The COVID-19 sensorium and its vectors, victims, and violators

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic shifted relationships between hegemonic sensory perceptions and disease epistemologies. The affective pedagogies of the COVID-19 sensorium signal vectors and victims of disease through racialized, classed, and gendered assemblages of sensory presence and absence. Present sounds of weaponized coughing suture white consumerist entitlement to violate public health imperatives. The coughs in the film Corona critique the rise of anti-Asian violence and demonstrate how sound is intelligible through available stereotypes and circulating xenophobic rhetoric. Amid asymptomatic spread, appeals to “Typhoid Mary” Mallon—the first named asymptomatic typhoid carrier–re-emerged as another xenophobic sensory pedagogy to signify threatening absent symptoms.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19
• whiteness
• race
• disease
• Typhoid Mary

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Marina Levina, participants in her Cultural Meanings of Pandemics graduate seminar, Diana Isabel Martínez, participants in her Advanced Rhetorical Criticism course, and Atilla Hallsby for assistance in strengthening the ideas that appear in this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “Coronavirus: US Death Toll Passes 2,000 in a Single Day,” BBC News, April 11, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52249963.

2 Luca Santocchia, “Non-stop Work and No Protection: Bergamo’s Funeral Houses Say ‘Enough,’” EuroNews, March 24, 2020, https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/24/non-stop-work-and-no-protection-bergamo-s-funeral-houses-say-enough.

3 Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Saurabh Sharma, “Stench of Death Pervades Rural India as Ganges Swells with Covid Victims,” The Guardian, May 19, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/20/stench-death-pervades-rural-india-ganges-swells-covid-victims.

4 Emily Winderman, Robert Mejia, and Brandon Rogers, “‘All Smell is Disease:’ Miasma, Sensory Rhetoric, and the Sanitary-Bacteriologic of Visceral Public Health,” Rhetoric of Health & Medicine 2 no. 2 (2019): 115–146.

5 Alexander J. Means and Graham B. Slater, “Collective Disorientation in the Pandemic Conjuncture,” Cultural Studies 35, no. 2–3 (2021), 515.

6 The phrase “Typhoid Mary” pejoratively refers to Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant to the United States in the early twentieth century. Mallon was the first reported asymptomatic carrier of Typhoid Fever in North America and was confined until her death in 1938. For excellent treatments of how Mary Mallon became “Typhoid Mary,” and the political consequences see: Judith W. Leavitt, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996), and Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

7 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. A. Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980/1995), 1.

8 Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1965/2005), 66.

9 Debra Hawhee, “Rhetoric’s Sensorium,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 2–17.

10 Hawhee, “Rhetoric’s Sensorium,” 5.

11 Justin Eckstein, “Sensing School Shootings,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 37, no. 2 (2020), 2.

12 V. Jo Hsu, “Containment and Interdependence: Epidemic Logics in Asian American Racialization,” QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking 7, no. 3 (2020), 125.

13 Caroline A. Jones, “The Mediated Sensorium,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 8.

14 Karen Weintraub, “‘Life-Altering:’ As Millions Cope with Smell Loss from Covid-19, Researchers Find New Explanations and Possible Treatments,” USA Today, 2021, accessed May 25, 2021, https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/health/2021/05/23/covid-19-smell-loss-new-research-explores-causes-treatments/4979734001/.

15 Weintraub, “As Millions Cope.”

16 “How COVID-19 Can Impact Your Sense of Smell,” Penn Medicine, June 21, 2020, https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/health-and-wellness/2020/june/covid-and-smell.

17 Winderman, Mejia, Rogers, “All Smell Is Disease.”

18 Paula A. Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 45.

19 Lalaie Ameeriar, “The Sanitized Sensorium,” American Anthropologist 114, no. 3 (2012), 510.

20 Ameeriar, “The Sanitized Sensorium,” 510.

21 “COVID-19 Fueling Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia Worldwide,” Human Rights Watch, May 12, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide#.

22 Dan Scanlan, “She Coughed on a Jacksonville Pier 1 Shopper during the Pandemic. Now She’s Heading to Jail,” Florida Times-Union, April 8, 2021, https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/courts/2021/04/08/woman-gets-jail-after-coughing-shopper-jacksonville-pier-1/6979453002/.

23 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 2001).

24 Winderman, Mejia, Rogers, “All Smell is Disease,” 131.

25 As just a few examples, see: “What Typhoid Mary’s Story Tells Us About COVID-19 Tensions,” NPR, July 2, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/07/02/886487212/what-typhoid-marys-story-tells-us-about-covid-19-tensions; Navjeevan Gopal, “Explained: How Punjab Police is Using the Tale of ‘Typhoid Mary’ to Battle COVID-19,” Indian Express, August 14, 2020, https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/punjab-police-typhoid-mary-coronavirus-6554411/; Jon Jackson, “Ron DeSantis Calls Rebeka Jones the ‘Typhoid Mary’ of COVID, Lauds Twitter Suspension,” Newsweek, June 7, 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/rebekah-desantis-twitter-1598312.

26 Boon Hau Ng, Nik Nuratiqah Nik Abeed, Mohamed Faisal Abdul Hamid, Chun Ias Soo, Hsueh Jing Low, and Yu-Lin Andrea Ban, “What Happens When We Treat the “Typhoid Mary” of COVID-19,” Respirology Case Reports 8 no. 6 (2020): e00604.

27 “What Comes After the COVID-19 Vaccine? 6 DOs and DON’Ts,” Tryon Medical Partners, https://www.tryonmed.com/resource/what-comes-after-the-covid-19-vaccine-6-dos-and-donts/

28 Roisin O’Connor, “Seth Meyers Calls Out Trump over White House Coronavirus Outbreak: ‘He’s Typhoid Mary If She Held Rallies,” Independent, October 9, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/seth-meyers-trump-coronavirus-health-white-house-covid-super-spreader-b905602.html.

29 O’Connor, “Seth Meyers Calls.”

30 O’Connor, “Seth Meyers Calls.”

31 Robin Abcarian, “Column: Trump is No Churchill, No FDR. Try Typhoid Mary Instead,” Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2020, https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-10-06/trump-coronavirus-churchill-fdr-typhoid-mary.

32 T.J. Tallie, “Asymptomatic Lethality: Cooper, COVID-19, and the Potential for Black Death,” nursingclio.org, June 8, 2020, https://nursingclio.org/2020/06/08/asymptomatic-lethality-cooper-covid-19-and-the-potential-for-black-death/.