby 2013; Harrison 2016; Cohn 2017). To date, however, the scholarly literature has yet to recognize the similarities between profilaktika and the present-­day theories of crime control known as epidemiological criminology. On its face, profilaktika did not directly involve ideas from epidemiology or medicine, focusing instead on the benign influence that a “fatherly” KGB officer could play on “immature” citizens who had “temporarily” strayed from the correct path. Although the decrees instituting profilaktika remain closed to researchers, a 1977 textbook for the KGB officers’ school describes the tactic as “measures of an admonitory, educational character in relation to those Soviet citizens who commit politically incorrect acts as a result of their political immaturity” (Chebrikov 1977, 583). Another KGB publication, 1973’s Counter-­Intelligence Dictionary, defines the tactic as an “activity conducted by agencies of the Soviet state and social organizations, and aimed at preventing state crimes, politically harmful offenses, and other actions affecting the interests of state security of the USSR, by identifying and eliminating the causes

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and conditions (circumstances) contributing to their occurrence, as well as through the provision of educational influence on the politically and morally erratic people who can commit such crimes and offenses” (Nikitchenko 1972, 237). The dictionary differentiated profilaktika from police work aimed at stopping a crime that was already being planned, arguing that prophylactic measures were instead “carried out prior to the criminal acts and should prevent the occurrence of criminal intent” (Nikitchenko 1972, 237). N. R. Mironov, a high-­ranking KGB official sometimes known as “the father of profilaktika,” gave the tactic its simplest description, characterizing it (in typically euphemistic terms) as “invitations of a person to the organs of state security, with the goal of explaining to him the antisocial character of his actions and warning him that he stands on a dangerous path.” He added, “Experience shows that in a majority of cases, people summoned to such conversations, recognizing that the organs of state security are sincerely interested in their fate and want to help them, reform themselves and enter into a healthy working and public life” (Mironov 1969, 141). Archival evidence from the Baltic region gives a more precise sense of how profilaktika worked. Cases typically began when investigators narrowed in on a suspect or sometimes when they received a report from an informer. KGB officers used several criteria to determine whether offenders were good candidates for profilaktika or were unredeemable criminals who should be arrested: Was the offender underage or, less often, extremely old? Was he or she “politically illiterate” or “immature”? Did the candidate act without a “hostile goal,” perhaps blurting out an anti-­Soviet comment while drunk or making an unpremeditated remark in the absence of a larger agenda? Suitable candidates were summoned to a supposedly voluntary “chat,” informed of the charges against them, and grilled about their actions and beliefs. Prophylactic chats typically ended when a KGB officer warned his victim that he or she would be seriously punished if the person committed another crime. Nevertheless, profilaktika cases often showed the more subtle influence of medical ideas or language. Many profilaktika victims were accused of expressing “unhealthy” opinions or attitudes—­a nearly ubiquitous phrase2—­and many KGB documents (like the Mironov text quoted above) refer to the “healthiness” of different collectives or institutions or the need to restore wrongdoers to a “healthy” life. (A 1978 report from the Latvian KGB called for the eradication of “nationalist and other unhealthy expressions” among young people and for “timely prophylactic influence on unhealthy tendencies” among students, for example.3) Moreover, KGB theorists often used medical or psychological language to describe their methods (Healey 2013). G. I. Ivanin’s 1971 textbook on “operative psychology” summed up the KGB’s approach, declaring that “the prevention of mass unrest should be carried out by the influence of various forces on the social psychology of appropriate groups

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of the population,” singling out prophylactic chats as one means of shaping citizens’ psychology (Ivanin 1971, 170). Ivanin also described the need to understand “social-­psychological characteristics of the collective” to develop “a more rational tactic of profilaktika” (Ivanin 1971, 159). (Strikingly, these writings were published at the same time that the KGB began sending high-­profile dissidents to mental institutions [Smith and Oleszczuk, 1996; Hornsby 2013].) Finally, and perhaps most importantly, many KGB case files focus on the possibility that the offender’s behavior would spread to other citizens, suggesting that the KGB saw dissent as a contagious behavior. Even when it did not use terminology from medicine or public health, the KGB’s approach to profilaktika often resembled the present-­day American model of epidemiological criminology. In recent years, criminologists, psychologists, and other scholars have sought to use the insights of public health and epidemiology to explain a number of violent phenomena, including terrorism, juvenile delinquency, and crime (Kruglanski et al. 2007; Stares and Yacoubian 2006; Farrington and Loeber 2000; Akers et al. 2013). These scholars have based their research on the so-­called epidemiological triad, arguing that the spread of violence—­like the diffusion of a disease—­can best be understood through the interaction of three factors: an external agent, a susceptible host, and their environment. Just as epidemiologists argue that the spread of disease can be best understood as the introduction of an agent (the disease itself ) to a host (the patient) in an environment that fosters the illness, so epidemiological studies of terrorism have argued that jihadist Islam can be understood as the introduction of militant ideology (the agent) to a possible terrorist (the host) in an environment with features fostering radicalism (such as political repression and social alienation; Stares and Yacoubian 2006). More broadly, many epidemiological approaches to crime seek to prevent violence by focusing on the environmental factors behind it and on the disruption of connections between agents and hosts (Ransford et al. 2013). These models allow for a complex, multifaceted approach to violence that targets not only the perpetrator but also the environmental conditions driving him to violence and the outside actors shaping his actions. The KGB’s use of profilaktika followed a remarkably similar model of dissent. Most KGB reports dealing with anti-­Soviet behavior did not focus on concrete enemies or the direct involvement of foreign spies. Instead, the main threat in cases of anti-­Soviet activity—­or, in epidemiological jargon, the agent—­was “bourgeois ideology.” Mironov, for example, wrote in the KGB’s in-­house journal that most of the people confronted by the secret police “began on a path of anti-­Soviet activity under the influence of bourgeois ideology that had penetrated our country” (Mironov 1959, 58). This ideology could supposedly take many forms, including nationalism, capitalist acquisitiveness, or involvement in the Western-­inspired hippie movement.

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Before reaching its host, bourgeois ideology could be spread by many vectors, including foreign radio broadcasts and nationalist literature published before the Soviet conquest of the Baltic States. Moreover, profilaktika cases often treated the perpetrator of an anti-­Soviet act in ways that resembled an epidemiological host. The perpetrator was never portrayed as a die-­hard enemy of the regime but as a misguided citizen whose inexperience allowed him or her to become the unwitting purveyor of dangerous ideas. Many profilaktika victims were youth—­the group that could most often be described as “immature.” Most perpetrators could be redeemed through profilaktika, the KGB argued, just as most disease hosts could be treated medically. The final way in which the KGB’s theory of profilaktika followed an epidemiological approach to dissent deals with the third part of the triad: the environment. In case after case, KGB officers pursued an environmental approach to fighting dissent, looking not only at the actions of the agent and its host but also at the conditions allowing dissent to thrive. They often focused on the upbringing of children, the workings of the educational system, and even the influence of deviant or dangerous messages that appeared in the physical environment (say, in nationalist graffiti or leaflets nailed to telephone poles). The dictionary definition of profilaktika quoted above, for example, referred to the need to “[identify and eliminate] the causes and conditions” leading to anti-­Soviet activity—­showing a strong focus on the environment (Nikit­ chenko 1972, 237.) Ivanin also focused on environmental factors: “We need to study the place of the profilaktika target in the collective, especially his attachment to relevant micro-­groups, the influence of these micro-­groups on other groups and on the collective as a whole, the degree of conformity of the profilaktika target, and his ability to influence the collective and form within it certain moods” (1971, 158). Although some KGB theorists were probably influenced by the language of medicine (as the name prophylaxis suggests), some low-­level KGB operatives may not have realized the extent to which dissent was being implicitly likened to an infectious disease. The regime had other reasons—­beyond the influence of ideas from public health—­to cast profilaktika victims as misguided “hosts” of dangerous ideas rather than as anti-­Soviet criminals: from the 1950s onward, official rhetoric had argued that true, deep-­seated anti-­Soviet feelings had largely ceased to exist, except in cases where they were introduced from abroad (Fedor 2011, 30–­57). But there was a strong resemblance between KGB rhetoric and epidemiological theory nonetheless, suggesting that profilaktika implicitly depended on an epidemiological conception of dissent, even if its champions were inconsistent in their use of epidemiological language.

Prophylactic Policing and the Epidemiology of Dissent  •  195

A Soviet Theory of Broken Windows? In a 1982 article in the Atlantic Monthly, the American criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling proposed a model of crime control that was closely based on social contagion theory and on decades of work in social psychology and sociology: broken-­windows policing (Wilson and Kelling 1982; Kelling 1991; Kelling and Coles 1996; Akers et al. 2013; Tsvetkova and Macy 2015). As Wilson and Kelling wrote, “Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-­breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-­breakers whereas others are populated by window-­lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)” (Wilson and Kelling 1982, 31). Wilson and Kelling used this metaphor to argue that “disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence” and that the police should act to prevent major crimes by cracking down on minor offenses that threatened public order (Wilson and Kelling 1982, 31). Since the 1970s, they argued, police officers had begun to emphasize “crime fighting” over “order maintenance,” forgetting that their counterparts in the 1960s had seen a clear link between maintaining order on the streets and preventing large-­scale riots. “The citizen who fears the ill-­smelling drunk, the rowdy teenager, or the importuning beggar is not merely expressing his distaste for unseemly behavior,” they wrote. “He is also giving voice to a bit of folk wisdom that happens to be a correct generalization—­namely, that serious street crime flourishes in areas in which disorderly behavior goes unchecked” (Wilson and Kelling 1982, 34). New York police of the 1990s made use of these ideas, seeking to prevent murders and gang violence by cracking down on graffiti and vandalism in a high-­profile “quality of life” campaign. Profilaktika emerged in the USSR decades before Wilson and Kelling wrote their 1982 article, but it was based on remarkably similar logic. On the most obvious level, profilaktika was an effort to prevent major crimes (such as a mass insurrection) by targeting minor ones (such as anti-­Soviet jokes, rumors, and complaining). But the connection between profilaktika and broken-­windows policing ran deeper, since both tactics involved distaste for antisocial behavior. The KGB’s Counter-­Intelligence Dictionary, for instance, argued that the tactic could be used against “antisocial acts which, though not constituting a crime against the state (or a crime in general), might well grow into one” (Nikit­ chenko 1972, 238). Offenders were more likely to be subjected to profilaktika if they committed their misdeed while drunk, and KGB officers were suspicious of deviant, antisocial groups like “hooligans,” “hippies,” and “punks” (who were

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frequently subjected to profilaktika). Most importantly, profilaktika was used by the KGB as a form of order maintenance, intended to not merely change its victims’ behavior but to stamp out actions that publicized political nonconformity and threatened the aura of stability that supposedly defined Soviet rule. This approach was evident in many profilaktika cases but was especially clear in a June 1972 case involving a Lithuanian mechanic, who had told his coworkers that he missed work because he was delayed by a KGB crackdown on hippies who had started rioting in Kaunas after the self-­immolation of a young protester. The man was accused of spreading “anti-­Soviet rumors,” even though his comments were an innocuous reference to the high-­profile case of Romas Kalanta4 (Swain 2013). In case after case, KGB officers used “prophylactic measures” to crack down on minor crimes that threatened the social and political environment. Profilaktika, in short, was a form of broken-­windows policing. In all, around 60 percent of all Lithuanian profilaktika cases from the 1960s and 1970s resulted from accusations of “anti-­Soviet and politically harmful statements and other manifestations without harmful intent.”5 Some profilaktika cases had very little to do with social disorder: a citizen could be summoned to a “chat” when he or she met with foreigners, revealed state secrets, or illegally imported contraband, for example. Others cases involved more serious dissent. Many instances, however, dealt with low-­level anti-­Soviet manifestations that—­if left unaddressed—­created the impression that “no one cared” about dissent and disorder. A May 1974 case from Kuršėnai, for example, concerned a tenth grader accused of writing the slogans “Freedom to Lithuania” and “Hands off Kaunas” (Lithuania’s second-­largest city) on six public buildings6—­exactly the sort of behavior likely to upset the Soviet equivalents of Wilson and Kelling. Other cases involved the members of anti-­Soviet youth groups, who were often charged with leaving makeshift political leaflets on the streets of Lithuanian cities after writing them in pencil on ripped-­out notebook paper.7 Still other profilaktika victims were accused of disorderly conduct, such as making drunken threats or anti-­Soviet comments to soldiers and Communists.8 The broken-­windows approach to profilaktika was perhaps most evident in cases where the KGB attacked a workplace culture of political complaints. A September 1974 case from Kaunas involved a man accused of “praising the bourgeois way of life” and “trying to show that everything is bad in the USSR and everything is good in capitalist countries”; he admitted to the KGB that he had taken part in improper “political conversations” with coworkers and had made incorrect statements about the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1968.9 Many cases targeted offenders who made politically suspect comments and complaints within their “milieu” (okruzhenie), often pointing specifically to the harmful effects of the offenders’ remarks on those around them.10

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A particularly colorful 1973 case, however, illustrates several wrinkles in the KGB’s crackdown on “unhealthy remarks” by Lithuanian citizens. In that case, an informer told the KGB that a mechanic named Viktoras Pečkis had made a series of “politically harmful statements.” He had complained that the Red Army was “ragged and dirty” when it arrived in Lithuania and now “gorged itself on Lithuanian meat” before making the fascist salute to his boss and greeting him with the words “Heil Hitler!”11 Pečkis’s comments on the army had obvious political overtones, but his criticism of his supervisor stood on the border between complaining about his boss and making a political statement about the Soviet regime. It seems highly unlikely that Pečkis—­a forty-­six-­year-­old man—­was going to become a more serious foe of the Soviet regime if the KGB did not act. Instead, he had engaged in behavior—­especially the angry fascist salute—­that mocked an authority figure and threatened the sense of order that the regime was determined to maintain. There are several ways to interpret these cases. “Prophylactic chats” differed from arrests inspired by broken-­windows theory in that they were more explicitly intended to reshape the behavior of the accused: a New York graffiti artist was unlikely to become a murderer, after all, but an Estonian teenager who distributed anti-­Soviet pamphlets might eventually become a more dangerous dissident. Some profilaktika cases—­including those dealing with rumors and even jokes—­can be understood as efforts by an authoritarian regime to control information flows, involving activity sometimes interpreted as a more subtle form of social contagion (Barash 2011). In case after case, however, Baltic profilaktika cases were intended—­at least in part—­as efforts to maintain order by eliminating signs of nonconformity, discontentment, or antisocial behavior, especially in instances where an offender’s actions negatively influenced his or her “milieu.” KGB officers believed that the best way to prevent larger-­scale dissent was not only to reeducate low-­level offenders but to eliminate signs of petty disorder that created an atmosphere fostering larger-­scale unrest. Their tactics had nearly as much in common with Bratton-­era New York policing as they did with the traditional methodology of the secret police.

