Contagion

In the age of HIV, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the Ebola Virus and BSE, metaphors and experience of contagion are a central concern of government, biomedicine and popular culture.Contagion explores cultural responses of infectious diseases and their biomedical management over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also investigates the use of 'contagion' as a concept in postmodern reconceptualisations of embodied subjectivity.The essays are written from within the fields of cultural studies, biomedical history and critical sociology. The contributors examine the geographies, policies and identities which have been produced in the massive social effort to contain diseases. They explore both social responses to infectious diseases in the past, and contemporary theoretical and biomedical sites for the study of contagion.

IntroductionContagion, Modernity and PostmodernityContagion and Cultural Histories of the Modern World1. The Meaning of Contagion: Reproduction, Medicine and Metaphore2. Foreign Bodies: Vaccination, Contagion and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century3. Moral Contagion and the Will: The Crisis of Masculinity in Fin-de-Sicle France4. Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution5. Leprosy and the Management of Race, Sexuality and Nation in Tropical Australia6. Sanitary Failure and Risk: Pasteurisation, Immunisation and the Logics of PreventionContaminating Capacities in Postmodernity 7. Vulnerable Bodies and Ontological Contamination8. A Pig's Tale: Porcine Viruses and Species Boundaries9. Taking the HIV Test: Self-Surveillance and the Making of Heterosexuality10. The Promiscuous Placenta: Crossing Over11. Carrier - Becoming Symborg

Alison Bashford (Author) , Claire Hooker (Author)