Viral Entanglements

Abstract

This article explores the treatment of queer people as biosecurity threats during the 2015 outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in South Korea. The making of corporeal threats pivoted on the common biosecurity techniques of isolation and containment, of both virus and (potentially) infected, and mirrors the protracted treatment of people living with HIV/AIDS. However, in the aftermath of the MERS-CoV outbreak, queer and HIV/AIDS activists critiqued the methods of isolation that make people into threats and reify structural violence, articulating a radical form of relationality that draws infected and noninfected, humans and viruses, together. I argue that inviting relationality, activists mobilize the same biosecurity relations thought to be dangerous. The problem of proximity becomes not only the solution but also an activist tool of social justice. The MERS-CoV outbreak became an opportunity to illustrate a different kind of living, one predicated on what I call the human-virus hybrid: the social and microbial relationships between humans and viruses. Moving through the fields of biosecurity, human-microbe relations, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS, I proffer that the human-virus hybrid provides nuanced understandings of how people considered threats live during public health crises and find innovative methods of endurance.