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Acknowledgements
She thanks Cara Finnegan, John Lyne, Jeffrey Bennett, Stephen John Hartnett, and Hamilton Bean for intellectual engagement with this essay.
Notes
1. American Gothic appears at the Art Institute of Chicago and may be viewed online at “About this Artwork: American Gothic,” July 27, 2010, http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/6565. What I have taken to calling “Anthrax Gothic” appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune on October 11, 2001, by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Steve Breen, who granted permission for its use in this essay. The image may be accessed online by entering the date of the cartoon into Daryl Cagle's Political Cartoonists search engine: http://www.cagle.com/politicalcartoons/pccartoons/archives/breen.asp?Action=GetImage.
2. This phrase from an “unnamed organizer” of the Atlantic Storm biodefense exercise appears in “Not Science Fiction,” Washington Post, January 27, 2005, A18. The unnamed source is likely Tara O'Toole, formerly of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Center for Biosecurity, who, as Under Secretary for Science and Technology of the US Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Division, is now President Obama's de facto biosecurity advisor, a fact that reveals the tight coupling of biodefense insiders and the US government.
3. I chart what is now more than $50 billion in US spending on civilian biodefense in “How Does a Pathogen Become a Terrorist? The Collective Transformation of Risk into Bio(in)security” in Rhetorical Questions in Health and Medicine, ed. Joan Leach and Deborah Dysart-Gale (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 85–120.
4. Heather Schell observed that in the 1990s the US became “infected with virus metaphors” in “Outburst! A Chilling True Story About Emerging-Virus Narratives and Pandemic Social Change,” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 5 (1997): 94. Some worthwhile germ scholarship from other disciplines includes historian Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor's Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2003); security analyst Jonathan B. Tucker's edited collection of biological and chemical weapons case studies, Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000); “Contagion and Culture,” a 2002 special issue of American Literary History edited by English professor Priscilla Wald, historian Nancy Tomes, and journalism professor Lisa Lynch; see “Introduction: Contagion and Culture,” American Literary History 14 (2002): 617–24; Americanist Ruth Mayer's “Virus Discourse: The Rhetoric of Threat and Terrorism in the Biothriller,” Cultural Critique 66 (2007): 1–20; and English professor Stephen Dougherty's “The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel,” Cultural Critique 48 (2001): 1–29. See also Cynthia J. Davis, “Contagion as Metaphor,” American Literary History 14 (2002): 828–36; and Heather Schell, “The Sexist Gene: Science Fiction and the Germ Theory of History,” American Literary History 14 (2002): 805–27. An example from communication studies may be found in Rebecca A. Weldon, “An ‘Urban Legend’ of Global Proportion: An Analysis of Nonfiction Accounts of the Ebola Virus,” Journal of Health Communication 6 (2001): 281–94. Finally, the Journal of Health Communication published a 2003 special issue concerning communication following the anthrax attacks. See especially Susan J. Robinson, and Wendy C. Newstetter, “Uncertain Science and Certain Deadlines: CDC Responses to the Media During the Anthrax Attacks of 2001,” Journal of Health Communication 8 (2003, Supplement 1): 17–34.
5. Melinda Cooper, “Pre-empting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War on Terror,” Theory, Culture, & Society 23 (2006): 113. I should note that although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, biodefense, biosecurity, and biosafety often mean different things, with biosecurity having a broader focus. The differences (and their implications) should be subject to close rhetorical analysis.
6. Reviews of nuclear criticism include Bryan C. Taylor and Stephen John Hartnett, “‘National Security, and All That it Implies …’: Communication and (Post-) Cold War Culture,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86 (2000): 465–87; and Bryan C. Taylor, “Nuclear Weapons and Communication Studies: A Review Essay,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 300–15. E. Johanna Hartelius provides a review of recent rhetoric of medicine scholarship in “Review Essay: Sustainable Scholarship and the Rhetoric of Medicine,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 457–70. See also Judy Z. Segal's Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Studies of biopolitics in rhetorical studies include but are not limited to J. Blake Scott, Risky Rhetoric: AIDS and the Cultural Practices of HIV Testing (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003); J. Blake Scott, “Kairos as Indeterminate Risk Management: The Pharmaceutical Industry's Response to Bioterrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 115–43; and Jeffrey A. Bennett, Banning Queer Blood: Rhetorics of Citizenship, Contagion, and Resistance (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009).
7. Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
8. I had a productive and enjoyable conversation about epidemic discourses with Jeffrey Bennett, Isaac West, Megan Foley, and John Lynch at the Fall 2010 Public Address Conference in Pittsburgh. West and Bennett reminded me that Gordon R. Mitchell and Kathleen M. McTigue have an essay on the “now endemic” use of the term epidemic to describe obesity, “The US Obesity ‘Epidemic’: Metaphor, Method, or Madness?” Social Epistemology 21 (2007): 391–423.
9. For a fascinating overview of the shifting senses of the word epidemic from Homer through the twentieth century, see Paul M. V. Martin and Estelle Martin-Granel, “2,500-year Evolution of the Term Epidemic (Historical Review),” Emerging Infectious Disease 12 (2006): 977, September 15, 2010, http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol12no06/05–1263.htm. Even schizophrenia has recently been reconfigured in terms of “the insanity virus”; see Douglas Fox, “The Insanity Virus,” Discover, November 8, 2010, November 20, 2010, http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-virus.
10. Paula Treichler uses this phrase in How To Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 1. Just a few of the scores of films that feature this vision include Danny Boyle, dir., 28 Days Later (United Kingdom: Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2002) and Francis Lawrence's remake of the 1971 Omega Man, I am Legend (United States: Warner Brothers, 2007). José Saramago's brilliant and haunting pandemic novel Blindness (New York: Harvest Books, 1998), which later became a major motion picture, also deserves mention. I am grateful that my research assistant Jennifer Malkowski, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, has created elaborate tables of germ-related motion pictures, novels, television shows, and documentaries to help me chart this terrain.
11. Much film criticism addresses the 1990s film Outbreak. See Walter Metz, “From Microfilm to Microbes: Outbreak as Post-Cold War Thriller,” in Engaging Film Criticism: Film History and Contemporary American Cinema (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 23–44; and Schell, “Outburst!”
12. Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff, “The Problem of Securing Health,” in Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question, ed. Andrew Lakoff and Stephen J. Collier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 9.
13. Richard M. Clendenin supplies an account of bacteriological weapons work at Fort Detrick in Science and Technology at Fort Detrick, 1943–1968 (Frederick, MD: US Army, 1968). In 1941, the National Academy of Science's (NAS) War Bureau of Consultation, commissioned by Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimson, recommended creating a bacteriological weapons research program. In 1942, President Roosevelt asked Stimson to start the War Research Service, which was then directed by George Merck at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. In November of 1942, the War Research Service requested that the Chemical Warfare Service develop a biological weapons research and development initiative to be overseen by Dr. Ira Baldwin. Construction began at Detrick in 1943. For an overview of this program, see Phillip R. Pittman, Sarah L. Norris, Kevin M. Coonan, and Kelly T. McKee, Jr., “An Assessment of Health Status Among Medical Research Volunteers Who Served in the Project Whitecoat Program at Fort Detrick, Maryland,” Military Medicine 170 (2005): 183–87.
14. See Theodor Rosebury, Peace or Pestilence: Biological Warfare and How to Avoid It (New York: Whittlesey, 1949); and David E. Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (New York: Doubleday, 2009). Rosebury left Detrick in 1945 and spoke out against biological warfare.
15. My current book project, tentatively titled Envisioning Viral Apocalypse: A Rhetorical History of Biological Weapons from World War II to the War on Terror, examines changing visions of viral apocalypse in biodefense discourse across technical, political, and entertainment domains. For a representative work concerning the post-9/11 period, see Keränen, “How Does a Pathogen Become a Terrorist?”
16. Jeanne Guillemin's Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) offers a great starting point for scholars interested in the international history of biological weapons development in the twentieth century and offers a set of texts and contexts ripe for further analysis. One new investigation of nuclear imagery is Ned O'Gorman and Kevin Hamilton, “At the Interface: The Loaded Rhetorical Gestures of Nuclear Legitimacy and Illegitimacy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8(2011): 41–66.
17. Christopher J. Davis, “Nuclear Blindness: An Overview of the Biological Weapons Programs of the Former Soviet Union and Iraq,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 5 (1999): 509–12.
18. Alibek also shared news of “hundreds of tons” of anthrax bacteria ready for loading on intercontinental ballistic missiles, among other horrifying tales. Tim Weiner, “Soviet Defector Warns of Biological Weapons,” New York Times, February 25, 1998, A1, A8; and Ken Alibek and Steven Handelman, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World; Told From Inside by the Man Who Ran It (New York: Random House, 1999). Tales of the chimera virus or spliced “super-germ” appear in Hoffman, The Dead Hand; and Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), which in kairotic fashion arrived in bookstores on 9/11.
