Soundings in Sodomscape: Biblical Purity Codes, Spa Clinics, and the Ends of Immunity

Under the canopy of cultural geography, Chapter five draws on the resources of critical medical studies and landscape architecture to show how the deep memory of the Sodom story reissues the hospitality question (what are you willing to give up to protect what you think you value most?) in the region historically known as Palestine, even as that very question is currently being subsumed into the engines of biopower promoting the crush of industries in the fragile ecosystem along the southwestern shores of the Dead Sea. The notable symptom of this operation takes shape, perhaps surprisingly, in the region's robust investment in the skincare industry-in particular, the therapeutic regimens for psoriasis, the disorder whose biosemiotic profile and biomedical history quietly point up the shared socio-ethical borders of community and immunity in the figural mooring of Sodomscape.