Viral Conjunctures
— What’s in a Name?
“Viral Conjunctures” is a phrase we borrow from Stuart Hall’s notion of a “conjuncture” . To Hall, a conjuncture denotes an analytical practice that examines how different historical, cultural, social, and political “currents” meet to form a particular historical moment that remains open to the future and the contingencies of the present. In this way, conjunctures make political, cultural, and social transformation possible. For instance, reading pandemics as conjunctures emphasizes their multifaceted biomedical, biopolitical, and narrative formations and, as such, elucidates decreasing planetary habitability, the interdependence of human and nonhuman life-worlds, the global rise of political authoritarianism, the expansion of technocapitalism, and the backlash against civil rights and freedoms. This method of reading pandemics recalibrates received understandings of the relationship between health, biomedicine, planetary transformation and wellbeing, public health, and the creative imagination.
“Viral Conjunctures” also describes the complex and intersecting forces that shape how global pandemics are experienced, understood, and narrated. These forces include systemic racism, gender and sexual oppression, environmental degradation, class and geopolitical inequality, and forms of violence rooted in homo- and transphobia. Rather than viewing health as a normative state designating the absence of illness, we approach it as a dynamic and pluri-epistemic practice and assemblage. We are primarily interested in querying how literary, critical, lyrical, and visual engagements with pandemics in various geopolitical contexts trouble, decolonize, and redirect technocratic, solutionist, and scientistic concepts of pandemics and planetary health. To us, the adjective “viral” not only connotes unruly contagion and contamination, but it invokes histories of imperial, tropical, and patriarchal medicine and viral warfare. We thus examine pandemics as historical and present conjunctures, in which biology, power, politics, and narrative collide in regulatory and transformative ways