19. The New York Times article detailing President Clinton's engagement with Preston's work may be found at “About Richard Preston,” December 2, 2010, http://richardpreston.net/about-richard-preston.
20. Schell, “Outburst,” 94.
21. Cooper, “Pre-empting Emergence,” 113.
22. Cooper, “Pre-empting Emergence,” 113. Cooper used British spellings (“defence”), which I changed.
23. Bill Frist as quoted in Milton Leitenberg, “Bioterrorism, Hyped,” Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2006, B13.
24. For a study of autism rhetoric, see Dennis A. Lynch, “Rhetorics of Proximity: Empathy in Temple Grandin and Cornel West,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 28 (1998): 5–23.
25. Huiling Ding offers an analysis of SARS communication that picks up some of these themes in “Rhetorics of Alternative Media in an Emerging Epidemic: SARS, Censorship, and Extra-Institutional Risk Communication,” Technical Communication Quarterly 18 (2009): 327–50.
26. Rob Stein, “Reports Accuse WHO of Exaggerating H1N1 Threat, Possible Ties to Drug Makers,” The Washington Post, June 4, 2010, January 4, 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2010/06/04/AR2010060403034_pf.html.
27. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1986), 126.
28. Admittedly, much existing work in this area tracks militant metaphors of contagion, but there is room for considering other forms of representation and influence. In terms of how fear of bioterrorism might affect academic research, Barry R. Bloom speculates in “Bioterrorism and the University: The Threats to Security—and to Openness,” Harvard Magazine (November–December 2003), January 4, 2011, http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/11/bioterrorism-and-the-uni.html.
29. While my focus for readers of the Quarterly Journal of Speech concerns rhetorical interventions, critical and interpretive health communication scholars obviously have much to contribute to biocriticism as well. Examples of cultural/rhetorical studies scholarship concerning HIV include Treichler, How to Have Theory; Scott, Risky Rhetoric; and Bennett, Banning Queer Blood.
30. See, for starters, Michel Foucault, “The Right of Death and Power over Life,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 258–72; and The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College De France, 1978–1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, “Biopower Today,” Biosocieties 1 (2006): 195–217; Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas, “Biological Citizenship,” in Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 439–63.
31. For a fine example of this line of scholarship, see J. David Cisneros, “Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of Immigrant as Pollutant in Media Representations of Immigration,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11 (2008): 569–601.
32. Crystal Franco, “Billions for Biodefense: Federal Agency Biodefense Funding, FY2008-FY2009,” Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science 6 (2008): 131–46. The figure $49 million appears on page 131 and though substantial, represents but 0.26 percent of the federal budget, yet subsequent studies have pushed the figure above $50. See Keränen, “How Does a Pathogen Become a Terrorist?” The $2 billion per victim figure comes from Alan Reynolds, “WMD Doomsday Distractions,” reprinted in The Cato Institute Online (2005), August 3, 2008, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4235.
33. The Institute of Medicine's 1999 report “To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System” details that somewhere between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year from preventable medical errors. A brief version of the report, January 4, 2011, is available online at http://www.iom.edu/~/media/Files/Report%20Files/1999/To-Err-is-Human/To%20Err%20is%20Human%201999%20%20report%20brief.pdf.
34. See Keränen, “How Does a Pathogen Become a Terrorist?” and Keränen, “Bio(In)Security: Rhetoric, Scientists, and Citizens in the Age of Bioterrorism,” in Sizing Up Rhetoric, ed. David Zarefsky and Elizabeth Benacka (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2008), 227–49.
35. Robert Danisch recently argued that “the tremendous ‘success’ of scientific research and technological development now acts to produce uncertainty, fear, and danger. As such, science and technology stand at the center of contemporary political rhetoric in a radically different way”; see “Political Rhetoric in a World Risk Society,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 40 (2010): 173; Danisch wants to explore how to sustain political culture in the face of such techno-scientific rationality, an important task indeed. While his focus on political culture advances a different project than the one I have in mind, his treatment of risk suggests the importance of this line of inquiry. See also Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2009); Van Loon, Risk and Technological Culture; Barbara Adam, Ulrich Beck, and Joost Van Loon, eds., The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory (London: Sage, 2000); Jeffrey T. Grabill and W. Michele Simmons, “Toward a Critical Rhetoric of Risk Communication: Producing Citizens and the Role of Technical Communicators,” Technical Communication Quarterly 7 (1998): 415–41; Scott, Risky Rhetoric; and Beverly Sauer, The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003).
