Abstract
This chapter of my book Bodies Out of Rule (2014) considers John Greyson's Zero Patience – a 1993 musical satire on the early days of the AIDS epidemic – in the context of the epidemiological and immunity discourses inherent in neoliberal biopolitics. Greyson's film can be read as a queer critique of the broadly understood epidemiological operations of biopower, especially its authoritarian systematizations and taxonomizations that establish a certain "regime of truth" and are a necessary condition for the effective regulation of social practices and subjects. Through my reading of Greyson's film, I argue for a queer reclamation of the feared figure of the virus as a thoroughly transversal figure that transcends existing boundaries, identities, and cognitive categories.
Highlights
The internet is replete with information on the alleged vampire virus (V5 or K-17, or other) or else the zombie virus (LQP-79 or the C-virus, or other), and comparisons to HIV are often explicit1
In the realm of the internet and the media the idea of “going viral” has itself gone viral, not to mention the very vampire and the zombie. What they have in common, besides the quality of “undeadness,” is a familiar idea of the computer virus, itself, as Buiani points out, traceable to the discovery of the HIV virus (2009: 87) and the more general virological rhetorics that developed, over the 1980s and onward, in science, politics and other social spheres. (Incidentally, if HIV inspired IT specialists to think of malicious information codes in virological terms, a later hypothesis, proposed in 2003, concerning HIV infection – the Trojan Exosome Hypothesis – has probably borrowed its name from information technology; see Gould et al 2003.)
We find an element of individual sacrifice here, but the epidemiological “lesson” that the movie teaches is that in a globalized world the politics of containment is no longer tenable in the long run and so the only salvation is in immunization through vaccination
Summary
Contagion and epidemic can be argued to constitute the nodal point that brings together major issues of late modernity: questions of defining self versus other, the importance of recognizability and identifiability, the vulnerability of bodies and bodies politic (and questions of state security), the medico-political imperative to control and contain, and the viral nature of the media and communication; the list is not exhaustive, to be sure.
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