27: From HIV to COVID: Virality, Vulnerability, and Interdependence feat. Steven Thrasher

Ordinary Unhappiness

Abby and Patrick welcome Steven Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. We discuss Steven’s singular career trajectory (from Saturday Night Live to The Village Voice to academia); the difference between “having” or “owning” a body versus being a body; why pandemics are never just about biology, but implicate social realities, shared fantasies, and libidinal economy; the notion of the “viral underclass”; the changing landscape of HIV/AIDS criminalization laws and the case of Michael Johnson, a young Black man prosecuted for the “reckless transmission” of HIV; the origins, myths, and baggage of the term “Patient Zero”; logics of scapegoating and moral panics; hierarchies of social vulnerability and human disposability, especially as they implicate questions of race, class, sexuality, disability, incarceration, and housing status; our relationship to animals and our calculi about who gets to count as human; ideologies about health and disease, purity and pollution, infection and risk; and how viruses can help us reimagine our conceptions of borders, boundaries, permeability, autonomy, and interdependence.
The Viral Underclass is here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-viral-underclass-the-human-toll-when-inequality-and-disease-collide-steven-w-thrasher/17086534
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