Foreign Contagion and Soviet Dissent In April 1978, a twenty-­two-­year-­old woman named Valeriia Kotel’nikova was summoned to the KGB’s offices in Klaipeda, Lithuania, for a prophylactic chat. Reports to the KGB noted that she had been consorting with foreign sailors for the last two years; Kotel’nikova, a KGB officer wrote, was a “woman of easy behavior” who met with foreigners for “amoral” and “mercenary” reasons. In fact, the officer went on to write that Kotel’nikova “embraces the most negative aspects of the so-­called ‘western way of life,’ commits actions defaming the

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honor and dignity of a Soviet citizen, and creates a false impression of Soviet reality among foreigners, causing political harm to our state.” Two officers then grilled their victim on her behavior, pushing her to admit that she had been meeting with sailors since she was seventeen, that she often got gifts of foreign currency and small consumer items from them, and that she frequently spent time with foreigners in restaurants and apartments. Kotel’nikova agreed that she had violated the moral norms of Soviet society and was told that if she did not draw conclusions from the conversation, she would face “more severe measures.”12 Kotel’nikova’s case highlights another feature of many profilaktika cases: the KGB’s particular fear of contagion from abroad. In case after case, KGB officers showed a particular concern that “bourgeois ideology” would be introduced to Soviet society from the West; they therefore summoned a variety of people to prophylactic chats, including women who slept with foreign sailors, Lithuanian sailors who violated the regime’s rules on foreign travel, citizens who had improper contact with foreign tourists, and people who listened to foreign radio broadcasts (like the BBC and the Voice of America). A typical KGB report, for example, discussed the impact of a seven-­day visit by a Canadian tourist on the behavior of his Lithuanian sister. The man, a Toronto resident from an émigré family, took his sister to “lavish” meals in restaurants and gave her expensive gifts and $200 in foreign currency; soon after he left, the woman and two other brothers made anti-­Russian nationalist comments at a meeting in a public cemetery that was supposed to honor the veterans who had liberated the city from the Nazis.13 KGB officials worried both that Soviet citizens would grow dissatisfied with Soviet life when they met with foreigners and that they would absorb the antisocial behaviors of the capitalist West. These worries were in many ways unsurprising. As a number of scholars have shown, contagion narratives were often connected to Cold War paranoia on both sides of the Iron Curtain (Wald 2008; Smith 2014). The USSR, moreover, had a long history of international isolation and distrust of foreigners, and the Baltic States occupied a strategic location near the USSR’s western border, relatively close to Scandinavia and the West. Although they were closed to international visitors in the years after their 1940 incorporation into the USSR, the Baltic republics were opened to foreign tourists in 1959, when the Soviet regime made their capitals into model cities for Westerners to visit (Gorsuch 2011; Misiunas and Taagepera 1993). From then onward, KGB officers closely monitored Baltic residents when they interacted with foreign visitors or corresponded with relatives in the West. One feature stood out in nearly every profilaktika case involving improper contact with foreigners: The KGB’s victim was rarely accused of a concrete crime. Kotel’nikova herself was accused of “exerting harmful influence on

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her milieu among the city’s youth”14—­yet another instance of a profilaktika victim being targeted because of her influence on others. Like Kotel’nikova, most women who associated with foreign sailors were accused of being both greedy and sexually promiscuous. Some were alleged to have hung around the city’s port looking for foreigners, while others spent a lot of time in restaurants and cafes frequented by sailors from capitalist countries. Some women were accused of drinking and socializing with capitalist sailors, some invited sailors back to their apartments, and many accepted small gifts, including Soviet money, foreign currency, and portable consumer goods. Some women were charged with keeping foreign sailors in their apartment for days at a time, even making them miss their ships home. In the most serious cases of all, some women were accused of trying to get foreign men to marry them and help them emigrate. Others were accused of prostitution or were treated like prostitutes even when they were not actually involved in the sex trade— ­illustrating the complexities of the party’s vision of sexual morality and private life in the post-­Stalin years, when sexual “amorality” (especially by women) was often criticized as a sign of egotistical individualism and a dangerous vestige of the capitalist past (Field 2007). Another variety of profilaktika cases involved contact between Soviet citizens and foreign ideas, often involving citizens accused of engaging in anti-­Soviet activities after listening to foreign radio, especially the Voice of America, the BBC, or Vatican Radio. In 1971, for instance, a worker at a cardboard workshop was accused of passing along news she heard on foreign radio, as well as threatening Communists with acts of violence and talking publicly about an émigré relative’s pro-­American comments15; similarly, a train dispatcher was subjected to profilaktika in 1975 after playing foreign radio loudly in the presence of passengers, retelling the program’s contents, and making anti-­Soviet comments.16 Other Lithuanians were accused of belonging to deviant subcultures associated with the West, such as punks, hippies, and even the Hare Krishna. In a dramatic case during the fall of 1985, three teenagers were accused of trying to start an illegal “profascist” group in Kaunas. The boys were allegedly “followers” of punk and new wave music who championed a cult of violence. They had supposedly been won over to sexual dissolution and fascism by listening to KISS and Black Sabbath and watching Hollywood movies like Rambo and Class of 1984.17 In short, profilaktika cases involving the foreign threat featured traditional xenophobia, a realistic fear of foreign propaganda, and moral panics about the noxious influence of Western pop culture figures like Sylvester Stallone. Cases like these were especially well suited for an outbreak narrative, given that they combined contamination from foreign parts with the spread of rumors, videotapes, and retold radio stories dealing with the outside world. As Julie

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FIGURE 12.1  The August 1987 Hirvepark demonstration in Tallinn, Estonia. This was one of the first public demonstrations against Soviet rule in the Baltic republics. Photo by Erich Norman. Courtesy of the Film Archives of the National Archives of Estonia.

Fedor has noted, the rise of profilaktika even coincided with the opening of the USSR to foreign visitors and cultures—­a crucial fact in understanding the Soviet epidemiology of dissent (Fedor 2011, 52). Profilaktika cases from the Baltic, in short, help us both see that the KGB frequently viewed anti-­Soviet activity as a contagious behavior and understand the reasons that the KGB looked at dissent through an epidemiological lens. KGB officers treated dissent like an infectious disease because this approach enabled them to portray it as a temporary ailment and an alien force in Soviet society—­not as the result of deep-­seated opposition to rule from Moscow. As late as August 1987, the KGB therefore used profilaktika as one of its main responses to the large organized demonstrations that broke out in all three Baltic capitals and cited insufficient use of the tactic as an excuse for the demonstrations.18 In the years after Stalin’s death in 1953, an epidemiological approach also allowed the KGB to argue that dissent was a problem to be managed, not a serious long-­term threat, and gave the secret police’s methodology a scientific, even revolutionary, veneer. Prophylaxis, in short, was a powerful tool that served the KGB politically while offering the promise that it would allow the regime to overcome anti-­Soviet activity at last. *

*

*

Prophylactic Policing and the Epidemiology of Dissent  •  201

Research for this article was completed with the support of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Notes 1 Lietuvos ypatingasis archyvas (Lithuanian Special Archive [LYA]) f. K-1, ap. 3, b,

682, l. 30.

2 For representative examples, see LYA f. K-18, ap. 1, b. 345, l. 168; f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 697, l. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

71; f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 687, ll. 79–­83. F. K-1, ap. 3, b. 730, ll. 6–­9. Latvijas Valsts arhīvs (Latvian State Archives) f. PA-­101, o. 43, d. 75, l. 18. LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 697, ll. 44–­45. LYA f. K-15, ap. 1, b. 307. LYA f. K-18, ap. 1, b. 514, ll. 35–­41, 73–­74. LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 632, ll. 20–­22, 26–­27; f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 730, ll. 70–­71; f. K-18, ap. 1, b. 511, ll. 50–­58, 209. LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 687, ll. 58–­61; f. K-11, ap. 2, b. 283, ll. 218–­219. LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 713, ll. 62–­64. LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 682, l. 89. LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 710, ll. 25–­27. LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 753, ll. 34–­35. LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 712, ll. 40–­42, 46–­48. LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 753, l. 35. LYA f. K-18, ap. 1, b. 511, ll. 37–­38. LYA f. K-1, ap. 3, b. 726, ll. 6–­7. LYA f. K-18, ap. 1, b. 315, ll. 9–­10. See, for example, LYA f. 1771, a. 270, b. 55, l. 2, and b. 57, ll. 1–­2.

References Akers, Timothy A., Roberto H. Potter, and Carl V. Hill. 2013. Epidemiological Criminology: A Public Health Approach to Crime and Violence. San Francisco: Jossey-­Bass. Barash, Vladimir. 2011. “The Dynamics of Social Contagion.” PhD diss., Cornell University. Chebrikov, V. M. 1977. Istoriia sovetskikh organov gosudarstennoi bezopasnosti: Uchebnik. Moscow: Vysshaia krasoznamennaia shkola komiteta gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR imeni F. E. Dzerzhinskii. Cohn, Edward. 2017. “Coercion, Reeducation, and the Prophylactic Chat: Profilaktika and the KGB’s Struggle with Political Unrest in Lithuania, 1953–­1964.” Russian Review 76 (April 2017): 272–­293. Farrington, D. P., and R. Loeber. 2000. “Epidemiology of Juvenile Violence.” Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America 9 (4): 733–­748. Fedor, Julie. 2011. Russia and the Cult of State Security: The Chekist Tradition, from Lenin to Putin. London: Routledge. Field, Deborah. 2007. Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia. New York: Peter Lang.

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Gliksman, Jerzy G. 1954. Social Prophylaxis as a Form of Soviet Terror. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Gorsuch, Anne. 2011. All This Is Your World: Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad after Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Mark. 2016. One Day We Will Live without Fear: Everyday Lives under the Soviet Police State. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Healey, Dan. 2014. “Russian and Soviet Forensic Psychiatry: Troubled and Troubling.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 37 (1): 71–­81. Hornsby, Robert. 2013. Protest, Reform, and Repression in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ivanin, G. I. 1971. Nekotorye Voprosy Operativnoi Psikhologii: Kurs Lektsii. Moscow: Vysshaia krasoznamennaia shkola komiteta gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR imeni F. E. Dzerzhinskii. Keizer, Kees, Siegwart Lindenberg, and Linda Steg. 2008. “The Spreading of Disorder.” Science 322: 1681–­1685. Kelling, George L. 1991. “The Contagion of Public Disorder.” City Journal (Spring 1991): 57–­61. Kelling, George, and Catherine Coles. 1996. Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crimes in Our Communities. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kozlov, Vladimir A, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Sergei V. Mironenko. 2011. Sedition: Everyday Resistance in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kruglanski, Arie W., Martha Crenshaw, Jerrold Post, and Jeff Victoroff. 2008. “What Should This Fight Be Called? Metaphors of Counterterrorism and Their Implications.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 8 (3): 97–­133. Lewin, Moshe. 2005. The Soviet Century. London: Verso. Mironov, N. R. 1959. “Za smeloe primenenie profilaktichekikhx, predupreditel’nykh mer I usilenie sviazi s narodom.” Sbornik 1:55–­74. Mironov, N. R. 1969. Ukreplenie zakonnosti i pravoporiadka v obshchenarodnom gosudarstve programmnaia zadacha partii. Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura. Misiunas, Romuald, and Rein Taagepera. 1993. The Baltic States: Years of Dependence, 1940 1990. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nikitchenko, V. F., ed. 1972. Kontrrazvedyvatel’nyi slovar’. Moscow: Vysshaia krasoznamennaia shkola komiteta gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR imeni F. E. Dzerzhinskii. Pikhoia, R. G. 2000. Sovetskii soiuz: Istoriia vlasti, 1945–­1991. Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronolog. Ransford, Charles, Candice Kane, and Gary Slutkin. 2013. “Cure Violence: A Disease Control Approach to Reduce Violence and Change Behavior.” In Epidemiological Criminology: Theory to Practice, edited by Eve Waltermaurer and Timothy Akers, 232–­243. New York: Routledge. Smith, Jeff. 2014. Film Criticism, the Cold War, and the Blacklist: Reading the Hollywood Reds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, Theresa C., and Thomas A. Oleszczuk. 1996. No Asylum: State Psychiatric Repression in the Former USSR. New York: New York University Press. Stares, Paul B., and Mona Yacoubian. 2006. “Unconventional Approaches to an Unconventional Threat: A Counter-­Epidemic Strategy.” In Mapping the Jihadist Threat: The War on

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Terror since 9/11, edited by Kurd M. Campbell and Darseil Willow, 85–­118. Queenstown: Aspen Institute. Tsvetkova, Milena, and Michael Macy. 2015. “The Social Contagion of Antisocial Behavior.” Sociological Science 2:36–­49. Wald, Patricia. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press. Wilson, James Q., and George Kelling. 1982. “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” Atlantic Monthly 249 (3): 29–­39.

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Sexual Politics and Contagious Social Movements ERIC SWANK Social definitions about “proper” and “acceptable” sexualities are rooted in the enactment of social power. In order to restrict sexual diversity, institutions like churches, governments, schools, and political organizations often employ tools that force stigmatized groups act in ways that are against their wishes and best interests (Lukes 1986). For example, gays and lesbians during childhood are often forced to attend religious institutions that demean their sexual identities, and they are often pressured to romantically couple with a person of the opposite sex. Heterosexist practices—­that is, practices that deny, denigrate, and stigmatize nonheterosexuals—­dominate the landscape of American society. The United States still has many gaps in protecting LGBT citizens from discrimination, including laws against lesbians and gays adopting children and no federally recognized protection for LGBT individuals against employment discrimination, harassment, and job loss (Herek 2004). However, domination and discrimination go beyond obvious forms of structural oppression, as powerful institutions spread ideas that legitimize prevailing practices and preserve the heterosexual status quo. To think about the relationship between power and sexual identities, many scholars have argued that sexual identities are social constructs, identity markers, and sites of contention for individuals, groups, and institutions (Connell 204

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1987). Compulsory heterosexuality—­or the notion that one must be heterosexual and that any other choice is wrong or bad—­is often seen as cornerstone of sexual politics because it maintains that heterosexuality is the normal, natural, and superior sexual expression (Rich 1980). With heteronormativity built into the logic and practices of societal institutions, LGBT identities are often subjected to derisive and degrading comments about the supposed “immorality” or “sickness” of anything other than heterosexuality. While the practices of sexual politics and heteronormativity can be addressed in many different theoretical and conceptual frameworks, this chapter addresses the ways that the regulation of sexualities can be seen through the metaphor of contagion, sickness, and spread. (I do so with the full awareness that using contagion as a metaphor has its own hazards; see chapter 5.) To connect sexual politics to issues of contagion, social control, and political struggles, this chapter explores four related topics to argue that contagion can be both repressive and liberatory: (1) the conservative assumption that LGBT identities are “defective” traits that should be hidden, concealed, and kept in “the closet”; (2) the fear of heterosexuals must always manage their sexual reputations in order to prove they are straight; (3) the symbolic and psychological fear of heterosexuals “catching gayness” through social interactions with sexual minorities; and (4) the ways that conversations with sexual minorities can turn heterosexuals into activists who publically challenge heterosexual privilege and discrimination against LGBT people. Much of this discussion is theoretical and analytical in nature, but I also draw heavily from relevant social science findings to support the key arguments in this chapter.

Sexual Politics and Heteronormativity In Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael Warner (1991) suggests that heteronormative belief structures insist that heterosexuality should be accepted as being the universal, legitimate, and morally superior sexuality. Scholarship on the public and private realms of life has shown how heteronormativity is central to concepts of the family, intimate relationships, workers, and citizens (Lind 2013). The government, given its ability to write laws and regulate human activity, can shape the citizenry’s sexual imagination and impose a particular normative vision. In doing so, the state “has a sexual agenda” that favors some groups at the expense of others (Bernstein and Schaffner 2005, xiii). The state and the mainstream institutions of church, schools, and the media can manipulate understandings of sexualities in explicit and overt ways. Through laws and policies that explicitly favor heterosexuals, the state can regulate sexualities through a variety of overt means: violent and repressive tactics of police brutality, imprisonment, and condoning or allowing the acts of hate crimes against sexual minorities. With less visible forms of physical violence, institutions can

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offer more rights and opportunities to heterosexuals while limiting or denying the same options to sexual minorities. For example, many countries outlaw anal sex, whereas others lack crucial protections for LGBT individuals, such as not being fired by a place of employment because of one’s sexual identity and having access to a partner’s health care. Questions regarding how effectively the state can regulate “abnormal” sexualities have been called sexual politics. David Bell and Jon Binnie (2000) define sexual politics as a terrain in which institutions, groups, and individuals struggle over the rights of people to have self-­determination in their expression of sexual attractions, beliefs, and practices. Often, these struggles happen in the conventional domain of electoral politics and government, but much of this struggle also occurs in the practices of media outlets, workplaces, religious institutions, schools, families, and face-­to-­face conversations in the general public. The form, methods, and substance of sexual politics have some universal dynamics, but many of the specific manifestations of this phenomena vary by country, region, and time. For example, the sexual politics of rural Morehead, Kentucky, with Kim Davis in charge of issuing marriage certificates (Swank, Fahs, and Frost 2013) differs greatly from the sexual politics of the San Francisco, California, Castro district when Harvey Milk was on the board of supervisors (Armstrong 2002). Sexual citizenship is undergirded by a set of dichotomies about the supposedly separate worlds of public and private spaces (Plummer 2001). Public mandates often demand that sexual minorities hide or conceal their sexual identities so that heterosexuals can assume that everybody is heterosexual in everyday contexts and activities. LGBT people are hidden in plain sight and rarely experience complete freedom of “outing” themselves in all contexts. Disclosures of sexual identities to others are often fraught with tension and apprehension because of anticipated negative reactions by other people. Thus narratives and practices about a “closet” and “coming-­out” are tied to the assumptions of which sexual identities should be secret, hidden, and out of public recognition. However, public disclosures of an LGBT identity can be seen as an overt political challenge because they break genteel social facades and demand the recognition of sexual diversity (Bernstein 1997).

