The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel

Neat Science in a Messy World: The Global Impact of Human Behavior on Phage Therapy, Past and Present

“…in news media, and similarly, the rise of ''killer zombie'' films and ''outbreak narratives,'' both attest to the widespread cultural anxiety around viral epidemics. 25 What is significant here, then, is that we recognize first that bacteriophage therapy is very unlikely to remain separate from cultural understandings of viruses and second that these understandings are already strongly inflected with negative connotations. As the controversy surrounding the MMR vaccine demonstrated, once a sense of fear and mistrust of medical information has occurred, it is extremely difficult for the medical establishment to rectify this.…”

“…Often, depictions of viruses are tied up in societal concerns about other matters: for example, the threat of bodily invasion by a virus seems to be frequently scaled up in the public imaginary to generate fears of the breakdown of the wider ''social body.'' 25 In recent years, fears of the consequences of communicable illnesses in a globalized world have led to particularly fearful reporting of outbreaks of anthrax, Ebola, bird flu, swine flu, SARS, Zika, etc. in news media, and similarly, the rise of ''killer zombie'' films and ''outbreak narratives,'' both attest to the widespread cultural anxiety around viral epidemics.…”

Concocting Viral Apocalypse: Catastrophic Risk and the Production of Bio(in)security

“…As many scholars have documented (Ayotte, 2011;Dougherty, 2001;Weldon, 2001), Ebola, a contagious virus known for its hemorrhagic effects and high death rates, ranks among the most feared of human diseases. Thus, a simulation featuring a mutant, lethal, and airborne form of Ebola provided a particularly colorful story line for later popular accounts of the exercise.…”

“…Meanwhile, Washington DC buzzed with Soviet defectors' tales of a biological weapons program far more advanced than the United States', replete with a gruesome sounding Soviet ''superplague,'' a ''chimera'' that ''combined several types of microbes'' (Miller et al, 2002, p. 202). Against the backdrop of HIV and Ebola outbreaks, Richard Preston's bestsellers, The Hot Zone (1994) and The Cobra Event (1997), captivated public and official imaginations alongside dozens of other biothriller films and novels (Dougherty, 2001;Mayer, 2007). In fact, Preston's fictional Cobra Event, about bioterrorism in a New York subway, purportedly persuaded President Clinton to conduct a review of germ threats (Preston, 1997(Preston, , 2009); Clinton soon launched federal biopreparedness initiatives, including a mandate that the federal government conduct regular Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) preparedness exercises, the earliest of which involved biological weapons staged in complicated WMD storylines involving multiple sites and weapons of attack (see Erickson & Barratt, 2004;Keränen, 2008Keränen, , 2011band Schoch-Spana, 2004, for a brief history of these initiatives).…”

Colonizing Bodies: Corporate Power and Biotechnology in Young Adult Science Fiction

“…As Stephen Dougherty (2001) writes, ''…there is nothing politically or ideologically neutral about the desire to translate the body into code. It is a desire that marks the body unequivocally as the privileged site of capitalism's epochal struggle to reduce all heterogeneity to equivalencies'' (p. 1).…”