Going Viral
“Going Viral” is an opportunity to think with the logics and lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic about the ways that intimacy, mobility, information, body, nation, gender, and sexuality are imbricated through viruses, and other transmittable forms.
Is the virus airborne? The constantly shifting data on how the Coronavirus spreads has reconfigured breath and other normative bodily habitations, from mask-wearing and hand sanitizing, to elbow-taps and grocery wiping.
Through what fluids is the virus transmitted? Covid-19 has required reconsiderations of physical intimacy, with cities even publishing sex guides. The governance of intimacy is all too familiar to people considered “at risk” of HIV infection: queer and trans people, sex workers, migrants, and drug users.
Does the virus know gender? Computer viruses named Melissa and ILOVEYOU signal how gender, intimacy, and affect become vectors for digital migrations. But along with viruses travel techniques of care and survival that are distinctly gendered; consider the recurring report that nations with women leaders handled pandemic response better.
Is racism the virus? Racist attacks have targeted Asian people, casting them as originators and spreaders of Covid-19. HIV, Ebola, H1N1, and Avian Flu have each been attached to particular racialized populations in ways that cast suspicion on their sexual and intimate proximities with humans and other animals. Further, reports of higher infection rates amongst Black and Latinx populations pulled the veil back on unequal structures of labor, housing, and access to medical care.
The current pandemic is an accumulation of many viral histories. This panel invites scholars to draw form their original research to explore the traffic in viral discourse and the pathways of transmission—of data, bodies, feelings, ideology—through feminist, queer, and trans lenses.
Live captioning will be provided.
Roundtable Participants:
Adia Benton, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Northwestern University
Adia Benton is an associate professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Northwestern University, where she is affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. Her first book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development Through Disease in Sierra Leone, won the 2017 Rachel Carson Prize, which is awarded by the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) to the best book in the field of Science and Technology Studies with strong social or political relevance. Her body of work addresses transnational efforts to eliminate health disparities and inequalities, and the role of ideology in global health. In addition to ongoing research on public health responses to epidemics, including the 2013-2016 West African Ebola outbreak, she has conducted research on the growing movement to fully incorporate surgical care into commonsense notions of “global health.” Her other writing has touched on the politics of anthropological knowledge in infectious disease outbreak response, racial hierarchies in humanitarianism and development, techniques of enumeration in gender-based violence programs, and racial capital in professional sports. She has a PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University, an MPH in international health from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, and an AB in Human Biology from Brown University. She has held a postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College and visiting positions at Oberlin College and in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Gowri Vijayakumar, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Brandeis University
Gowri Vijayakumar is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research and teaching use feminist and transnational perspectives to illuminate the trajectories of social movements, the everyday life of the state, and the political economy of globalization. Most of her research focuses on India. Her first book, At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis, forthcoming with Stanford University Press, draws on ethnographic fieldwork from India and Kenya to consider the fraught relationship between sex worker and LGBTQ+ activists and HIV prevention programs. She is also engaged in ongoing collaborative research projects on sex work in Bangalore. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Gender & Society, World Development, Qualitative Sociology, Social Problems, Political Power and Social Theory, Global Labor Journal, and Signs, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.
Jih-Fei Cheng, Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Scripps College
Jih-Fei Cheng is Assistant Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Scripps College. He is co-editor of the book volume AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Duke University Press 2020) with Alexandra Juhasz and Nishant Shahani. His first book-in-progress, Queer Code: HIV/AIDS and the History of Virology, examines HIV/AIDS within the colonial context of virology. A second project, tentatively titled Queer Across the Straits, studies how the fields of virology and genetics have structured whiteness and Chineseness.
Shaka McGlotten, Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology, Purchase College
Shaka McGlotten is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology at Purchase College-SUNY, where they also serve as Chair of the Gender Studies and Global Black Studies Programs. Their work stages encounters between Black study, queer theory, media, and art. Their research focuses on networked intimacies and messy computational entanglements as they interface with QTPOC lifeworlds. They are the author of Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality, published by SUNY Press in 2013. They are also the co-editor of two edited collections, Black Genders and Sexualities (with Dana-ain Davis) and Zombies and Sexuality (with Steve Jones). Their book Dragging: In the Drag of a Queer Life, forthcoming from Routledge, is a work of creative non-fiction that features ethnographic portraits of drag performers in Berlin and Israel/Palestine as they navigate art, politics, and the global mediatization of drag publics. Their ongoing project, Black Data, works to bridge theoretical developments in critical data studies with those central to queer of color critique. Their work has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation, and Data&Society.
Moderator: Kareem Khubchandani is the Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University. He recently published Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (U. Michigan Press), a performance ethnography of queer social spaces in Bangalore and Chicago. He has published in Scholar and Feminist Online; Transgender Studies Quarterly; Journal of Asian American Studies; The Velvet Light Trap; Theater Topics; Theatre Journal; The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies; Queer Dance (Oxford UP); and Queering Digital India(Edinburgh UP).
ABOUT FEMINISMS UNBOUND
This Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an annual event series featuring debates that focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. This series is intended to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments.
The event organizers, who are also visiting scholars with the GCWS this year, are Elora Chowdhury (Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston), Faith Smith (Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Brandeis University), and Kareem Khubchandani (Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in theDepartment of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University). have programmed the events in this series.