Sexual Identities as “Contagious” Even with these attempts to silence and ignore LGBT presence, gays and lesbians are found in almost every social setting, and most regions in the United States have some sort of LGBT community and subculture (e.g., gay neighborhoods, support networks online, workplace social groups). These communities serve many functions for sexual minorities, including the creation of safe places for people who just came out and the development of gay-­affirmative

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FIGURE 13.1  “Your Silence Will Not Save You.” Protesters at the Women’s March in Los Angeles, California, on January 21, 2017, highlight sexual politics at the first protest of the Trump administration. Photo by Eric Swank.

rituals and resources to enhance the resiliency of sexual minorities (Bernstein 1997). Moreover, the creation of LGBT community centers as well as queer bookstores, lesbian music scenes, and LGBT college curriculums all provide the social spaces for sexual minorities to construct affirmative social identities, engage in political organizing, and connect with other LGBT people and allies to combat LGBT oppression. While the LGBT community may seem sequestered and unrecognized by many heterosexuals, even the most isolated and oblivious heterosexuals come into contact with LGBT teachers, cops, coworkers, and community members. This mingling and intergroup contact between people of different sexualities can sometimes inspire positive changes in perception and attitudes about the diversity of sexuality (Smith, Axelton, and Saucier 2009). Still, conventional social scripts often render such interactions as possibly dangerous and harmful to the social order that maintains heterosexuality as compulsory and “superior” to LGBT identity. Specifically, concerns about social contagion often fixate on the spread of toxic qualities from a population with less power (e.g., sexual minorities) to a “healthy” population with more power (e.g., heterosexuals; Plummer and McCann 2007). Moral concerns on the “coming out” process are often

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connected to deep-­seated fears of LGBT sexualities as both dangerous and transmittable. While missing the technical terms of medical germ theory, moral panics about a possible spread of the “gay lifestyle” often rely on terms like decay, corruption, perversion, and pollution. Gayness, according to this logic, can be transmitted simply through the idea that someone else is gay; a student learning that his or her teacher is gay or watching gay characters on a television show could be immediately converted to a gay identity at the mere suggestion of it as a possibility. At some sort of basic level, all the expressions of a brewing gay pestilence or the slippery slope of a homosexual invasion are grounded in the implication that sexual diversity is a disease that can consume, spread, and infect the moral fiber of a “safe” heterosexual society. Research on the “magical law of contagion” has demonstrated that people fear that bad personal characteristics can also be spread through contact with social deviants. The fear of contact can manifest in many ways and can even be seen in physical objects that touch infected beings. For example, some people are so afraid of catching “bad morals” that they are reluctant to wear an article of clothing previously worn by an “immoral” person, believing that the clothing would be imbued with some of that person’s immorality (Nemeroff and Rozin 1994). Other individuals worry that sexual minorities are intentionally trying to undermine and change the sexual preferences of heterosexuals. Organizations such as Defend the Family distribute printed materials that teach parents to protect their child from being “recruited” by gay men or lesbians (e.g., “Seven Steps to Recruit-­Proof Your Child”). These rhetorical practices reveal the insidious ways that gay panics rely on rather preposterous notions of “catching the gay” to promote fear and hostility toward the LGBT population. (Recently, parents of trans teenagers have expressed fear that trans identities are contagious among friends, revealing this paranoia as targeting all sexual minorities; see Fahs, forthcoming) When heterosexuality in this framework is portrayed as a vulnerable entity susceptible to a powerful and insatiable “gay appetite,” a whole set of legal restraints and social containments emerge as supposedly “reasonable” responses. Although the reactions to gay contagion can take many forms, Mark Schaller and Justin Park (2011) have provided a cogent and detailed account of how these processes work. By offering the idea of a “behavioral immune system,” Schaller and Park suggest that control and containment of contagious sexualities focus on (a) the detection of infectious sexualities in the immediate environment, (b) the triggering of disease-­relevant fears and disgust in homophobic individuals, and (c) the behavioral avoidance of a possible LGBT pathogen infection. In short, the detection and identification of sexual minorities are vital to organizations and people who want to halt the “dangerous” spread of homosexuality. Similar to the outbreak narratives of physical diseases (Wald 2008),

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identification programs are done at individual and institutional levels as different entities try to detect people who are carrying the perceived LGBT pathogen. Taking this metaphor a step further, some infectious diseases are readily identified by visual cues—­coughing, sneezing, skin rashes—­whereas others can be highly infectious but asymptomatic in their carrier (e.g., Zika virus). With homosexual identities being concealable, many homophobic people concerned about “gay contagion” may be especially paranoid about the asymptomatic LGBT people who may be secretly in their midst. In fearing that heterosexuals lack the adequate “gaydar” to recognize LGBT in their presence, perceptions of “abnormality” in gender performances are often used as a heuristic tool to discover LGBT identity (Kimmell 1994). This means that fears of gay contagion require continual scanning for signs of people who violate the expectations of “normative” gender roles. While much of the surveillance of sexual identities happens in face-­to-­face interactions or small social groups, there are many instances in which federal governments fixate on knowing the sexual identities of their citizens. After World War  II, the U.S. military began its obsession on gays in the military, enacting a policy that forbade GI bill benefits to gay and lesbian military veterans (Canaday 2003). At the same time, the Canadian government feared that gay and lesbian civil servants were so morally weak that they funded and used a (in their words) “fruit machine” that guided the detection and dismissals of lesbian or gay employees (Kinsman 1995). These state practices reflect the startling degree to which detection of LGBT identity, coupled with fear of gay contagion or “disease,” has created harmful norms of intrusion and state paranoia about sexuality. Fear of sexual contagions is also often coupled with disgust about homosexuality (Inbar, Pizarro, and Bloom 2009). Experiments have found a relation­ship between the fear of gay teacher indoctrination and people’s disgust toward homosexuality (Filip-­Crawford and Neuberg 2016). One study by Cottrell and Neuberg (2005) revealed that college students displayed more disgust toward gays and lesbians than any other stigmatized group in America (i.e., African Americans, disabled people, fundamentalist Christians). Conservative rhetoric of “gay contagion” often relies on threat-­based notions of spread, treatment, and inoculation. With LGBT people functioning as a symbolic pathogen, societies, institutions, and groups have implemented a wide array of ways to prevent, contain, treat, or eradicate the feared “pathogens” of homosexuality and pro-­gay ideology. Avoiding contact with pathogens is one of the safest and easiest forms of disease prevention. To facilitate this, humans have evolved a repertoire of behaviors designed to minimize the amount of encounters of “healthy” heterosexuals with infectious agents. Attempts to limit encounters with LGBT people are far-­reaching, multidimensional, and quite insidious. Avoidance, or social distancing, is a common

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way to elude the feared spread of homosexuality (Hinrichs and Rosenberg 2002). Individuals who want to claim heterosexual privileges have been shown to be especially invested in their appearance as “authentic” heterosexuals (Bosson, Prewitt-­Freilino, and Taylor 2005). With sexual identities being a mutable status that needs to be achieved, some heterosexuals may routinely enact statements, gestures, and symbols that publically “prove” their heterosexuality. This might include performing in hypermasculinized or feminized manners that can entail derision or enactment of discriminatory and hostile behaviors toward sexual minorities. In anticipating that one’s heterosexual reputation may be questioned or spoiled by simply talking with LGBT individuals, many heterosexuals do their best to segregate themselves away from any person who appears queer (Goffman 1963). In the logic of quarantine, heterosexuals may shun restaurants with gay servers, avoid media with lesbian content, or send their children to private religious schools. Moreover, people who report negative attitudes toward sexual minorities also tend to report that they would not accept a gay man or lesbian as a close relative, would not want gay men or lesbians to live on their street, and would not like them as a coworker (Hinrichs and Rosenberg 2002). Moreover, men who feared that they were not seen as masculine enough were more likely to condone homophobic remarks than men who did not care about being seen as stereotypically “macho” (Kroeper, Sanchez, and Himmelstein 2014). Heterosexuals also did not volunteer for an AIDS support groups or attend gay pride rallies when they worried that others might perceive them as gay or lesbian (Dwyer, Snyder, and Omoto 2013). Containment strategies also influence practices toward LGBT targets. Gay men and lesbian women can be forbidden from having certain jobs, parental roles, and housing arrangements, and violent homophobes often turn to aggression and violence when they are upset by having an LGBT person around them. Harassment and discrimination against LGBT people are alarmingly common, with a recent meta-­analysis of 386 studies showing that 55 percent of LGBT people have experienced verbal harassment and 41 percent of this group have experienced some form of discrimination (Katz-­Wise and Hyde 2012). People that pathologize LGBT identity as a “sickness” might also call for “curing” gay identity. The pseudoscientific program called “conversion therapy” promises to change an individual’s sexual identity and/or sexual behavior from homosexual to heterosexual in order to supposedly “help” them (Haldeman 2002). Such programs are often religiously based and led by “ex-­ gays” who think they can suppress homosexual desires and attraction through a combination of prayer, group-­sharing exercises, journaling, and so on (e.g., Journey to Manhood program, sponsored by People Can Change). While these programs are often voluntary for conflicted adults who are unhappy or

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ambivalent about their current sexual orientation, parents and legal guardians in some parts of the country can force their children to participate in such programs against their will. These sexual “reorientation” programs are not endorsed by any professional mental health association, and studies suggest that conversion therapies are overwhelmingly ineffective and damaging to participants (Dehlin et al. 2015).

Heterosexuals Who Challenge Heterosexism Contagion metaphors not only are applicable to efforts to maintain heterosexual dominance but can also apply to campaigns against heterosexism and movements toward progressive social change and civil rights for LGBT people. Individual forms of LGBT activism and social movements are cyclical challenges to authority (Ghaziani, Taylor, and Stone 2016). Typically, conservative sexual politics prevail, and collective mobilizations against heterosexism are most often covert, in abeyance, and considered too small and unimportant to get much recognition in the press or elsewhere. Then during unique moments of growth and expansion, LGBT social movements—­where allies and sexual minorities come together to fight for social change—­can become prominent social entities that gain the recognition of the government, media, corporations, schools, and other mainstream institutions. Since the Stonewall uprising in 1969, the gay and lesbian rights movement has had several large mobilizations that have normalized same-­sex relationships, confronted the harmful assumptions of compulsory heterosexuality, fought for public recognition of LGBT relationships, and worked to improve the governmental laws, policies, and regulations that penalized LGBT people (Adam, Duyvendak, and Krouwel 2009). Social movement scholars have long studied the process of collective “diffusion” (Givan, Roberts, and Soule 2010), which refers to the spread of information, ideas, and practices from a source to an adopter. Issues of diffusion can be studied in social movements in many ways. Some analysis concentrates on the spread of resistance from one geographical place and time to another (Haider-­ Markel 2001), while other studies have looked at the diffusion of radical tactics over time and the ebb and flow of protest cycles (Ghaziani, Taylor, and Stone 2016). In this section of the chapter, I address how pro-­LGBT social movements grow and expand through the recruitment of new activists and allies. While the majority of activists in the LGBT movements identify as LGBT themselves (Swank and Fahs 2011), heterosexual allies also constitute a notable and important subsection of the people who contest heterosexual privileges in an open and public fashion. The diffusion of LGBT activism across people and groups occurs through social networks, evoking again a more progressive connotation of contagion

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as a metaphor. Social networks, which represent webs of recurring interactions between people and groups, typically entail conversations that convey beliefs, values, and norms. The transmission of pro-­gay messages depends on the points of communication between the creators and receptors of these messages. While mass media can transmit messages that condone the goals and tactics of social movements, most scholars argue that LGBT activists are created and maintained through the web of social networks that people are immersed in (Fingerhut 2011). For example, access to social environments that support progressive politics can generate ally activism among heterosexuals. Families with liberal parents often create liberal children (Fingerhut 2011; Goldstein and Davis 2010), and schools with diversity classes often generate more liberal activism than schools that do not (Friedman and Ayres 2013). Political parties, committed partisans, and movement activists often try to motivate activism through different persuasive techniques (e.g., face-­to-­face conversations, phone calls, email, and direct mail). As such, social networks seem to play the dual purpose of pushing and pulling people into political activism (Fetner and Kush 2008). In effect, social networks boost political engagement because they often convey attitudes that make people prone or receptive to activism (e.g., “I too believe in marriage equality”) and disseminate the logistical information that makes activism possible (e.g., notices about petitions, rallies, and key court cases, as well as encouragement to contact state representatives). Studies show that very few people become activists, but when they do, they are typically motivated by narratives that highlight widespread social injustices. Moreover, successful calls for action often connect to fundamental moral codes about decency and propose solutions that seem novel and efficacious but not too radical, extreme, or risky (Benford and Snow 2000). Members of relatively privileged groups, such as heterosexuals, occasionally reject their social advantages by protesting heterosexism ( Jones, Brewster, and Jones 2014; Russell 2011). Ally activism is rare because heterosexuals often assume that their privilege is legitimate, fair, and natural. Moreover, potential LGBT allies who question the merits of heterosexual privilege often fear negative reactions from others. With most heterosexuals trying to maintain their heterosexual identities or fearing that they may face social isolation or hate crimes for siding with a stigmatized population, recruiting allies to the LGBT movement is challenging. Conversations that debunk traditional sexuality and gender scripts are crucial to the cultivation of LGBT activism among heterosexuals (Montgomery and Stewart 2012). For example, factors like belonging to schools with gay-­ straight alliance groups, taking classes on heterosexist discrimination, and having prolonged discussions with peers about sexual orientations are essential to adolescent and college student engagement in LGBT-­affirming behavior

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(Walls, Kane, and Wisneski 2010). While diversity classes and the presence of liberal teachers on campus can lead to greater LGBT activism for heterosexual students, peer conversations that dispel sexual stereotypes, reveal the pain of heterosexist discrimination, and demand reflection on undeserved heterosexual advantages most clearly motivate LGBT activism among heterosexual allies. Heterosexual allies in qualitative studies often acknowledge the role of intergroup contact as they talk about the ways in which friendships with sexual minorities and participation in LGBT events were turning points that made them active participants in social justice campaigns (Grzanka, Adler, and Blazer 2015). Conversations with sexual minorities erode sexual prejudice among heterosexuals, as the simple fact of knowing gays and lesbians can turn heterosexuals against referendums that outlaw same-­sex marriages (Barth et al. 2009). However, the close ties found in friendships between heterosexuals and sexual minorities seem to be an even stronger force behind heterosexual ally activism (Broido 2000). While the mechanisms behind the importance of LGBT friendships are not fully understood, close emotional bonds with sexual minorities can lead to a greater understanding of heterosexual privilege and a personal commitment to doing something to end such unearned privileges (Montgomery and Stewart 2012). Moreover, heterosexual ally activism can represent the way that people show their commitment and solidarity with LGBT friends and how they display a moral-­altruistic version of themselves (McClendon 2014; Rostosky et al. 2015). In interviews, heterosexual allies have cited personal and familial relationships with LGBT people as a key reason for their collective action (Russell 2011), and quantitative studies confirm this assertion. Samples of adults, college students, and adolescents have found that gay or lesbian friends were significantly more likely to sign a pro-­same-­sex marriage or anti–­LGBT discrimination petition than those without such friends (Fingerhut 2011; Swank, Woodford, and Lim 2013). Similarly, heterosexuals who attended gay pride events have many more LGBT friends than heterosexuals who have not (Burgess and Baunach 2014; Goldstein and Davis 2010), and having LGBT “best friends” seems especially crucial for heterosexuals who join public demonstrations against homophobia (Calcagno 2016).

Conclusion In medical terms, pathogens are organisms such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites that can cause disease in their hosts. To many heterosexuals, the idea of homosexuality as a possible pathogen has strong social control ramifications because it defines what is healthy and unhealthy and can lead to draconian and punitive actions by states, groups, and individual actors. Attempts to erase or

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contain the presence of sexual minorities in societies come in many forms. The logic of compulsory heterosexuality demands that people maintain the impression that they are heterosexual at all times. This means that self-­identified heterosexuals strive to act in ways that seem unequivocally heterosexual, while sexual minorities receive messages that they should conceal their identities and “pass” as heterosexual while in public. When fears of LGBT contagion are highest, heterosexuals are also supposed to prefer sexual segregation and avoid any settings with LGBT individuals. The astonishing range of ways that conservatives feed into the idea of “gay contagion” reveals how contagion can serve to not only maintain the status quo but undermine civil and social rights for all. Historically, these efforts to curtail the spread of a possible LGBT contagion have generally marginalized and disempowered nonheterosexual populations. However, these social control techniques have limits and cannot block all challenges to heterosexual hegemony. Contagion, as this chapter has shown, can also help incite rebellion and encourage heterosexuals to engage in ally activism. Since the 1970s, many industrialized countries have seen the growth of massive political movements that confront and challenge homophobic laws, policies, and social customs that promote compulsory heterosexuality. While these movements have mostly been organized and participated in by sexual minorities, heterosexual allies constitute a sizeable number of activists who join LGBT people in solidarity with these struggles. As this chapter shows, while the creation of ally activists is generally slow and relies on exposure to activist narratives about social problems and political solutions, ally activism is on the rise. Contact and discussions between heterosexuals and LGBT individuals often lessen sexual prejudices among heterosexuals and transmits the sort of ideas that inspire greater ally activism. This form of contagion—­through conversations, words, and shared experiences—­can serve as a liberatory force. With the rise of hateful and conservative state powers in the United States and elsewhere, the need for solidarity across social identities—­and the potential for viral spread of ideas, interests, and goals—­will be all the more necessary, important, and salient.

