ABSTRACT
This is the first part of a two-part forum series titled Cultural Chronicles of COVID-19 edited by Marina Levina. The first part of the forum focuses on the role of language in shaping cultural responses to the pandemic. The authors focus on discursive, linguistic, and affective dimensions of language during COVID-19.
My personal and professional preoccupation with viruses began in the 1990s when HIV/AIDS, while no longer an immediate death sentence, still ravaged queer communities and communities of color. The only available treatments were the imperfect AZTs. The development of protease inhibitors, which gave back years in life expectancy, was still in its infancy. As I became deeply involved in queer liberation and HIV/AIDS prevention work, I marveled at how the virus was used to justify homophobia, violence, and hatred. After all, for so many, HIV/AIDS was proof of damnation; a proof that God, in fact, hates queer people. The language that emerged around the pandemic defined what could and could not be done to bodies whose very existence rendered them suspect; an affirmation of difference made flesh. Sure, it was clearly communicated through every type of official channel that the HIV virus does not discriminate, that it does not care about sexual identity or skin color, but that insistence on viral objectivity obfuscated the fact that viruses do not exist outside of language. Viral spread is intimately tied to the spread, or uncontrollable dissemination, of language used to describe, understand, and respond to disease, violence, and death.
Paula Treichler’s foundational text on cultural meanings of the HIV/AIDS epidemic is essential to drawing connections between viruses and language. She argues that HIV/AIDS must be understood first and foremost as an epidemic of signification; that we need to consider the-then epidemic not only in terms of (re)production of virus through the body of the nation-states, but also in terms of re(production) of meaning about sexuality, desire, marginalization, gender, and race.Footnote1 Her book made us painfully aware that the work of critical cultural studies is to be able to hold a multitude of oft-contradictory theorizations and affects – that we must live as if viruses are real, because they are, and, at the same time, question the public health interventions, media representations, and other forms of rhetorical utterances that determine how life is allowed to be lived, which bodies are allowed to survive, and which bodies are allowed to die.
The first part of this two-part forum series on COVID-19 will attend to the role of language in shaping our response to the pandemic. The contributors consider the pandemic as an intersectional apparatus of rhetorical, discursive, and affective meanings. The forum examines COVID-19 as an “epidemic of signification” and traces the viral dissemination of metaphors, rhetorical utterances, discursive practices, mediated constructions, and other language practices. It is then fitting that the forum opens with “COVID: A Pandemic of Metaphor,” by Paula Treichler. Through an analysis of COVID metaphors, Treichler argues that “a pandemic’s metaphoricity is mobile and unstable.” She then astutely illustrates how an “epidemic of signification” can serve as a methodology for studying the interconnections between language and viruses. She tracks a multiplicity of COVID metaphors to illustrate how, much like the virus itself, pandemic metaphors infect, fester, and mutate. In “Unmasking the Ageism of Whiteness,” Kyle Christensen examines anti-masking rhetoric to illustrate the role of language in identity formation. In an astutely intersectional analysis, Christensen shows how the refusal to mask is shaped through a rhetorical interconnection of age, masculinity, and whiteness. He argues that anti-masking is fundamentally shaped by internalized ageism articulated through a rhetorical conjunction between white masculinity and health and the “explicit relationship existing between whiteness and youthfulness.”
In “The COVID-19 Sensorium,” Emily Winderman and Robert Mejia analyze the sensory articulations of COVID-19 to argue that the sensory assemblages serve as an affective linguistic short-hand of the pandemic. With particular attention to “COVID cough,” they argue that the sensorium functions as a rhetorical and affective space, which “signal[s] disease, vectors, and victims through racialized, classed, and gendered assemblages of sensory presence and absence.” In the concluding essay, “Mourning and Memorializing,” Jeffrey Bennett examines the sites of mourning and memorialization of those lost to COVID-19. By drawing attention to the practice and language of memorialization, Bennett argues that commemorative sites are a site of meaning production, which can provide corrective to the disregard of life which shaped much of the response to COVID-19. At the same time, he imagines commemorative sites that “move beyond performative gestures of sentimentality to ensure that the civic agony inflicted by anti-science and far-right movements is not repeated.”
Together, these essays continue important critical work to study the interconnections between science, medicine, and language. The forum articulates the importance of critical cultural work for understanding COVID-19 and the way in which the particularities of language shape scientific and cultural responses to the pandemic. After all, the responses to COVID-19 as a site of meaning production will affect how we live in the newly re-infected world for years to come.Footnote2 In the second part of the forum, we will continue the work of tracing cultural dissemination of meanings during the pandemic, while focusing on COVID-19 politics and praxis.
Acknowledgements
The editor would like to thank Dr. Robin Boylorn for seeing merit in this work and for providing a supportive space in which to do it.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Treichler, Paula A. How to have theory in an epidemic. Duke University Press, 1999.
2 Levina, Marina. Pandemics in the media. Peter Lang, 2015.