Introduction: Autoimmunities in the Wake of COVID-19

Abstract

Our introduction and the essays collected in this Special Section address themselves to the ruins, creations, and legacies of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. More precisely, we ask how our notions of immunity and especially autoimmunity have changed over the last three years. We theorize autoimmunity in the wake of COVID-19 through approaches that consider the material and experiential phenomenology proliferated by the longue durée of both the experience of COVID-19 infection and the pandemic itself. In this way, we connect our inquiries both to the history of recent epidemics—most notably HIV/AIDS—and to broader philosophical and cultural investigations of what immunity means and does. The writings grouped here focus their attentions in different and complementary ways. Some train their analysis on issues of temporality, others on ontology (Does the virus live?). Still others focus on geopolitics and other fields of specialization such as feminist and queer theory, science and technology studies, disability studies, critical race theory, and health humanities. Taken together, we imagine strategies of care and collective survival through notions of autoimmunity that model different, more queerly entangled and cripped understandings of bodies and environments that reach beyond myths of autonomy and sovereignty, eradication, and cure.