References Adam, Barry, Jan Duyvendak, and Andre Krouwel. 2009. The Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints of a Worldwide Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Armstrong, Elizabeth. 2002. Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–­1994. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barth, Jay, Marvin Overby, and Scott Huffmon. 2009. “Community Context, Personal Contact, and Support for an Anti-­gay Rights Referendum.” Political Research Quarterly 62:355–­365.

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Bell, David, and Jon Binnie. 2000. The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond. Malden: Blackwell. Benford, Robert, and David Snow. 2000. “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 26:611–­639. Bernstein, Elizabeth, and Laurie Schaffner, eds. 2005. Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity. New York: Routledge. Bernstein, Mary. 1997. “Celebration and Suppression: The Strategic Uses of Identity by the Lesbian and Gay Movement.” American Journal of Sociology 103:531–­565. Bosson, Jennifer, Jennifer Prewitt-­Freilino, and Jenel Taylor. 2005. “Role Rigidity: A Problem of Identity Misclassification?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89:552–­565. Broido, Ellen. 2000. “The Development of Social Justice Allies during College: A Phenomenological Investigation.” Journal of College Student Development 41:3–­18. Burgess, Elisabeth, and Dawn Baunach. 2014. “Heterosexual Allies? Understanding Heterosexuals’ Alliance with the Gay Community.” Sexuality and Culture 18:936–­958. Burt, Ronald. 1987. “Social Contagion and Innovation: Cohesion versus Structural Equivalence.” American Journal of Sociology 92:1287–­1335. Calcagno, Justine. 2016. “Transforming Straight Guilt into Collective Action for LGBs via Close Cross-­Group Friendships.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 40:451–­463. Canaday, Margot. 2003. “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 GI Bill.” Journal of American History 90:935–­957. Connell, R. W. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cottrell, Catherine, and Steven Neuberg. 2005. “Different Emotional Reactions to Different Groups.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 88:770–­789. Dehlin, John, Renee Galliher, William Bradshaw, Daniel Hyde, and Katherine Crowell. 2015. “Sexual Orientation Change Efforts among Current or Former LDS Church Members.” Journal of Counseling Psychology 62:95–­105. Dwyer, Patrick, Mark Snyder, and Allen Omoto. 2013. “When Stigma-­by-­Association Threatens, Self-­Esteem Helps.” Basic and Applied Social Psychology 35:88–­97. Fahs, Breanne. Forthcoming. “In Preparation: The Coming Out Process for Trans Teenagers: Negotiating Multiple Identities, Parental Responses, and Early Transitions.” Trans Studies. Fetner, Tina, and Kristin Kush. 2008. “Gay-­Straight Alliances in High Schools.” Youth and Society 40:114–­130. Filip-­Crawford, Gabrielle, and Steven Neuberg. 2016. “Homosexuality and Pro-­gay Ideology as Pathogens?” Personality and Social Psychology Review 20:332–­364. Fingerhut, Adam. 2011. “Straight Allies: What Predicts Heterosexuals’ Alliance with the LGBT Community?” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 41:2230–­2248. Friedman, Carly, and Melanie Ayres. 2013. “Predictors of Feminist Activism among Sexual-­ Minority and Heterosexual College Women.” Journal of Homosexuality 60:1726–­1744. Ghaziani, Amin, Verta Taylor, and Amy Stone. 2016. “Cycles of Sameness and Difference in LGBT Social Movements.” Annual Review of Sociology 42:165–­183. Givan, Rebecca, Kenneth Roberts, and Sarah Soule, eds. 2010. The Diffusion of Social Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goffman, Erving. 1963. Stigma. New York: Simon and Schuster. Goldstein, Susan, and Denise Davis. 2010. “Heterosexual Allies: A Descriptive Profile.” Equity and Excellence in Education 43:478–­494. Grzanka, Patrick R., Jake Adler, and Jennifer Blazer. 2015. “Making up Allies: The Identity Choreography of Straight LGBT Activism.” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 12 (3): 165–­181.

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Haider-­Markel, Donald. 2001. “Policy Diffusion as a Geographical Expansion of the Scope of Political Conflict: Same-­Sex Marriage Bans in the 1990s.” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 1:5–­26. Haldeman, Douglas. 2002. “Gay Rights, Patient Rights: The Implications of Sexual Orientation Conversion Therapy.” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 33:260–­264. Herek, Gregory. 2004. “Beyond ‘Homophobia’: Thinking about Sexual Prejudice and Stigma in the Twenty-­First Century.” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 1:6–­24. Hinrichs, Donald, and Pamela Rosenberg. 2002. “Attitudes toward Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Persons among Heterosexual Liberal Arts College Students.” Journal of Homosexuality 43:61–­84. Inbar, Yoel, David A. Pizarro, Joshua Knobe, and Paul Bloom. 2009. “Disgust Sensitivity Predicts Intuitive Disapproval of Gays.” Emotion 9:435–­439. Jones, K. Nicole, Melanie Brewster, and Jacob Jones. 2014. “The Creation and Validation of the LGBT Ally Identity Measure.” Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity 1:181–­195. Katz-­Wise, Sabra, and Janet Hyde. 2012. “Victimization Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Individuals: A Meta-­analysis.” Journal of Sex Research 49:142–­167. Kimmell, Michael. 1994. “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity.” In Theorizing Masculinities, edited by Harry Broad and Michael Kaufman, 119–­141. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Kinsman, Gary. 1995. “‘Character Weaknesses’ and ‘Fruit Machines’: Towards an Analysis of the Anti-­homosexual Security Campaign in the Canadian Civil Service.” Labour/Le Travail 35:133–­161. Kroeper, Kathryn, Diana Sanchez, and Mary Himmelstein. 2014. “Heterosexual Men’s Confrontation of Sexual Prejudice: The Role of Precarious Manhood.” Sex Roles 70:1–­13. Lind, Amy 2013. “Heteronormativity and Sexuality.” In The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics, edited by Georgina Waylen, Karen Celis, Johanna Kantola, and S. Lauren Weldon, 187–­213. New York: Oxford University Press. Lukes, Steven. 1986. Power. New York: New York University Press. McClendon, Gwyneth. 2014. “Social Esteem and Participation in Contentious Politics: A Field Experiment at an LGBT Pride Rally.” American Journal of Political Science 58:279–­290. Montgomery, Samantha, and Abigail Stewart. 2012. “Privileged Allies in Lesbian and Gay Rights Activism: Gender, Generation, and Resistance to Heteronormativity.” Journal of Social Issues 68:162–­177. Nemeroff, Carol, and Paul Rozin. 1994. “The Contagion Concept in Adult Thinking in the United States: Transmission of Germs and of Interpersonal Influence.” Ethos 22:158–­186. Plummer, David, and Pol Dominic McCann. 2007. “Girls’ Germs: Sexuality, Gender, Health and Metaphors of Contagion.” Health Sociology Review 16:43–­52. Plummer, Kenneth. 2001. “The Square of Intimate Citizenship.” Citizenship Studies 5:237–­253. Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5:631–­660. Rostosky, Sharon, Whitney Black, Ellen Riggle, and Dani Rosenkrantz. 2015. “Positive Aspects of Being a Heterosexual Ally to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) People.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 85:331–­338. Russell, Glenda. 2011. “Motives of Heterosexual Allies in Collective Action for Equality.” Journal of Social Issues 67:376–­393.

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Schaller, Mark, and Justin Park. 2011. “The Behavioral Immune System (and Why It Matters).” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20:99–­103. Smith, Sara, Amber Axelton, and Donald Saucier. 2009. “The Effects of Contact on Sexual Prejudice: A Meta-­analysis.” Sex Roles 61:178–­191. Swank, Eric, and Breanne Fahs. 2011. “Pathways to Political Activism among Americans Who Have Same-­Sex Sexual Contact.” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 8:126–­138. Swank, Eric, Breanne Fahs, and David Frost. 2013. “Region, Social Identities, and Disclosure Practices as Predictors of Heterosexist Discrimination against Sexual Minorities in the United States.” Sociological Inquiry 83:238–­258. Swank, Eric, Michael Woodford, and Colin Lim. 2011. “Antecedents of Pro-­LGBT Advocacy among Sexual Minority and Heterosexual College Students.” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 10:317–­332. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham: Duke University Press. Walls, N. Eugene, Sarah Kane, and Hope Wisneski. 2010. “Gay-­Straight Alliances and School Experiences of Sexual Minority Youth.” Youth and Society 41:307–­332. Warner, Michael. 1991. “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet.” Social Text 29:3–­17.

14

Words on Fire Radical Pedagogies of the Feminist Manifesto BREANNE FAHS

Introduction Manifestos—­hot-­headed, urgent, sweeping, radical, revolutionary documents that mark a break with traditionalism and incremental change—­have constituted a notable part of Left history. At its core, the manifesto genre seeks to radically upend and subvert public consciousness around oppression and disempowerment while giving voice to those often stripped of power. Further, manifestos seek to purposefully infect readers (or listeners) by harnessing discursive tools to produce contagious speech and affects. As such, manifestos are messy, political, and often quite impactful, particularly as they resist containment and smash borders and boundaries between people, time periods, and places. This chapter closely considers the pedagogical impact of teaching about manifestos within the university classroom by drawing from my course titled “Hate Speech, Manifestos, and Radical Writings,” an upper-­division course cross listed between women and gender studies, ethnic studies, and American studies. To map the trajectory between historical uses of the manifesto and contemporary pedagogies of the manifesto, I first consider the history of the 218

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manifesto genre, including its ambiguous origins, its instability over time, and the difficulty of definitively labeling a document a “manifesto.” This is followed by a reflection of some of the most notorious examples of twentieth-­century feminist manifestos, including SCUM Manifesto (Solanas 1968), Bitch Manifesto (Freeman 1968), and Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway 1987). I describe the ways in which the feminist manifesto might have particular utility within the academy, where students are often pressed unwittingly into passive institutional writing that is at best dispassionate and at worst robotic, uninspired, and lacking originality and creativity in service of broader institutional norms of respectability. Manifestos, on the other hand, push back against these norms, as students think beyond incremental change and instead prioritize broad imaginative spaces often ignored within the traditional academy. I draw from several student manifestos to show the ways that their work (1) resists gendered norms of politeness and deference, (2) inherently works in intersectional ways (particularly fusing struggles of race, class, gender, size, and sexuality together), and (3) directly imagines words as contagious and emotional. I draw upon this student work as a way to push back against “polite” feminisms within the academy, calling into question the political impact of feminisms that shy away from such intensities. In doing so, I highlight the social justice utility of the feminist manifesto as a tool for both individual and collective resistance to hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal power and show the specific ways in which feminist manifestos explore the margins, fringes, and edges of feminism. I conclude by examining the contradictions of teaching radical writing and thought within institutional spaces like universities, as such spaces may simultaneously give voice to resistant and subversive “anti-­institutional” frameworks and restrain contagious words and affects in service of conservative institutional priorities and frameworks.

History of the Manifesto Genre Contemporary iterations of manifesto language have in some ways obscured the history of what manifestos are, what they do, and how they were designed to become contagious. Because the word manifesto seems relatively ubiquitous today—­proliferating on subway advertisements, billboards, t-shirts, and even bottles of wine—­the ongoing corporate appropriation of the word manifesto has seriously undermined and diluted the actual political impact and significance of the manifesto as a genre of writing and thinking. The website for the company description of Manifesto Wines, for example, states, “Our mission is to turn up the volume on wines that we believe will be the next rock stars of the wine world. If it’s too loud, you’re too old. . . . We feel lucky to work with people we trust, sell wines that we believe in, and make the decisions that we feel are good, not just beneficial. And that freedom is truly punk”

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(Manifesto Wines, n.d.). Here the radical intention of the manifesto gets usurped by a highly corporatized version of rebellion, innovation, and neoliberal claims of enjoyment-­as-­freedom, a stark contrast to actual manifestos, which often rail against capitalism and neoliberalism. This contradiction underscores the notion that the manifesto genre is much misunderstood and misrepresented, in part because manifestos are little studied in scholarly disciplines outside of art history. Historians note that the manifesto has moved from conservative (reverent of authority) to revolutionary (refusing any sort of authority) in the last two centuries. For example, the earliest uses of the word manifesto in 1775 had conservative intentions and did not advocate for a “collective, revolutionary, and subversive voice” (Puchner 2005, 12) but instead for a “declaration of the will of a sovereign. It is a communication, authored by those in authority, by the state, the military, or the church, to let their subjects know their sovereign intentions and laws” (Puchner 2005, 12). Thus early manifestos had the opposite intent of contemporary manifestos, as these early documents sought to preserve dominant institutions and create, maintain, and enact power over the masses. Martin Puchner rightly notes that the Communist Manifesto, by contrast, “is preposterous in its claims to power and authority. It challenges the type of declaration that rests on the assumption that whatever is being manifestoed, as the now-­obsolete verb form has it, is grounded in authority and thus immediately turned into action” (Puchner 2005, 12). The modern manifesto absolutely debunks and refutes the premise of authority altogether: “The revolutionary manifesto will break the conjunction of authority, speech, and action on which this old manifesto rests and instead create[s] a genre that must usurp an authority it does not yet possess, a genre that is more insecure and therefore more aggressive in its attempts to turn words into actions and demands into reality” (Puchner 2005, 12). Taking a closer look at the history of the manifesto genre shines light on the ways that manifestos became contagious, radical, impatient, unrefined, and nongenteel. Mary Ann Caws (2000), in “Poetics of the Manifesto,” described manifestos as necessarily infused with madness: “At its most endearing, a manifesto has madness about it. It is peculiar and angry, quirky, or downright crazed. Always opposed to something, particular or general, it has not only to be striking but to stand up straight” (xix). Manifestos also work through a contagious form, relying upon the style itself to communicate the urgency of the ideas and to infect the listener or reader, rendering content secondary or of less importance. Caws says, “It calls for capital letters, loves bigness, demands attention . . . going past what is thought of as proper, sane, and literary. Its outreach demands an extravagant self-­assurance. At its peak of performance, its form creates its meaning” (xx, my emphasis).

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FIGURE 14.1  “This Is My Therapy.” Anarchists and countercultural rebels leave defiant art and graffiti outside of Seattle’s Pike Place Market in September 2016. Photo by Breanne Fahs.

