by Jon Dell Jaramillo, PhD Candidate Department of Romance Languages
My dissertation analyzes examples of viral bodies which materialize in the works of three Latin American authors who wrote about HIV/AIDS in the 1990s: Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba), Pedro Lemebel (Chile), and Pablo Pérez (Argentina). In many ways, my dissertation responds to the Marxist legal sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who in his book La cruel pedagogía del virus (2020) calls for new strategies of contamination to overcome pandemics, natural disasters, financial collapses, the triumphant resurgence of authoritarian exceptionalism, and the technical circumvallation of patriarchal capitalist power that now leads the world toward catastrophe—strategies that enter the lives of citizens “por la puerta trasera” (14). This article briefly outlines the fields of virality, contagion, and transfeminism which led to my theorization of viral bodies and how they infect the imaginations of other bodies with rear-ended contaminations.
In the biological realm viral bodies are the individual virions which contaminate other bodies. My work proposes the materialization of viral bodies in other realms: human, metaphorical, ideological, linguistic, literary, and textual. Books can be viral bodies as evidenced by how the works of the above-named authors were received. Viral bodies are subjected to quarantines and inoculations because they can infect, disrupt, and destabilize established mechanisms of power transvestized within politics of expediency and convenience. Viral bodies can be used by those in power to infect imaginations, enforce norms, indoctrinate subjects, and justify censorship, quarantines, and exile—conditions which impact the bodies of marginalized people most when they are forced into precarious ways of living and being. Nevertheless, viral bodies can also be wielded to wage counter-offensives, such as those Arenas, Lemebel, and Pérez manifest in their writing about HIV/AIDS toward gender and sexual oppression.
The growing fields of virality and contagion are products of tremendously accelerated socio-political, economic, environmental, and ecological alterations that have materialized due to the lightning speed of techno-scientific innovation since the early 19th century. Virality studies how events become viral as they spread through the internet via social media. Most theorists in this field see virality as a phenomenon appearing with the advent of the internet. Thanks to queer theorist Hiram Pérez’s work in A Taste for Brown Bodies (2015), I can argue that virality began in the 19th century with the advent of the telegraph, since it allowed contagious metaphors from Europe to quickly infect Latin American imaginations via the microcircuitry of desire.
Contagion studies the virulence of metaphors and how their transgressive spread jumps across imaginary frontiers of identity and notions of essence and immunity. Peta Mitchell in Contagious Metaphor (2012) demonstrates how, in discourses at the crossroads of humanities, social science, medicine, and philosophy, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, metaphor as contagion increasingly gains currency in the social, affective, mental, emotional, financial, moral, religious, political, and narrative realms. Her aim is to “suggest a framework through which the emergence and often epidemic-like reproduction of metaphor in general can be understood” (7). By the late 1990s contagion evolves into an interdisciplinary field that has gone beyond epidemiological facts to address questions about how beliefs circulate in politics, religion, and society through social interactions. Fear and epistemological anxiety are primary vectors of contagion.
Political and social interactions often produce viral events. These lead to the creation of viral bodies, contagious metaphors, and even movements. Viral events are dramatic and immediate. Some examples are a military coup that leads to the systematic disappearance of opposing political bodies, like Chile and Operation Condor in 1970s; or the interspecies transmission of virions leading to a global pandemic, like HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. Viral events invoke ideological firestorms, while viral bodies spread blasphemous, transgressive, and contagious metaphors which intrepidly contaminate and infect the imaginations of other bodies. The contagious metaphors “Nunca mas” in the case of Pinochet’s Chile and “ACT UP! FIGHT BACK! FIGHT AIDS!” in the case of HIV/AIDS led to social movements since their virulence obligated people to take a position.
“Viral Bodies” broadly apprehends the notion of transgender. Feminist philosopher Judith Butler, who identifies as a non-binary lesbian, is probably the most influential gender theorist because she sees gender as performatively constructed through behavior, hence other genders are possible via different behaviors. Her work is fundamental to the growing field of transfeminism, which I see as a trench from which arises the counterattack that directly threatens the panoptic fortress standing guard over patriarchal power. I argue that the transgendered body is viral because it destabilizes binary notions of sex and gender which have long been its currency. The transgendered body is often treated as a pariah because it is regarded as a contagion that threatens to undo the social order.
Recently in Latin America the contagious metaphor “gender ideology” has provoked an epidemic-like movement to oppose the transgendered body. At rallies and marches, the contagious metaphor “#con_mis_hijos_no_te_metas” has become viral. The hysteria around the perceived threat recalls Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004) which proposes that reproductive futurism and the fascism of the baby’s face impose an ideological limit on political discourse. Gender ideology’s virality can be clearly apprehended considering how Judith Butler, regarded by many in the opposition as one of the architects of gender ideology, was burned in effigy in Brazil 2017 as protestors waved bibles, crosses, and banners yelling “Go to hell” and “Burn the witch,” invoking colonial and inquisitorial practices.
The viral bodies in the HIV/AIDS-writing of Arenas, Lemebel, and Pérez invoke a liberatory aesthetics of “radical exteriority,” theorized by Alejandro Vallega in Latin American Philosophy (2014) as discourse in “fluid ambiguity and transforming movement” which criticizes the coloniality of power’s domination (140). I argue that in their writing the radical exteriority of the viral bodies produces rear-ended counteroffensives to the exceptionalism of body politics that excludes identities complicated by questions of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and indigeneity—identities that do not conform to the LGBTQ rainbow. The aesthetic produces a twist that turns the table on oppressors by materializing bodily resistance through blasphemous and incendiary rhetoric that makes those in power uncomfortable. The radical exteriority of the viral body is a fulcrum that turns fissures into ruptures, thereby destabilizing complacent beliefs and ideologies that offer a false sense of immunity and hygiene.
—Jon Jaramillo is the 2021–22 winner of the prestigious Jane Grant Fellowship from CSWS.
References
Arenas, Reinaldo. Antes que anochezca. Tusquets, 1992. [Before Night Falls (1994)]
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015.
De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. La cruel pedagogía del virus. CLASCO 2020.
Edelman, Lee. No Future. Duke UP, 2005.
Lemebel, Pedro. Loco afán: crónicas de sidario. LOM, 1996.
Mitchell, Peta. Contagious Metaphor. Bloomsbury Academic, 2012.
Pérez, Hiram. A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire. New York University Press, 2015.
Pérez, Pablo. Un año sin amor. Perfil Libros, 1998. [A Year Without Love (2005)]
Vallega, Alejandro. Latin American Philosophy: From Identity to Radical Exteriority. Indiana UP, 2014.