36. Rose and Novas, “Biological Citizenship.”
37. Charles L. Briggs, “Communicability, Racial Discourse, and Disease,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (2005): 279. Brigg's review essay may be heuristic for rhetoricians interested in biocriticism, particularly as it maps out social inequalities related to disease.
38. Dan Brouwer, “The Precarious Visibility Politics of Self-Stigmatization: The Case of HIV/AIDS Tattoos,” Text and Performance Quarterly 18 (1998): 114–36.
39. Joost Van Loon's concept of the “viral abject” draws from Julia Kristeva and appears in his Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence (New York: Routledge, 2002), 86. See Kristeva's notion of the abject in “Powers of Horror,” The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 229–63.
40. Melinda Cooper's Life as Surplus: Biotechnology, Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008) examines a host of cases well suited for rhetorical analysis. Interested readers should also consult Rose, The Politics of Life Itself.
41. In 1987, rhetorician John Lyne first used the term bio-rhetoric to describe “a systematic strategy for mediating between the life sciences and social life,” in “Learning the Lessons of Lysenko: Biology, Rhetoric, and Politics in Historical Controversy,” Argument and Critical Practice, ed. Joseph Wenzel et al. (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1987), 527. The quotation here appeared in “Bio-rhetorics: Moralizing the Life Sciences,” in The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, ed. Herbert W. Simons (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990), 38. In addition to the research on HIV referenced above and below, one rhetoric scholar who has produced several studies of virus discourse is Carol Reeves. See “Owning a Virus: The Rhetoric of Scientific Discovery Accounts,” Rhetoric Review 10 (1992): 321–36.
42. “Making live” (faire vivre) contrasts with the power of the sovereign to take life. See Michel Foucault, “Faire Vivre et Laisser Mourir: La Naissance du Racisme,” Les Temps Modernes 535 (1991): 37–61; and Rabinow and Rose, “Biopower Today,” 195, where “making live” is defined as “strategies for the governing of life.”
43. For an example of the thanatopolitical view of biopolitics par excellence, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). There is a growing body of work in rhetoric studies that addresses thanatopolitics, and though I am lately seeking an alternate view of biopower, much of it is useful and important. My point, following Rabinow and Rose, is simply that “the field of biopolitics operates according to logics of vitality, not mortality: while it has its circuits of exclusion, letting die is not making die” (Rabinow and Rose, “Biopower Today,” 211). The work I reference in our field includes Megan Foley, “Voicing Terri Schiavo: Prosopopeic Citizenship in the Democratic Aporia Between Sovereignty and Biopower,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7 (2010): 381–400; and Todd McDorman, “Controlling Death: Bio-Power and the Right-to-Die Controversy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2 (2005): 257–79. Interested readers should also consult Michael Hyde's groundbreaking work on end-of-life communication, especially his “Medicine, Rhetoric, and Euthanasia: A Case Study in the Workings of Postmodern Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 201–24; and his Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, Rhetoric and the Euthanasia Debate (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008).
44. Rabinow and Rose, “Biopolitics Today,” 215.
45. Hyde's work concerning transhumanism, especially Perfection: Coming to Terms With Being Human (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), is required reading. So are Celeste Condit's studies of the rhetoric of the genome, especially The Meanings of the Gene: Public Debates about Heredity (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). See also John Lynch, “Stem Cells and the Embryo: Biorhetoric and Scientism in Congressional Debate,” Public Understanding of Science 18 (2009): 309–24.
46. Susan Herbst's call for long-term, functional communication studies is thought provoking. See her “Disciplines, Intersections, and the Future of Communication Research,” Journal of Communication 58 (2008): 603–14. However, whereas Herbst sees theory development across contexts as a desirable end of communication scholarship, I further seek engaged scholarship that seeks to build collaborative scholarly works into forms useful to stakeholder populations. As I was putting the finishing touches on this essay, I had the opportunity to work with other rhetoricians of science on a position paper concerning the need for collaborative cross-disciplinary research relationships. See the forthcoming opinion by David Gruber, Jordynn Jack, Lisa Keränen, John M. McKenzie, and Matthew B. Morris called “Rhetoric and the Neurosciences: Engagement and Exploration,” POROI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention.
47. Robert L. Ivie, “Productive Criticism Then and Now,” American Communication Journal 4 (2001): 1–4.