Manifestos are intentionally and consistently extreme, enamored of the sweeping we pronoun, shattering possibilities of other ways of seeing. Manifestos have contempt for moderation. Such extremity works by infecting audiences through the tone, which Caws describes as “hortatory, contrarian, bullying, rapid-­paced,” and by eliminating “all adjectives or useless words that would slow down the others . . . Stripped to its bare bones, clean as a whistle and as piercing, the manifesto is immodest and forceful, exuberant and vivid, attention-­grabbing. Immediate and urgent, it never mumbles, is always in overdose and overdrive” (xxi). The purpose of the manifesto is to erase all other possible ways of seeing, to communicate such urgent and intense affect that the reader or listener cannot retain a contrasting viewpoint. The genre thus leads to contagious affect, giving agency to a document (or thinker or writer) that may otherwise be forgotten. Manifestos allow for replication of feeling (outrage, madness, anger) communicated through the ideas and form of the document. Manifestos explore and play with the margins of things—­movements, cultures, societies, people—­serving as a mechanism through which marginalized people can explore emotions, resistance, and radical sweeping social change (Caws 2000; Puchner 2005). As such, manifestos emphasize the potentially

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marginalizing experience of both reading and writing, as the writer (who often lacks social and institutional power) demands to be heard and the reader (who often feels at once seduced and assaulted by the text) is absorbed into the writer’s urgent and impatient language. The manifesto is, perhaps, as Ti-­Grace Atkinson says, a “schizophrenic scream” (quoted in Fahs 2014), grabbing the attention of both writer and reader. It sometimes even literally and materially embodies the margins, as in the case of marginalia or manifestos written on scraps of paper or pamphlets (as in seventeenth-­century England), in the margins of liner notes (in Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come), or on public graffiti (Castleman 2004; Fauteux 2012; Lyon 1999). Historically, this process has allowed classic manifestos to have long-­lasting impacts on different historical periods. For example, as Puchner (2005) wrote, “The Communist Manifesto influenced the course of history more directly and lastingly than almost any other text. The Paris Commune, The Russian Revolution, and the independence movements in the colonial world are only some of the historical events that were inspired and shaped by this document” (11). Puchner goes on to describe how the genre and not the content allowed for its historical impact: “How could a single text achieve such a feat? To be sure, none of these events were thinkable without the histories of capitalism and colonialism or the effects of the two world wars. And yet, these broad historical forces do not explain why it was the Manifesto, and not one of its many rival documents, that acquired such central importance. The answer to this question must be sought not so much in the history of revolutions but in the Manifesto itself, and it must be sought not only in its content but also in its form” (11). The genre, or what he calls “form,” infused the Communist Manifesto with revolutionary qualities, primarily because it communicated the affective qualities of resistance and revolution. It did so by uniting previously distal fields and practices: “This new genre brought into a novel and startling juncture philosophy and politics, analysis and action, historiography and intervention” (Puchner 2005, 11). Manifestos used rhetoric to recruit readers to join a collective movement and were not particularly concerned with aesthetics beyond that (Reynolds 2010). Because of the importance of contagious affects to the manifesto genre, tracing the origins of manifestos has proven difficult. For example, historians can identify threads and splices of texts that would eventually come to be recognized as “manifesto” in nature—­texts that were rambunctious, rebellious, angry, or generally intent on urging revolution or that incited violence or social change—­but these remnants still render the history of the manifesto as permanently slippery. Scholarly work on manifestos continues to be scarce, as manifestos are subsumed with broader inquiries into social movements rather than treated as primary texts (Summers 2013); the majority of texts that examine manifestos in sustained ways are doctoral dissertations that never

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become books or articles (see Adams 2006; Encke 2002; Reynolds 2010; Summers 2013). And of course, tracing the origins of the manifesto genre has proven difficult. Is something considered a manifesto if it is not called a manifesto? Can we retrospectively identify manifestos, and if so, how does this impact the study of the entire genre of manifestos? Are manifestos identified through self-­titling or through the production of contagious affects? Can we “queer” a manifesto’s meaning, and is scholarly inquiry appropriate to such a genre? Can we have manifestos about manifestos (Alvarez and Stephenson 2012)?

The Feminist Manifesto It is in this spirit—­of taking and usurping power one does not yet necessarily have, of using language one is typically banned from or stripped of—­that I consider here the emergence of the feminist manifesto and its relevance to the contagious work of feminist classrooms. The feminist manifesto—­a genre prized by figures across feminist history (from Jill Johnston and Shulamith Firestone to Audre Lorde and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) engages in a war on the status quo of gender norms, patriarchy, sexism, and institutional power. It directly and relentless attacks, from radical Left perspectives, the premises of liberalism and incremental social change. As Anne Sinkey (2009) argued, “Feminist political theory, indeed, political theory in general, cannot move ‘past’ the problems of liberalism until these problems are historicized, and until the assertion of liberal vocabularies and dissent against their limits are seen as two components of a single gesture” (3). The feminist manifesto represents a taking of masculinized and patriarchal power, a usurpation of authoritative speech typically ascribed only to men (Pearce 1999). It is impolite by nature, going against the very qualities—­politeness in particular—­women are socialized to cultivate in themselves. The feminist manifesto is impatient, unmotherly, irritated, nasty, revolutionary, ambitious, and at times violent—­all of which constitute traditional “anti-­feminine” qualities. (Whether this usurpation has its own hazards continues to serve as a point of contention among feminist scholars [see Lusty 2009; Pearce 1999; and Winkiel 1999].) Consider this chunk of text from Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, self-­ published in 1967 in Greenwich Village and sold on the streets and in bookstores for $1 for women and $2 for men: Eaten up with guilt, shame, fears, and insecurities and obtaining, if he’s lucky, a barely perceptible physical feeling, the male is, nonetheless, obsessed with screwing; he’ll swim through a river of snot, wade nostril-­deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there’ll be a friendly pussy awaiting him. He’ll screw a woman he despises, any snaggletoothed hag, and, furthermore, pay for the opportunity.

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Why? Relieving physical tension isn’t the answer, as masturbation suffices for that. It’s not ego satisfaction; that doesn’t explain screwing corpses and babies. Completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize, or identify, and filled with a vast, pervasive, diffuse sexuality, the male is psychically passive. . . . Being an incomplete female, the male spends his life attempting to complete himself, to become female. (Solanas 1996, 3)

The language is startling not only because of its harsh misandry but because it is distinctly a woman’s voice speaking impolitely—­violently, emphatically, angrily—­about women’s oppression. Unlike manifestos written by men, Valerie Solanas, and by extension SCUM Manifesto, has been labeled by scholars and critics as mad, shocking, outrageous, unacceptably violent, hateful, and genocidal (for a full discussion of the reception of the manifesto, see Fahs 2014). Solanas is framed as difficult, unruly, impossible. Solanas’s appropriation of manifesto language not only insists on a sweeping indictment of men and their reliance on women for emotional, psychological, physical, and sexual support but also lays out a clear plan for the social change. Specifically, she advocated for notions of “unworking,” which she described as a series of sabotaging collective actions that disobey societal mandates: “A small handful of SCUM can take over the country within a year by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder: SCUM will become the members of the unwork force, the fuck-­up force; they will get jobs of various kinds and unwork. For example, SCUM salesgirls will not charge for merchandise; SCUM telephone operators will not charge for calls; SCUM office and factory workers, in addition to fucking up their work, will secretly destroy equipment. SCUM will unwork at a job until fired, then get a new job to unwork at” (Solanas 1996, 38). Solanas used the manifesto both as a satirical literary device (she admitted this in a 1977 interview with Howard Smith of the Village Voice) that drew upon discourses of extremity to make liberal feminism look reasonable by comparison and as an actual statement regarding a revolutionary overthrow of male domination. Scholars still debate whether she “meant” the manifesto as a call to action or as satire, a quality that impactful feminist manifestos often cultivate. Notably, the potentially satirical qualities of the SCUM Manifesto do not diminish its contagious impact or its scathing political bite. Jo Freeman’s Bitch Manifesto, written in 1968 and included in New York Radical Women’s (1970) Notes from the Second Year, had a similarly rebellious tone. Embracing a term intended to insult women, Freeman makes an argument for women to label themselves as “bitches”: “Bitches are aggressive, assertive, domineering, overbearing, strong-­minded, spiteful, hostile, direct, blunt, candid, obnoxious, thick-­skinned, hard-­headed, vicious, dogmatic, competent, competitive, pushy, loud-­mouthed, independent, stubborn, demanding,

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manipulative, egoistic, driven, achieving, overwhelming, threatening, scary, ambitious, tough, brassy, masculine, boisterous, and turbulent. Among other things. A Bitch occupies a lot of psychological space. You always know she is around. A Bitch takes shit from no one. You may not like her, but you cannot ignore her” (Freeman 1968). This manifesto seeks not only to take back power but also to reclaim language, to infect the reader with a sense of righteous indignation about the stakes of sexism and its framing of women as psychologically and emotionally limited. More recently, Donna Haraway’s (1987) cerebral Cyborg Manifesto argues that women’s liberation requires a reconsideration of material bodies and science: “Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (291). She forcefully argues that the boundaries between humans and animals (and humans and machines) are not absolute and that feminist resistance can draw from these dissolved boundaries to inspire social change. She plays on notions that women are always already infected by technological intrusions, rendering the space between self and machine obsolete. (This manifesto also went on to inspire radical feminist thinking about pharmaceuticals [see Zita 1998].) These feminist manifestos raise numerous questions: How can we understand “outrageous” women? What voice do women have if they discard the voice of passivity and compliance? Can the manifesto as a genre provide shelter to revolutionary women writers who do not want to merely appropriate the language of revolutionary male writers? What is the value of the feminist manifesto?

Pushing Back against Polite Feminisms in the Academy As a brief and decidedly inadequate answer to these questions, I argue that the feminist manifesto directly pushes back against the implicit goals of “liberal feminism” as welcoming, polite, and inclusive, instead advocating for a vision of feminism as difficult, contentious, unruly, and rebellious. This kind of pushing back against the moderate, incremental impulses of liberal feminism is crucial to the continued growth of feminism’s “edges” (Baumgardner and Richards 2000; Sinkey 2009). By this, I mean that feminist uses of manifesto language create a context that normalizes women’s anger and infects or alters contexts where women’s passivity is assumed. In fact, many scholars have argued that having a radical flank of a movement is crucial for innovative thinking within feminism and creating a sense of fear among the targets

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of feminist activism (McCammon, Bergner, and Arch 2015; Weir 1994). For example, during the 2016 presidential campaign, when faced with harassment, bullying, bragging about sexual violence, and the strengthened reemergence of “men’s rights” and “alt-­right” groups and their misogyny, feminism’s impoliteness took a center stage. And after a recording of Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy” was widely released in the press, the viral campaign, “Pussy Grabs Back,” both in visual form and in music video form, allowed for a collective response of rebellious and angry outrage, something too often squashed by the polite impulses of mainstream feminism. (One especially poignant line of a song said, “The man’s been racist as Fuck / But now he’s out of luck? / If pussy is his downfall / We’ll take it.”) Feminism needs such outbursts, as they work in multiple registers to fight back against the worst qualities of conservatism and liberalism—­that is, these outbursts refute stereotypes of women as passive and voiceless and allow for political resistance against misogyny. Within the academy, the collision (and collusion) between increasing pressures to shrink women’s and gender studies programs and the overwhelming push to frame women’s studies as “polite,” welcoming, respectable, and liberal has resulted in the increased marginalization of radical voices within feminist pedagogical conversations. This is where the teaching of the manifesto—­and specifically the feminist manifesto—­has value as well. By nurturing the voice of the manifesto—­one that invests itself with authority as “the manifesto stands alone, does not need to lean on anything else, demands no other text than itself. Its rules are self-­ contained, included in its own body” (Caws 2000, xxv)—­students can also rebel against institutional practices within the academy that squash originality, creativity, and emotionality. In writing manifestos, students do not pay homage to others, as they must when writing in other academic genres, just as they do not write in passive, moderate, disengaged ways. Manifestos allow students to cultivate anger and to think about what they oppose or what bothers them about the world. As Caws (2000) wrote, “The manifesto generally proclaims what it wants to oppose, to leave, to defend, to change. Its oppositional tone is constructed of againstness and generally in a spirit of a one-­ time only moment” (xxiii). More importantly, by bringing manifestos into the classroom and encouraging students to write their own manifestos, instructors can help students push themselves and each other and think in different ways about contemporary problems: “A manifesto is generally, by mode and form, an exhortation to a whole way of thinking and being rather than a simple command or a definition” (Caws 2000, xxvii).

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Pedagogical Uses of the Manifesto in the Feminist Classroom To draw upon the contagious possibilities of the manifesto genre, I designed my course “Hate Speech, Manifestos, and Radical Writings” around the dual tasks of reading and studying others’ manifestos, followed by writing their own manifesto. The course typically has between fifteen and thirty participants, all upper-­division students in women’s and gender studies, ethnic studies, or American studies, and it is typically composed of about one-­third men and two-­thirds women from a wide range of age, race, class, and sexuality backgrounds. Most students do not know what manifestos are when they begin this course. In the course, we read documents from the nineteenth century to the present, ranging from nineteenth-­century anarchist texts to manifestos of the alt-­right. Through the lens of manifestos and their production of contagious affects, we examine topics as diverse as the problems of marriage, the surveillance implications of Facebook and Twitter, the cultural and symbolic meanings of female suicide bombers, internet trolls and online hate speech, and the myth of the vaginal orgasm. We travel through the early days of organizing Chicana/o labor rights to the turbulent and politically progressive 1960s and on to the present day struggles about whether pornography is itself a form of hate speech. The course is designed to move far beyond the sanitized and predigested writings of typical university textbooks, far beyond the “happy, friendly face” of social movements that students may be familiar with (e.g., feminism, queer rights, black power, white supremacism), and into realms that are, by all accounts, radical, perverse, hateful, or transformative. The manifesto assignment is framed to students as an exercise in both form and content. I write in the assignment description: Your task is now to write your own manifesto, drawing from the stylistic guidelines we have discussed and reviewed during class. Your manifesto can be about anything you like, but it should be something you take seriously, and it should advance the cause of social justice in some way. Try to make it specific, forceful, creative, thought-­provoking, and interesting. This project is as much about practicing your “voice” in the manifesto as it is about the subject matter. Consider what potential impact the manifesto can have if it is circulated. Try hard to step outside of traditional modes of communication, paper writing, or argumentation. Rather, you are writing a sweeping document of social reform that should sound urgent and compelling. Build a case for the necessity of the change you seek, and use the methods of radicalism to guide your work.

In the span of the last seven years teaching this course, I have seen manifestos that have addressed a wide range of topics: fatness, antitechnology, privacy,

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sexual violence, racism, religion, money, art, politics, vaginas, work, capitalism, and more. While these do not necessarily serve as ideal “writing samples” for graduate school or postgraduation employment, many students have used their manifestos as the foundation for undergraduate thesis projects or for their masters and dissertation-­level work. Most centrally, writing a manifesto helps students hone in on what angers them, and it allows them to cultivate their feminist politics with freedoms not usually afforded to them as students. Some students use their manifestos as the basis for grassroots activism, as they see more clearly that marginalized voices (including their own) matter. This leads to the development of values as feminists that are, by definition, more radical and more likely to dig deeper into the root structures of patriarchy and misogyny. More specifically, I have found that student manifestos show three key elements that illustrate the pedagogical utility of the manifesto. First, their work resists gendered norms of politeness and deference. Laura (twenty-­seven, Latina, heterosexual) wrote in scathing ways about the problems of sexual violence, saying, “We all will be able to decide whether or not to have sex with our partners and we will be able to do this without the shame or guilt. We will not feel shame for enjoying sex, and we will not have guilt for not wanting to have sex at the same time as our partner” (Martinez 2015). Kimberly (twenty, white, bisexual) described the difficulties of pansexuality and agendered reality, saying, “Give me twinks and diesel dykes and trannies and drag royalty, give me butches and bears and femmes and fags, give me aces and demis and two-­ spirits and hermaphrodites, and let us all unite under one label, reclaiming and representing our history, that all the boring cishet people can still grasp and not be confused by. We’re queer, and we’re here, and surely that is enough” (Koerth 2015). The language is impolite, brash, even hostile, and certainly not the kind often cultivated in student coursework. (Kimberly has also, like many of my students, performed their work publicly at academic conferences and informal events.) Second, their work inherently functions in intersectional ways, fusing together struggles of race, class, gender, size, and sexuality. Liz (twenty-­four, white, heterosexual) described the hidden problems of being a working-­class feminist janitor: I had no idea I would have to take a bath for the first time in fifteen years just to soak my aching back in hot water. I had no idea my co-­workers had to load up on Ibuprofen before shifts in order to make it the full eight and half hours. I had no idea my stomach was so strong when faced with pee, poop, vomit, blood and mystery fluids that are dried (or not) to the walls around a toilet. . . . We all know stereotypes are exaggerations in order to label and limit groups of people, so why do you think we are all middle-­aged Mexican women who love nothing more

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than to clean . . . and cook, of course? You see no problem with the fact that all hospital signage, which can possibly relate to housekeepers, is translated into Spanish. But, wait, you are simply being inclusive, right? If inclusivity was the goal and if you took the time to know the housekeepers who get the trash out of your office every goddamn day then you would know your mistake. (Wallace 2015)

Student manifestos reveal insights about intersectionality, overlapping oppressions, and interconnectivity; they vividly draw upon their own intersecting identities to craft their work. Finally, their work collectively imagines words as contagious and emotional. Palpable anger and outrage, meant to infect the reader or listener, is clear in student manifestos. Crystal (twenty-­three, Latina, lesbian) critiqued religion and the treatment of women in Chicano communities by writing, “The white man came to discover mí genté’s land. Thank God they did, or else we’d be living on unknown territory. The white man came to teach mí genté the tongue of his people. Thank God they did, or else we’d have no proper way to communicate. The white man came to teach mí genté how to dress. Thank God they did, or else we wouldn’t know how to suitably cover our bodies. The white man came to teach mí genté a sense of spirituality. Thank God they did, or else we wouldn’t know what true morals are” (Zaragoza 2015). This emphasis on emotionality, intersectionality, and resistance shows how these student manifestos are deeply connected to the activist roots of women’s studies and related fields.

