And they are reproductive politics in that viral reproduction is, in some ways, the “new” (not new) sex-remaking a world of life and nonlife through this reproduction, as much as any major mammalian species, including the human. Nevertheless, viral politics are also sexual politics, not least in the human cases where certain identity-associated practices highlight queer vulnerability-such as in the case of HIV, and at the time I am writing, mpox (MPX). If sexuality inheres in majoritarian viral pandemics, then leaning on Kirksey’s terminology, I’m not sure what a “virophobic” politics-absolute, cloaking fear-has itself done definitively for the “greater good” it has brought with it much overcorrection and biopolitical re-entrenchment. In the majority of cases, a female spider kills and eats a male before, during, or after copulation.Īs for life as an object, Eben Kirksey has written of biophobic responses to Covid around the world-attacks on life understood as such, from foliage to alienable and yet proximate animal species. Spider cannibalism is the act of a spider consuming all or part of another individual of the same species as food. This has an interesting parallel with viruses, in that while a male-agentive narrative mandates penetration of a “host” egg, conception is a coordinated, shared activity in the same way that many viruses themselves work (or work themselves in) commensally or mutually. A soundalike non-cognate for virality, virility, refers not only to masculinity but the force of health and sex drive, and sometimes sperm counts. The profiling of sexual activity can exist within an ordinary state of affairs in which sex, and its nonidentical partner reproduction, are given disproportionate responsibility for the imagined sustenance of life, and a presumptive muscularity in the ideal. Though the biological potency of contact-based sex seems an easy and first-level culprit in a biocentric sphere, the stakes here can exist beside the question of biological mechanisms of infection, and it is key to remember that queerphobia opportunistically finds many venues for its articulation. 1 Sexual activity is again perceived as-and becomes, as an effect of that perception-at stake for disease. Sexuality’s sheer presence as an engine (if not also a designated placeholder) of intimacy is made baldly evident when any publicized disease indicts intimacy in its dominant rendering. What bodies bear the double weight of stigmatized “social” distance? (Viral) pandemics aren’t sexless how they are (or are made) sexual is the question. The Covid imagination has reanimated around racialized class as well as around old East Asian disease associations in the US and elsewhere. Perhaps I am thus predisposed to a certain stance vis-à-vis viral pandemics, such as Covid-19, which has occurred with spectacularity in part due to the globalization of popular scientific information, international public health communication, and forms of democratic (viral) media. My earlier attempts to consider animacy worlds included reframing such phenomena as toxicity and pollution within contemporary empire as inevitably invoking racialized ulterior bodyminds, while at the same time being structurally intimate with the phobic, and sexual, politics of contagion. This is a brief thought experiment (itself composed, or not composed, in a few agitated moments stolen away from Covid time compression) that is meant to pivot away from the dishonest romanticization and flattening of both life and death taking place in the pandemic.
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