This article studies the imagination and representation of biological disaster in contemporary popular cinema. The texts chosen are Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film Contagion, Danny Boyle’s modern zombie-horror classic 28 Days Later (2002), Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend (2007) and Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (2006). This article is interested in the ‘sensual elaboration’, within filmic narrative, of biological disaster, and will argue that these films not only communicate with but organize their viewers’ perceptions of biological disaster. It studies the narrativizing of the onset and consequences of biological disaster, coded as an ‘invasion’ of the individual and social body in these films. It further argues that the individual and social body in these texts form the key site of negotiating anxieties surrounding their inevitable collapse in the wake of social, cultural and economic breakdown following biological disaster. The narrativizing of biological disaster in these films, this article will demonstrate, performs a crisis of reproducibility and reproductivity.

This paper examines the trope of the virus in Octavia Butler’s 1984 science fiction novel Clay’s Ark, where an alien virus manifests as a border organism that produces new forms of the human. I argue that the trope of the viral agent in Butler’s Clay’s Ark reconfigures the ‘self’ (the human) and the ‘other’ (the virus) at the level of the material and the discursive, leading to a reconceptualisation of the epistemological and ontological basis for the definition of and distinction between, the two. Secondly, the diseased, contagious self in Clay’s Ark, is subject to neither ‘containment’ nor quarantine, but instead is the basis for the formation of a new social contract in a world that is soon to be ravaged by an extraterrestrial epidemic. The paper demonstrates the pervasive influence of the epistemic and discursive formulations of the “human” in a social order transformed by viral invasion.

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This article studies three graphic memoirs by women, Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen, Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles and Leah Hayes’ Not Funny Ha-Ha, to explore the use of the graphic form in the narrating of an experience of illness. I argue here that these writers engage the graphic form to visualise female embodiment as always already pathologised, even prior to the onset of illness. By making explicit the medical and socio-cultural scrutiny of female bodily practices, these texts interrogate the unequal structural relationship between the sign of gender female and the healthy/sick binary set up by mainstream illness narratives. This article also proposes that these graphic memoirs of illness by women perform a resistant femininity in narrative by refusing a linear progression from diagnosis to cure. The texts instead make visible their myriad sources, in the form of incoherent speech, unedited data, photographs and letters among others, thus refusing unity and coherence in the narrating self.

This article studies select documentary films on health and illness produced and distributed by the Films Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, in the late twentieth century. I argue that these medical documentaries narrativize the experience and treatment of illness and simultaneously encode particular notions of ‘health’, ‘illness’ and ‘restitution/recovery’. The documentary visualizes the presence of disease in individualized, local instances by moving between scientific/indexical and affective modes of narration. This enables the representation of ‘embeddedness’, which the documentary constructs as an inevitable characteristic of all bodies and thereby makes vulnerability to disease relevant in a general context. The article will demonstrate the processes through which the individual, ailing body is imagined for the viewer through the representation of pathological excess as a spectacle and ‘instructive example’, and the inculcation of a particular sensibility towards the identification and treatment of illness/disease.