Liberatory/Dangerous Possibilities Reflecting more broadly on the pedagogies of the feminist manifesto, there is a dangerous risk of recontainment of such contagious affects and radical thought. The irony of teaching students to write in this way, within the university as institution (where grades and instructions have paramount importance), may in fact strip their work of some of its “bite.” The story of academic women’s studies is a cautionary one; beginning as an extension of feminist activism, women’s studies was initially designed to be the university extension of feminist grassroots activism (Smith 1982; Stake and Rose 1994). It morphed over the years more and more away from these activist roots and into the realm of scholarly “respectability,” including more obscure theory, less teaching about activism, and less emphasis on praxis, consciousness-­ raising, and collectivism (Sarachild 2013). For example, many women’s studies professors have few connections to community feminist organizations and have not engaged in grassroots organizing. As such, they have not always cultivated on-­the-­ground politics and grounded experiences of inequality in

230  •  Breanne Fahs

their work. Manifestos might serve as a bridge between grassroots organizing and the theoretical frameworks of academia. Thus the contagious aspects of manifestos—­affective, political, pedagogical, geared toward social change and grassroots movements—­should be noted and celebrated within the academy, but not without caution about the immediate possibilities of appropriation and distortion. Contagious ideas are unruly and rebellious, but they can also be quickly assimilated into institutional practices that strip away revolutionary impulses. At its best, though, the feminist manifesto, within the university classroom, is not only a weapon against patriarchy but also a weapon against the worst aspects of feminist politics—­it refutes liberal tendencies of moderation and slow reform; it is a rebuttal to institutional practices of silencing women’s voices; it refuses to ignore anger and is perfectly fine with scaring people. It seeks to rip down the principles that underlie institutional politeness, women’s complicity, and student passivity. With renewed attention to the feminist manifesto as full of contradictions and possibilities (Colman 2010; Nussbaum 2011) and a broadening of who can (or should) write the feminist manifesto, we can harness the best possible energy of feminism—­one that fervently encourages voices that are rambunctious, impolite, uncompromising, unapologetic, and full of what I think is the single most important quality feminist professors should nurture: bravery. We can help students subvert the norms of (at times conservative) educational practices, and we can push the university to nurture more radical thought and work from students. In this sense, we can “subvert from within” by teaching students to recognize and channel their anger, utilize the rhetorical practices of the feminist manifesto, understand that infectious emotions can alter the conditions of the academy, and imagine a new sense of collectivity in a world of their own making.

References Adams, Elliott C. 2006. “American Feminist Manifestos and the Rhetoric of Whiteness.” Unpublished dissertation, Bowling Green University. Alvarez, Natalie, and Jenn Stephenson. 2012. “A Manifesto for Manifestos.” Canadian Theatre Review 150:3–­7. Baumgardner, Jennifer, and Amy Richards. 2000. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Castleman, Craig. 2004. “The Politics of Graffiti.” In That’s the Joint! The Hip-­Hop Studies Reader, edited by Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, 21–­29. New York: Psychology Press. Caws, Mary Ann. 2000. Manifesto: A Century of Isms. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Colman, Felicity. 2010. “Notes on the Feminist Manifesto: The Strategic Use of Hope.” Journal for Cultural Research 14 (4): 375–­392. Encke, Jeffrey M. 2002. “Manifestos: A Social History of Proclamation.” Unpublished dissertation, Columbia University.

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Fahs, Breanne. 2014. Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol). New York: Feminist Press. Fauteux, Brian. 2012. “‘New Noise’ versus the Old Sound: Manifestos and the Shape of Punk to Come.” Popular Music and Society 35 (4): 465–­482. Freeman, Jo [ Joreen]. 1968. “Bitch Manifesto.” Jo Freeman (website). http://​www​.jofreeman​ .com/​joreen/​bitch​.htm. Haraway, Donna. 1987. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Australian Feminist Studies 2 (4): 1–­42. Koerth, Kimberly. 2015. “Get Over Yourself.” Unpublished manuscript. Lusty, Natalya. 2009. “Valerie Solanas and the Limits of Speech.” Australian Literary Studies 24 (3–­4): 144–­154. Lyon, Janet. 1999. Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Manifesto Wines. n.d. “About.” Accessed April 2, 2017. http://​manifestowines​.com/​about/. Martinez, Laura. 2015. “My So-­Called Sex Life.” Unpublished manuscript. McCammon, Holly J., Erin M. Bergner, and Sandra C. Arch. 2015. “‘Are You One of Those Women?’: Within-­Movement Conflict, Radical Flank Effects, and Social Movement Political Outcomes.” Mobilization 20 (2): 157–­178. New York Radical Women. 1970. Notes from the Second Year. Self-­published manuscript. Nussbaum, Emily. 2011. The Rebirth of the Feminist Manifesto. New York Magazine. http://​ nymag​.com/​news/​features/​feminist​-blogs​-2011​-11/. Pearce, Kimber C. 1999. “The Radical Feminist Manifesto as Generic Appropriation: Gender, Genre, and Second Wave Resistance.” Southern Communication Journal 64 (4): 307–­315. Puchner, Martin. 2005. Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-­Gardes. New Brunswick: Princeton University Press. Reynolds, Thomas. 2010. “‘Peculiar, Angry, and Downright Crazed’: Exploring Rhetoric in Manifestos.” Unpublished dissertation, Austin State University. Sarachild, Kathie. 2013. “Feminist Revolution: Toward a Science of Women’s Freedom.” Lecture at Arizona State University, March 26, 2013. Sinkey, Anne. 2009. “The Rhetoric of the Manifesto.” Unpublished dissertation, Emory University. Smith, Barbara. 1982. “Racism and Women’s Studies.” In All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia B. Scott, and Barbara Smith, 48–­51. New York: Feminist Press. Solanas, Valerie. (1968) 1996. SCUM Manifesto. San Francisco: AK Press. Stake, Jayne E., and Suzanna Rose. 1994. “The Long-­Term Impact of Women’s Studies on Students’ Personal Lives and Political Activism.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 18 (3): 403–­412. Summers, Ian. 2013. “Generic Criticism of Extraordinary Documents: An Inquiry into Manifesto Texts and Genre Scholarship.” Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Alabama. Wallace, Elizabeth. 2015. “The People behind the Mop Buckets.” Unpublished manuscript. Weir, Lorna. 1994. Left Popular Politics in Canadian Feminist Abortion Organizing, 1982–­1991. Feminist Studies 20 (2): 249–­274. Winkiel, Laura. 1999. “The ‘Sweet Assassin’ and the Performative Politics of SCUM Manifesto.” In The Queer Sixties, edited by Patricia J. Smith, 62–­85. New York: Routledge. Zaragoza, Crystal. 2015. “Queer Mexican Manifesto: Mí Genté Chingona Doesn’t Need Your White God.” Unpublished manuscript. Zita, Jacqueline. 1998. “Prozac Feminism.” In Body Talk: Philosophical Reflections on Sex and Gender, edited by Jacqueline Zita, 61–­84. New York: Columbia University Press.

Acknowledgments

This book, and the conference that inspired it, began as the brainchild of a research cluster devoted to thinking about gender and contagion at Arizona State University (ASU). As editors, we were fortunate to receive institutional support from ASU to think and work together these many years. Without the backing of ASU’s Institute for Humanities Research and the Jenny Norton Research Award, we would have lacked the institutional framework to develop this work into a conference and then into a book. We also received financial and institutional support from the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at ASU, particularly the Center for Critical Inquiry and Cultural Studies (CCICS) under the direction of Sherri Collins; the School for Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies under the direction of Louis Mendoza; and the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences under the direction of Jeffrey Kassing. We are forever grateful for such robust institutional backing. We are especially indebted to Louis Mendoza, director of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies, who has always cheered us on no matter what. A wholehearted and genuine thanks goes out to our brave feminist (former) dean, Marlene Tromp, who not only worked to ensure that our conference was a success but also contributed (in all of her spare time!) a wonderful chapter in this volume. Her generosity, thoughtfulness, and intelligence inspire us all. We give thanks to the many scholars who presented papers at the transforming contagion conference, many of whom traveled from quite a distance. Your work inspired the direction of this book, guided and shaped our thinking about contagion, and left us all in a state of awe. We had the great fortune of having both Priscilla Wald and Alice Echols as keynote speakers at the event, 233

234  • Acknowledgments

each of whom embodies the very best of feminist collegiality and powerhouse intelligence. Your pathbreaking work on outbreak narratives and radical feminist social movements is brave and important—­we only hope that this volume does your work justice and extends the conversation about our shared interests and subjects. We wholeheartedly thank our many supportive colleagues who believed in this project from the beginning and pitched in throughout the whole process, particularly Sharon Kirsch, Michael Stancliff, Patricia Clark, Matt Simonton, Todd Sandrin, Patrick Bixby, Karla Murphy, Miriam Mara, Tuomas Manninen, Bertha Manninen, Ramsey Eric Ramsey, Patricia Friedrich, Julie Murphy Erfani, Jennifer Quincey, Breezy Taggart, Karen Leong, Marsha Fazio, and Matthew Garcia. We owe a particular debt to the women who helped with the minutiae and logistics of the conference, particularly Tracy Encizo, Lucy Berchini, Mary Bauer, and Karen Thew—­thank you! Thanks also to Emily Dolan for a truly boundary-­smashing conference artwork. To the Rutgers University Press team, particularly Kimberly Guinta, we deeply appreciate your investment in our work and have benefited greatly from your commitment to see this book through to the finish line. Since the inception of the project—­and all the way through the conference and the making of the book—­the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group (“the FROGS”) has done an awe-­inspiring amount of background work for which we are eternally grateful. Special thanks to Kimberly Koerth, who made spreadsheets until their eyeballs fell out and who indexed the book so thoughtfully; Michael Karger, who helped conceptualize the name and theme of the conference and the book; and Chelsea Pixler Charbonneau, who helped with hotel arrangements and other logistics. Crystal Zaragoza, Laura Martinez, Corie Cisco, and Elizabeth Wallace helped ensure that the conference ran smoothly and that the book launched without a hitch. More recently, Ela Przybylo, Madison Carlyle, Emma DiFrancesco, Alexis Starks, Decker Dunlop, Laisa Schweigert, Decker Dunlop, Ayanna Shambe, and Tatiana Crespo worked on drafts of the book to put on the final polish. We adore you all and would be lost (and certainly disorganized) without you. Finally, we thank Becky Fahs, Joe Rheinhardt, Jenny Mann, Ursula Swank, Twain Kenyon, and Barry Kenyon for infecting us with your love, support, friendship, patience, and energy. We dedicate this book to Faye Rheinhardt, Annika’s girl, who was conceived at the beginning of the project, born in the middle of it, and is now thriving as an embodiment of vitality, beauty, and wonder.

Notes on Contributors is an assistant professor of Family and Community Medicine at Northeast Ohio Medical University. She received her PhD in literature from Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she was a graduate certificate student with the Center for Critical and Cultural Theory, the Center for Teaching Excellence, and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Bracken’s work, which explores the intersections of American literature and public health history, appears or is forthcoming in Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities, Big Data and Society, and English Language Notes (ELN).

RACHEL CONRAD BRACKEN

EDWARD COHN is an associate professor of Russian history at Grinnell College. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he completed his PhD at the University of Chicago in 2007, and in 2015, he published his first book, The High Title of a Communist: Postwar Party Discipline and the Values of the Soviet Regime. He is now working on a history of the KGB’s use of preventative policing to fight dissent and political unrest in the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

is a doctoral candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke University. She is also completing a certificate in feminist studies. Her dissertation is an interdisciplinary project rooted in origins of life research, feminist theory, and biophilosophy. It interrogates how relations between matter and life need to be rethought to attend to the philosophical forces embedded within the idea of evolution.

ANNU DAHIYA

is professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, where she specializes in studying women’s sexuality, critical

BREANNE FAHS

235

236  •  Notes on Contributors

embodiment studies, radical feminism, and political activism. She has published numerous peer-­reviewed articles in feminist, social science, and humanities journals and has authored/edited five books: Performing Sex (SUNY Press 2011), an analysis of the paradoxes of women’s “sexual liberation”; The Moral Panics of Sexuality (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), an edited collection with Mary L. Dudy and Sarah Stage that examines cultural anxieties of “scary sex”; Valerie Solanas (Feminist Press 2014), a biography of author and would-­be assassin Valerie Solanas; Out for Blood (SUNY Press 2016), a book of essays on menstrual activism and resistance; and Firebrand Feminism (University of Washington Press 2018), a book about radical feminist activists active in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She is the director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group at Arizona State University, and she also works as a clinical psychologist in private practice, where she specializes in sexuality, couples work, and trauma recovery. MICHELLE ASHLEY GOHR is an assistant librarian with Arizona State University Libraries, where she teaches information literacy and provides research assistance to students and faculty in women and gender studies, social justice and human rights, and the social and behavioral science subject specialties. Her research interests include women’s status in online communities and video games, women’s participation in STEM, phallic/yonic imagery in popular culture, and cultural constructions of the “vagina dentata” and other abject gendered spaces. PATRICK MALEY is an associate professor of English at Centenary University in New Jersey, where he regularly teaches courses in drama, Shakespeare, classics, and the Bible. His research on the modern and contemporary drama of the United States and Ireland, with a particular emphasis on playwrights like August Wilson, Brian Friel, Eugene O’Neill, Suzan-­Lori Parks, and Conor McPherson, has appeared in Field Day Review, Irish Studies Review, The Eugene O’Neill Review, New Hibernia Review, Comparative Drama, and Modern Drama. He is currently at work on a book project about August Wilson’s blues dramaturgy.

is an assistant professor of English in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University. She specializes in eighteenth-­century and Romantic British literature and culture, with research and teaching interests in the history of science, women’s and gender studies, and the medical humanities. Her book Reading Contagion: Textual Infections and the Hazards of Reader Response in the Long Eighteenth Century explores how fears about textual infections—­that books could communicate contagious passions and matter in and on their contaminated pages—­energize ANNIKA MANN

Notes on Contributors  •  237

aesthetic and political debates about the power of reading to reshape social bodies during this long period. She has also been published in Eighteenth-­ Century Fiction. is professor of literary and cultural studies and director of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University’s New College. He is the author of Historia: The Literary Making of Chicana and Chicano History, A Journey around Our America: A Memoir on Cycling, Immigration, and the Latinoization of the U.S., and Conversations across Our America: Talking about Immigration and the Latinoization of the U.S. and is the coeditor of Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration. He is the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Latina/o Literatures.

LOUIS MENDOZA

SADIE MOHLER is a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Duquesne University. She studies phenomenology and poststructural theory with a focus on the intersection of deviance and pathology. Sadie graduated with honors and distinction from Occidental College with a degree in critical theory and social justice. Prior to her doctoral program, Sadie worked within community mental health clinics throughout Los Angeles County.

is a professor of communication studies at Arizona State University, where she studies biopolitics, or the politics of life, encoded in liberal systems of governing. Her research has explored biopolitics in the contemporary workplace, in childhood risk management, in the interpretation and treatment of autism and other neurological disorders, and most recently in the governance of environmental risk. She has published six books, with her research on the Fukushima nuclear crisis available in Fukushima and the Privatization of Risk (2013); Crisis Communications, Liberal Democracy, and Ecological Sustainability (2016); and (edited) Fukushima: Dispossession or Denuclearization (2014).

MAJIA NADESAN

is an associate professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, where he also teaches in the urban studies program. He received his PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center with a certificate in American studies. He has published in the journals Meditations, the Canadian Review of American Studies, International Labor and Working-­Class History, and William James Studies and is working on a book project on the 1877 general strike.

