Technologies of Contagion: Spores, Viruses, and the Queer Pleasures of Apocalypse

Abstract

This essay theorizes the apocalyptic in three recent Latina gothic fictions. Zombie mushrooms are at the heart of the Doyle family heteropatriarchal colonial enterprise in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. The rabies virus is weaponized as a justification for militarized control of East LA—and in particular over the bodies of young Chicanas—at the height of the Chicano Movement in Helena Maria Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them. A viral apocalypse drives Carmen Maria Machado’s short story “Inventory” forward across sexual and other forms of queer intimacy, leaving the narrator to wonder whether the world will spin faster without people on it. While in each of these instances tropes of contagion represent a threat against human life, viruses and mushrooms are also perfect articulations of liminality—neither clearly animal nor plant, troubling taxonomic common sense, threatening contagion and annihilation. They are biological analogues to both the wild and emancipatory queer and Chicana feminist borderlands imagined by poets and scholars alike, and this essay speculates on their theoretical possibilities as tropes of destruction and creation. The viral and the fungal represent a biotechnology of transformation that decenters liberal humanism and promises moments of apocalyptic emergence of a queer, Latina utopia.