JUSTIN ROGERS-­C OOPER

is an associate professor of practice in social and cultural analysis at Arizona State University. With more than fifty published works, Swank writes on the ways that stigmatized populations accept and challenge social

ERIC SWANK

238  •  Notes on Contributors

inequalities. In doing so, his research explores the ways that education and heterosexist assumptions are related to minority stress, LGBT activism, sexual compliance, and color-­blind racism. His works appear in journals like Sex Roles, Archives of Sexual Behavior, Journal of Homosexuality, Feminist Formations, and Research in Higher Education. MARLENE TROMP is professor of English and women’s and gender studies, campus provost, and executive vice chancellor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-­ Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism (SUNY 2006), The Private Rod: Sexual Violence, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England (University of Virginia Press 2000), and more than twenty essays on nineteenth-­century culture. She has also edited or coedited and contributed to Abstracting Economics: Culture, Money, and the Economic in the Nineteenth Century (Ohio University Press 2016); Fear and Loathing: Victorian Xenophobia (Ohio State University Press 2013); Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in the Nineteenth Century (Ohio State University Press 2007); and Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Beyond Sensation (SUNY 2000). She has two new books under review, Force of Habit: Life and Death on the Titanic and Intimate Murder: Sex and Death in Nineteenth Century Britain, which explores deadly violence in sexual relationships. Tromp is president of the North American Victorian Studies Association and a member of the board of directors of the Nineteenth-­ Century Studies Association.

is director of the Center for the Humanities and professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. With research interests in translation studies and the intersections of literature, philosophy, and science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he has written for Educational Theory, Germanic Review, and the collections Translations of Romantic Texts and Staël’s Philosophy of the Passions. He edited a special volume on “Translation Theory/ Pedagogical Practice: Teaching Romantic Translation(s)” for Romantic Circles Pedagogies and is currently translating Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther for a new Broadview Press edition.

C.  C. WHARRAM

Index

2008 Global Financial Crisis, 3, 32 2016 U.S. presidential election, 10, 167, 226 abnormality, 149, 158, 206, 209 accumulation, 75, 103–­104, 107–­108, 110, 112–­113, 115–­116 accumulative contagion, 104, 110–­111, 114–­115. See also contagious accumulation Acius, Alfredas, 189–­190 activism, 6, 10, 20, 72, 78, 81, 145, 185, 205, 211–­214, 226, 228–­229 Act to Regulate Immigration, 178 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 223 advertising, 162, 168–­169, 219 Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, 56 Aeschylus, 127 aesthetics, 12, 16, 116–­127, 129, 222, 247 affect, 2, 7–­8, 15–­16, 104–­108, 218–­221 affective contagion, 5 affective turn, 105 affect theory, 4 African American theater, 117 Agamben, Giorgio, 5 agency, 9–­10, 12, 82, 91, 105–­108, 111, 114–­115, 123, 221 agender identity, 228 aggression, 16, 168, 210 AIDS crisis, 3, 5

Alcaraz, Lalo, 185 allies, 20, 207, 211–­214 ally activism, 212–­214 alt-­right groups, 226–­227 America firsters, 18–­19 American Protective Association, 181 anal sex, 206 anarchy, 12, 178, 227 Anderson, Benedict, 29, 66, 178 Anderson, Lukis, 143–­144 Anderson, Misty, 90 anthrax, 5 anthropomorphism, 36 anti-­immigrant rhetoric, 19, 175, 184. See also anti-­immigrant sentiment; xenophobia anti-­immigrant sentiment, 19, 178–­181, 184–­185. See also anti-­immigrant rhetoric; xenophobia antisocial behavior, 192, 195, 197–­198 antivenin, 11 antivirus, 11 antiwar movement, 7 appropriation, 10, 20, 30–­31, 34, 156, 219, 224–­225, 230 arboromorphism, 36 archives, 9, 11, 190–­191 Aristotle, 127 Armstrong, Nancy, 96, 135 assemblages, 123 239

240  •  Index

assimilation, 181, 230 asylum, 181–­182, 185 Atkinson, Ti-­Grace, 222 atmospheric testing, 75 Atomic Bomb Causality Commission, 75–­76 atomic technology and weapons, 15, 72–­77, 80–­82 audience, 16, 116–­118, 121, 123–­124, 126–­129 Aurora movie theater shooting, 133, 135 autism, 56, 247 autoimmunity, 28 autonomy, 49, 51, 60, 105–­106, 111; bodily, 30, 57, 64 avoidance, 208–­209 bacteria, 44–­48, 52, 213 bacterial revolution, 5, 12, 15, 87 bacteriology, 45 Baker, Annie, 16, 118 Baker, Houston A., Jr., 121–­122 Barad, Karen, 4 Baudrillard, Jean, 27 beak doctor, 1–­2 Beckett, Samuel, 118 bedbugs, 183 behavioral immune system, 208 Bell, David, 206 Bernays, Edward T., 73 bias, 6, 8, 38, 136, 145, 162 Bills of Mortality, 94, 98 binaries, 12, 48, 149, 151, 156, 176 Binnie, Jon, 206 bioaccumulation, 15, 72, 80–­81 Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation report, 75 biomedicine, 5, 7, 88 biopolitics, 5, 27–­28, 31, 38, 58–­61, 66. See also biopower biopower, 5, 59. See also biopolitics Biss, Eula, 57, 63–­66 bitches, 224 Bitch Manifesto, 20, 219, 224–­225 black liberation movement, 7 Black Lives Matter, 117, 144–­145 Bloom, Harold, 125 body politic, 14, 29, 57–­68, 176, 179 border, the, 175, 177, 181–­184 bourgeois ideology, 193–­194, 196, 198

Boylston, Zabdiel, 35–­36 Brackemyre, Ted, 180–­181 bravery, 124, 123 Brecht, Bertolt, 128 Brennan, Teresa, 104–­106 broken-­windows policing, 19, 190–­191, 195–­197 Buchanan, Pat, 183 bullying, 126, 221, 226 Bureau of Immigration, 178 Bush, George W., 181 cancer, 3, 15, 76, 79–­81 canonization, 119 capitalism, 15–­16, 103–­104, 106–­108, 198–­199, 220 capitalist acquisitiveness, 193 Carnival of Venice, 1–­2 castration, 161 Caws, Mary Ann, 220–­221, 226 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 56, 60–­61, 182 Chamberland filters, 45 Chambers, Ephraim, 91 Chaudhuri, Una, 126 Chekhov, Anton, 16, 118 Chernobyl nuclear crisis, 72, 76, 79 Chesnutt, Charles, 16, 103–­104, 106, 111–­115 Chicanos, 229 Chinese Exclusion Act, 178 cholera, 88, 176 chronology, 118, 127 church, 20, 186, 204–­205, 220 Churchill, Caryl, 126 citizenship, 19, 176–­177, 186 civic engagement, 186 civil rights, 211, 214 Civil Rights Movement, 117 classism, 12, 140, 142–­143, 145 Cleckley, Hervey, 150 “closet, the,” 205–­206 Cohen, Ed, 59 Colbert, Soyica Diggs, 123–­124 Cold War, 15, 72, 75, 198 collectivism, 229 colonialism, 104, 112, 183, 185, 222 Columbine school shooting, 135–­136 coming-­out, 206–­207

Index  •  241

communal health, 12, 186. See also public health communicable affect, 89–­90, 93. See also contagious affect communicable disease, 105, 135, 177–­178. See also contagious disease Communist Manifesto, 220, 222 community identity, 105 competitiveness, 168 compliance, 57, 60–­63, 126, 225 complicity, 230 compulsory heterosexuality, 20, 205, 207, 211, 214 conscience, lack of, 151–­153 consciousness, 133–­134, 218, 225 consciousness-­raising, 229 conservatism, 226 contagion: in Latin, 4; as metaphor, 57, 71, 87–­89, 105–­106, 211–­212 contagious accumulation, 16, 103–­104, 106, 108, 110–­113, 115. See also accumulative contagion contagious affect, 91, 99, 221–­223, 227, 229. See also communicable affect contagious disease, 5, 12, 56, 64, 91–­92, 183. See also communicable disease Contagious Diseases Acts, 10 containment, 5, 13, 208, 210, 218 conversion therapy, 210 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 90–­92 copycat crimes, 9, 17, 133, 135, 144 corruption, 149, 208 cowpox, 31, 37. See also smallpox crime, 133–­138, 142–­144, 150–­151, 189–­193, 195–­196. See also copycat crimes; hate crimes crime control, 191, 195 criminal: class, 136; justice, 136, 151; reconviction, 150 criminality, 17, 133–­135, 142, 144 cultural: anxiety, 176, 181; citizenship, 186; integrity, 176; lag, 74; narratives, 5, 143–­144, 179; symbolism, 165 Curry, Lynne, 30 cyber harassment, 165 cyborg, 225 Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway), 20, 219, 225 dangerous individual, 149, 151, 155–­158 Davis, Cynthia, 88

Davis, Kim, 206 Dawkins, Richard, 71 debt, 30, 109–­110, 121 decay, 76, 208 Defend the Family, 208 defensiveness, 160, 168 deference, 219, 228 Defoe, Daniel, 15, 89, 93–­96, 98–­101 DeGabriele, Peter, 100 degeneracy, 178–­179 Deleuze, Gilles, 122–­123, 128 delirium, 1, 90 de Lorme, Charles, 1 DeMent, Jack, 74 dengue fever, 182 Dennis, John, 93 Derrida, Jacques, 27–­29, 88 deviance, 136, 148–­149, 158, 194–­195, 199 diagnosis, 17, 104, 147–­151, 154–­158 dick pics, 17–­18, 160–­161, 163, 165–­166, 169. See also phallic: imagery; phallic: symbolism diffusion, 6, 19, 114–­115, 193, 211 digital community, 15, 58–­59, 66–­68 diplomatic immunity, 27 discontentment, 197 discrimination, 87, 204–­205, 210, 212–­213 discursive violence, 186 disease, 1–­5, 12–­15, 31–­34, 42, 44–­45, 61–­66; carrier, 92, 136, 175, 183, 209; control, 176; prevention, 1, 14, 56, 95, 191, 209; recurrence, 62. See also vaccine-­preventable disease diseased other, 9 disempowerment, 10, 214, 218 disgust, 208–­209 disorderly conduct, 195–­196 dissent, 19, 190–­191, 193–­194, 196–­197, 200 DNA, 43, 46–­47, 50–­51, 143–­144, 164 Dolan, Jill, 126 drama, 16, 116–­118, 120–­129. See also performance; theater Durkheim, Emile, 104–­105 dynastic inheritance, 103 Ebola virus, 3, 7, 179, 181–­182 Echols, Alice, 8 egocentricity, 150, 224

242  •  Index

electoral politics, 206 Eliot, T. S., 119–­120, 123 Ellis Island, 178 embodiment, 7–­8, 14–­16, 66–­67, 106–­107, 222 emotion, 3, 5–­10, 106, 221, 229–­230 emotional contagion, 6–­8, 161, 164–­165 empathy, lack of, 18, 149–­153, 224 engrafting, 13, 32–­36, 38 Enlightenment, the, 35 enthusiasm, 90–­91 environment, 46, 63, 76, 80, 89; as part of epidemiological triad, 190, 193–­194, 196 epidemic, 71–­72, 190, 193–­194, 196 epidemiological criminology, 190–­191, 193 epidemiological triad, 190, 193–­194 epidemiology, 5, 105, 191, 193 epidemiology of dissent, 200 erotics, 16, 104, 108, 113, 115 Esposito, Roberto, 5, 27–­31, 36, 38, 64 ethics of immunity, 14, 58–­66 eugenics, 16, 104, 178 euphoria, 16, 103–­104, 106–­110, 112–­113 evolution, 13, 29, 37, 42–­43, 46–­53 ex-­gays, 210 existing order, 119–­120, 123–­124 extremity, 64, 153, 212, 221, 224 Facebook, 227 Fairchild, Amy L., 184 fear, 9–­10, 74–­75, 78–­82, 149–­152, 198–­199, 208–­209 Federation of American Scientists, 73 Fedor, Julie, 199–­200 female genital mutilation, 161 femininity, 160–­161, 167 feminism, 4, 104, 219, 225–­227, 230 feminist movement, 7 feminist theory, 12, 169, 245 figurative language, 35, 87–­88, 93 Firestone, Shulamith, 223 Fisher, Barbara Loe, 65–­66 flu shot, 11 fomites, 92–­93, 95 Foucault, Michel, 5, 28, 134–­135, 147–­148, 156 Freeman, Jo, 20, 224 Freud, Sigmund, 104–­105 fruit machine, 209

Fuentes, Agustín, 163 Fukushima nuclear disaster, 15, 72, 77–­82 fungi, 213 Gadamer, Hans-­Georg, 123 Gaffney, Frank, 182 Gamergate, 164–­165 gang violence, 195 gay: appetite, 208; contagion, 20, 208–­209, 214; lifestyle, 207; panics, 9, 208; pride rallies, 210, 213; rights ordinances, 7 gaydar, 209 gay-­straight alliance groups, 212 gender: assignment, 163; inequality, 165–­166, 229–­230; performance, 162, 209; roles, 8, 20, 209 gender-­based violence, 165–­166 gendertrolling, 164 generic hierarchy, 15, 89, 92–­94, 99–­100 genes, 42–­43, 45–­47, 52, 75, 178 genetic deterioration, 75, 178 genome, 14, 42–­43, 46, 50–­53, 164 germ plasm, 178 germ theory, 44, 208 GI bill, 209 Gilbert, Sandra, 119, 125–­126 Gilded Age, 16, 104 Gilman, Ernest, 88 Gingrey, Phil, 182 global health care, 19 Goffman, Erving, 175 Gofman, John, 75 Gohmert, Louie, 182 graffiti, 166, 194–­195, 197, 222 groupthink, 165 Grover, Anand, 80 Grzanka, Patrick, 12 Guattari, Felix, 122–­123, 128 Gubar, Susan, 119, 125–­126 guilt, 109, 151, 153, 155, 223, 228 Hansberry, Lorraine, 124 harassment, 164–­166, 204, 210, 226 Haraway, Donna, 4, 20, 27–­28, 31, 225 Hare, Robert, 150–­153, 155 Harrison, Mark, 190 Hart, Hornell, 74 hate crimes, 184, 205, 212 hate speech, 2, 227

Index  •  243

Hausman, Bernice L., 66–­67 health, 9–­12, 58, 60–­64, 78–­82, 185–­187 health insurance, 186 healthism, 59 Heape, Walter, 162 hegemonic masculinity, 160–­161, 164–­166, 219 hegemony, 16, 116, 125–­126, 175, 214 herd immunity, 60–­64, 66 heteronormativity, 20, 166, 168, 205 heterosexism, 204, 211–­213 heterosexual dominance, 211 heterosexuality, 111, 168–­169, 205, 207–­208, 210 heterosexual privilege, 20, 205, 210–­213 Heyd, Michael, 90 Hida, Shuntaro, 77–­78 hippie movement, 193, 195–­196, 199 historical revision, 16, 116–­117, 120 Hobbes, Thomas, 29 Holmes, James, 133 homicidal monomania, 148–­150, 157 homophobia, 20, 145, 208–­210, 213–­214 Hughes, Sally Smith, 44 Huguenots, 90 Humphries, Suzanne, 60–­61 hypermasculinity, 168 hysteria, 3, 81–­82, 175, 179, 184–­185

impoliteness, 223–­224, 226, 228, 230. See also politeness inequality, 20, 163, 229, 248 infection, 20–­21, 32–­33, 60–­62, 94–­96, 183–­184. See also lytic: infection infectious diseases, 56, 59, 88–­89, 200, 209 infectious sexualities, 208 informed consent, 65 Ingraham, Laura, 182 injustice, 126, 212 Innocence Project, 142, 145 inoculation, 13–­14, 27–­28, 31–­39, 56–­57, 209. See also vaccine inoculation narrative, 37–­39. See also outbreak narrative insanity, 148–­152. See also sanity interdependence, 9, 11 International Commission on Radiation Protection, 76 internet, 10–­12, 71–­72, 135, 166, 184 internet trolls, 227 interracial marriage, 113 intersectionality, 3, 21, 219, 229 intersex conditions, 162 intoxication, 103–­104, 108–­110 Iron Curtain, 19, 198 Ivanin, G. I., 192–­194 Ivanovsky, Dmitri Josipovitch, 5

illness, 7–­8, 114–­115, 183, 187, 193. See also vaccine-­preventable: illness imagined communities, 29, 66, 178. See also Anderson, Benedict; imagined immunities imagined immunities, 29, 57, 178. See also imagined communities; Wald, Priscilla immigrant health, 177 immigration, 18–­19, 175–­186 Immigration Act of 1891, 178 immigration control, 176 immorality, 20, 110, 137, 205, 208 immunitary paradigm, 28–­30 immunity, 14, 29–­31, 37–­39, 51, 57–­67. See also ethics of immunity immunizations, 29, 64, 183 immunological: memory, 37; syntax, 179; turn, 28–­29 immunology, 27–­28, 30–­32, 38, 59, 179 imperialism, 88, 119, 128, 169

Jenner, Edward, 31, 37 jihadist Islam, 193 Jim Crow era, 104, 117 Johnston, Jill, 223 Journal of the Plague Year, A, 15, 89, 93–­94 Judge, Phoebe, 147 “junk” DNA, 43, 49 juridical-­political power, 175 juvenile delinquency, 151, 193 Kamanaka, Hitomi, 81 Kazuhiro, Haraguchi, 78 Keesler, Michael, 152 Kelling, George, 195–­196 Kent, Constance, 138, 142, 144 KGB, 19, 189–­197, 198, 200 King Tutankhamun, 166 Klein, Lawrence, 90 Koch, Robert, 5, 31, 44 Koerth, Kimberly, 228

244  •  Index

Kotel’nikova, Valeriia, 197–­199 Kraut, Alan, 61, 176–­177 Kumra, Raveesh, 143–­144 labor rights, 227 Lane, Harriet, 139–­142 language, 105, 124, 152, 219, 222–­225, 228 Largent, Mark A., 64–­65 Latino health paradox, 186 Latour, Bruno, 4, 28 Le Bon, Gustave, 104 Lee, Alison, 62–­65 leprosy, 183, 184 lesbian music scene, 207 LGBT community centers, 207 Libby, Willard, 73 liberal feminism, 224–­225 liberalism, 223, 226 Licensing Act, 89 Locke, John, 13, 29–­31, 34–­35, 37 Lorde, Audre, 223 Luhmann, Niklas, 27, 30 lysogenic virus, 50–­51 lytic: infection, 50–­51; life cycle, 50 machines, 109, 225 MacKay, Ellen, 125 madness, 18, 152, 220–­221 Magner, Lois N., 45 male bashing, 168 male fragility, 18, 161–­163, 167–­169 manifestos, 20, 218–­230 manipulation, 51, 150–­151, 153–­154, 205, 225 Mansel, H. L., 137–­138 marginalization, 15, 82, 214, 221–­222, 226 margins, 20, 219, 221–­222 Margulis, Lynn, 46–­49 Markel, Howard, 177 Markides, Kyriacos, 187 Marples, David, 76 marriage, 104, 107–­108, 227. See also interracial marriage; same-sex relationships marriage certificates, 206 marriage equality, 212 Martinez, Laura, 228 Marx, Karl, 111 masculinity, 18, 160–­163, 166–­169. See also hegemonic masculinity; toxic masculinity Massey, Edmund, 34

mass media, 14, 71, 212 material bodies, 225 material objects, 111 Mather, Cotton, 36 McDowell, Paula, 96 McVeigh, Timothy, 145 Mead, Richard, 91–­92 measles, 31, 56, 182–­183 media narratives, 17 media theory, 4 medical nativism, 61, 177 Mee, Jon, 90 memes, 3, 5, 72; hegemonic, 72; oppositional, 15, 72, 74, 77; in regard to radiation, 15, 71–­76, 78–­82 men’s rights, 226 menstruation, 162 mental institutions, 193 Mercier, Louis-­Sebastien, 32 metagenomics, 46 microbe, 37–­38, 43–­45, 48, 52 microbial symbiosis, 46 migrant children, 183 militant ideology, 193 military, 209, 220 Milk, Harvey, 206 Miller, Arthur, 121 Miller, D. A., 135 Mimivirus, 52 misandry, 224 misogyny, 10, 18, 160, 165–­166, 169, 226, 228 Mitchell, Peta, 5, 88 moderation, 221, 230 modernism, 128, 163 modernity, 29, 179, 184 mommy blogs, 14, 58 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 31–­34 moral disease, 150 moral economy, 108–­111 moral panics, 14, 199, 208 Muller, H. J., 75 multicellular life, 43, 47, 50, 52 mutation, 14, 47, 75–­76, 81, 155, 157 narcissism, 6, 155 national: belonging, 176; boundaries, 178; culture, 175; health, 11, 181; history, 19, 176; identity, 175–­176; well-­being, 180 National Academy of Sciences, 75

Index  •  245

National Committee on Atomic Information, 73 nationalism, 178–­179, 193 nationalist literature, 194 National Vaccine Information Center, 65 nation formation, 179 nation-­states, 9, 59, 175 Native American Mutual Protection Association, 181 nativism, 184 Navarro, Joe, 152 neoliberal fatigue, 12 neoliberalism, 12, 58–­61, 66, 220 neoliberal parenting, 58, 65, 68 New Materialisms, 4 New York Radical Women, 224 Ngai, Sianne, 104, 106 Nixon, Kari, 88 nonconformity, 196–­197 norms, 125, 179, 209, 212, 230; cultural, 168; gendered, 219, 223, 228; moral, 198; social, 59, 153 Norris, Frank, 16, 103, 106–­108, 111, 113 Notes from the Second Year (New York Radical Women), 224 Nottage, Lynn, 126 nuclear neurosis, 75 nuclear waste, 14 Nutton, Vivian, 87 O’Conner, Erin, 88 Ogburn, William, 74 O’Neill, Eugene, 16, 118, 120, 123, 127 operative psychology, 192 oppression, 21, 126, 218, 225, 229; of LGBT people, 204, 207; of women, 224 O’Reilly, Bill, 183 orientalism, 125 Othello (Shakespeare), 117 outbreak narrative, 5, 29, 37–­38, 105, 179. See also inoculation narrative outing, 206 outrage, 73, 138, 221, 226, 229 pandemics, 3, 182, 184 panic, 2, 15, 19, 106, 108. See also gay: panics; moral panics pansexuality, 228 paranoia, 198, 208–­209

parasite, 13–­14, 44–­45, 47–­53, 150–­151, 176, 213 Paris Commune, 222 Park, Justin, 208 Parks, Suzan-­Lori, 118 parole, 151, 156 passing, 214 passivity, 49, 74, 156, 219, 224–­226, 230 Pasteur, Louis, 31, 44–­45 pathogens, 37, 117, 121, 208–­209, 213 pathologization, 151, 158, 210 patriarchy, 119, 160–­161, 169, 223, 228, 230 pedagogy, 12, 20, 218, 226, 228–­230 Pelling, Margaret, 87 performance, 15–­16, 116–­118, 121–­127, 129, 220. See also drama; theater perversion, 158, 208, 227 Peterson, Scott, 143 phallic: imagery, 17–­18, 160, 162, 169; symbolism, 162, 164; worship, 161, 164, 169. See also dick pics phallocentrism, 161–­163 phallomorphic weaponry, 169 phallus fallacy, 163 pharmaceuticals, 225 plague, 1, 88–­89, 91–­96, 98–­100, 125 plague mask, 1, 2 pleasure, 104, 106–­108, 110–­115 polarization, 149, 186 police brutality, 205 police violence, 145 polio, 56, 176, 182 politeness, 219, 223, 225–­226, 228, 230. See also impoliteness political cartoons, 185 political economy, 108, 111, 115, 179 pollution, 14, 71, 87, 208 pornography, 163, 227 postcolonial discourse, 88 praxis, 45, 229 prejudice, 144, 176, 179, 184, 213–­214 primitivism, 179, 184 prison, 95, 133–­135, 143–­144, 150–­151, 205 prison industrial complex, 186 private space, 94, 206 privilege: heterosexual, 20, 205, 210–­213; male, 161, 167–­169; white, 121 profilaktika, 19, 190–­200 pro-­gay ideology, 209, 212

246  •  Index

propaganda, 185, 199 prophylaxis, 90, 190–­191, 194, 200. See also profilaktika prostitution, 178, 199 protest, 6, 9–­10, 182–­185, 196, 211–­212. See also rebellion; resistance; revolution proviruses, 164 psychiatrization of crime, 148 psychopathy, 9–­10, 17–­18, 147–­158 public health, 57–­61, 63–­67, 176, 183–­184, 193–­194. See also communal health public space, 56, 60, 64–­65, 206 Puchner, Martin, 220, 222 “Pussy Grabs Back,” 226 quality of life, 195 quarantine, 11, 13, 60, 94–­95, 210 queer bookstores, 207 Quinn, Zoe, 165 racial violence, 16, 104 racism, 6, 10, 143–­145, 185, 228 radiation, 10, 72–­73, 75–­82; exposure, 75–­76, 80–­81; safety, 72–­74, 76, 81–­82 radicalism, 10, 20, 193, 211, 219–­220, 226–­230 radiophobia, 15, 72, 74–­76, 78–­82 rape, 113, 138, 161, 165–­166 rebellion, 214, 220, 222, 224–­226, 230. See also protest; resistance; revolution Reich, Jennifer, 58 religion, 28, 105, 162, 186, 228–­229 remorse, 151–­153 reproductive health, 72, 75, 77 resiliency, 35, 207 resistance, 72, 145, 153, 219, 229; feminist, 126, 225; political, 135, 226. See also protest; rebellion; revolution revenge pornography, 164–­165 revolution, 3, 10, 12, 18, 222. See also protest; rebellion; resistance revolutionary contagion, 9 rhetoric, 34–­36, 58, 60–­61, 66–­68, 208–­209. See also anti-­immigrant rhetoric rhizome, 122–­123, 128 Richard, Lloyd, 124 risks, 71–­74, 76–­81, 88–­89, 181–­182, 184–­185; of contagion, 58–­59, 62–­63, 65, 136; of vaccination, 57, 60–­62, 66 Roach, Joseph, 124

Robinson, Cedric, 104 Ronson, Jon, 153 Rosaldo, Renato, 186 Rosenthal, Tracy, 163 Rubio, Marco, 167 Ruhl, Sarah, 123–­124 runaway ornament diversity, 168 Russian Revolution, 222 sadistic violence, 115 safe places, 206 Sagan, Dorion, 47–­49 Said, Edward, 119, 125–­126 same-­sex relationships, 211, 213 Sampson, Tony, 104, 107, 113 sanity, 149–­151, 153, 156, 220. See also insanity Santiago-­Hudson, Reuben, 123–­124 Sarkeesian, Anita, 165 SARS, 2–­3 satire, 224 Schaller, Mark, 208 SCUM Manifesto (Solanas), 20, 219, 223–­224 Sedgwick, Eve, 4 self-­determination, 206 self-­diagnosis, 18, 154–­157 self-­identity, 156 self-­interest, 153 Selis, Nicolas-­Joseph, 36 sensation fiction, 137 Servitje, Lorenzo, 88 Sethi, Megan, 73 sexism, 10, 12, 140, 143, 223, 225 sexting, 165–­166 Sexton, Michael, 128 sexual: assault, 138, 161; citizenship, 206; diversity, 204, 206, 208; identities, 204, 206, 209–­210; minorities, 205–­208, 210–­211, 213–­214; morality, 199; politics, 205–­206, 211; reorientation, 211; segregation, 214 sexual violence, 226, 228 Shakespeare, William, 16, 117–­118, 120, 122–­123, 127–­128 shame, 110, 223, 228 sickness, 7, 44, 177, 179, 205, 210 Siegel, Marc, 182 Silva, Cristobal, 179 Sinkey, Anne, 223

Index  •  247

slavery, 117 Sloterdijk, Peter, 27–­30 smallpox, 27–­28, 30–­35, 37, 89, 91. See also cowpox Smith, Susan, 142–­143 Snapchat, 166 Sobo, Elisa J., 60, 64 social: change, 13, 211, 221–­225, 230; class, 175; contagion, 71, 191, 195, 197, 207; containment, 208; contract, 63; control, 2, 18, 74, 205, 213–­214; disorder, 196; distancing, 209; epidemics, 71–­72; isolation, 212; justice, 145, 186, 213, 219, 227; media, 3, 18, 67–­68, 135, 160–­161; movements, 3, 6, 211–­212, 222, 227; networks, 134, 211–­212; order, 21, 165, 207; scripts, 207; spaces, 207 socialism, 104 social-­problem novel, 104 sociopathy, 149, 152–­155 Solanas, Valerie, 20, 224 solidarity, 6, 185, 213–­214 Sontag, Susan, 3–­4, 88 Sophocles, 118, 122, 126–­127 Soviet Union. See USSR speculative humanities, 105 speech, 90, 218, 220, 223 Spiegel, Alix, 151 Stalin, Joseph, 19, 191–­200 stereotypes, 145, 210, 213, 226, 228 Stern, Alexandra, 177 Sternglass, E. F., 75 Stewart, Alice, 75 stigmatization, 19, 77, 80, 175–­177, 204 Stonewall uprising, 211 Stout, Martha, 151–­152 subcultures, 168, 199, 206 subversion, 116–­117, 124–­126, 148, 162, 218–­220 suicide bombers, 227 sunshine units, 73 support networks, 206, 210 surveillance, 29, 209, 227 swine flu, 179, 182 symbiogenesis, 47, 49–­50 symbolic order, 18, 160–­161, 209 symbols, 62, 160–­166, 169, 205, 227 syphilis, 91, 183

Tamplin, A., 75 Tarver, Erin C., 144 technology, 43–­45, 71, 89, 156, 225 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 96 terrorism, 145, 193 Teves family, 133–­135 theater, 4, 16, 116–­118, 121, 123–­129. See also drama; performance Thomas, Cal, 182 Thompson, Helen, 99 threat narrative, 176, 179, 181 thyroid cancer, 15, 79–­82 tone, 20, 221, 224, 226 totemic belonging, 105 toxic masculinity, 17 traditionalism, 218 translation aesthetic, 38 transmission, 3, 51, 71, 75, 88, 117, 169 transplantation, 35–­36 Trenchard, John, 90–­91 trending, 90, 154–­155, 165, 167 Trump, Donald, 11, 167, 184, 226 Tsugane, Shoichiro, 80 tuberculosis, 5, 176–­177, 182–­183 Tucker, Susie, 90 Twain, Mark, 16, 103–­104, 106, 108–­111, 113 Twitter, 7, 167, 227 unaccompanied minors, 18, 181–­182 United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), 76–­77 “unworking,” 224 urgency, 71, 218, 220–­222, 227 U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, 73 USSR, 19, 189–­191, 195–­196, 198, 200 vaccination, 14, 31, 37, 56–­66, 68, 72, 182–­183. See also inoculation; vaccine vaccine, 11, 14, 31, 37, 56–­68, 183. See also inoculation; vaccination vaccine exemption, 14, 57–­58, 62, 66–­67 vaccine-­preventable: disease, 56–­57, 182; illness, 57, 61, 63, 66 vagina dentata, 161 vaginal imagery, 18, 161, 166 vaginal orgasm, 227 Venice, 1 veterans, 145, 198, 209

248  •  Index

Vick, Michael, 144 Victorian novels, 134, 142 Villarreal, Luis, 46, 48–­50, 52 violence, 17–­19, 148–­149, 168–­169, 181, 193. See also discursive violence; gang violence; gender-­based violence; police violence; racial violence; sadistic violence; sexual violence; violence transmission violence transmission, 133 viral: creativity, 48, 50; murder, 134, 142; replication, 160, 164 virality, 7, 88, 98, 104, 136. See also contagion: as metaphor virology, 5, 13–­14, 42–­43, 52 viruses, 5, 7, 12–­14, 42–­52, 105–­106, 213 vulva vignettes, 18, 161, 166

welfare reform, 7 white privilege, 121 Williams, Raymond, 106 Williams, Tennessee, 118, 120, 127 William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, 181 Wilson, August, 117, 121, 124, 127 Wilson, James Q., 195–­196 women’s liberation, 225 Women’s March, 10 working class, 4, 104, 111–­112, 115, 141–­142, 228 World Health Organization, 61–­65 World War I, 16, 104 World War II, 75, 209 Wu, Brianna, 165

Wagstaffe, William, 36 Wainwright, Henry, 17, 138, 140–­142, 144 Wald, Priscilla, 8, 29, 57, 177–­178; on outbreak narrative, 5, 37–­38, 61, 105, 136, 179. See also imagined immunities; outbreak narrative Wallace, Liz, 228–­229 warfare, 185 Warner, Michael, 205 Weber, Randy, 182 Weiner, Anthony, 165

xenophilia, 36 xenophobia, 3, 10, 19, 32, 176, 199. See also anti-­immigrant sentiment Yamashita, Shunichi, 79 yonic imagery, 18, 161, 166 Zaragoza, Crystal, 229 Zika virus, 3, 179, 209 Zimmer, Carl, 42–­43 Zimmerman, David, 108