Cardboard Coffins and Vaults of Gold: Debt, Obligation and Scandal in Ecuador’s Response to Covid-19

As the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in Guayaquil—foreshadowing one of world’s most devastating outbreaks—the Ecuadorian government paid $324 billion to bondholders, while forgoing much needed investment in pandemic preparation. This was the opening round for a series of struggles over the costs of containment and treatment of the virus; conflicts over debts foreign and domestic, taxes and corruption, wages and working conditions, and the control of public space. While the pandemic provided a context for the renegotiation of public and social obligations, however, the outcome was that the burden of pandemic containment was placed on those least able to sustain it— especially precariously employed, informal sector workers—deepening existing inequalities at the cost of lives and livelihoods. This paper addresses how this process was manifested through controversies in public culture, including traditional and social media, finding that the predominance of middle class and elite interests and preoccupations— together with the prevalence of scandal as a genre—sidelined the defense of popular lives and livelihoods and reinforcing systemic inequalities.

Belonging in the Coronaverse: Will There Be Time?

Since the spring of 2020 SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus, has upended lives and caused a rethinking of nearly all social behaviors in the United States. This paper examines the ways in which the pandemic, shutdown, and gradual move towards “normal” have laid bare and obfuscated societal pressures regarding running out of time as it pertains to the residential university experience. Promised by movies, television, and older siblings and friends as a limited-time offer, the “typical” college experience is baked into the U.S. imaginary, reinforcing a host of notions of who “belongs” on campus along lines of race, class, and age. Fed a vision of what their whole lives “should be”, students who enter a residential four-year college are already imbued with a nostalgia for what is yet to come, hailed, in Althusser’s (2006[1977]) sense, as university subjects even before their first class. The upheaval of that subjecthood during the pandemic has raised important questions about the purpose of the college experience as well as how to belong to a place that is no longer there.

Necrosecurity, Immunosupremacy, and Survivorship in the Political Imagination of COVID-19

The neologism ‘necrosecurity’ describes the cultural idea that mass death among less grievable subjects plays an essential role in maintaining social welfare and public order. In the early months of the novel coronavirus pandemic in the United States, this perspective on the social value of death emerged in diverse contexts, particularly in claims that deaths were a necessary consequence of returning economies to normal. Necrosecurity discourse encourages audiences to perceive coronavirus fatalities as neither preventable nor exceptional, and to perceive themselves as facing little risk of infection or death. Overlooking the realities of infectious disease epidemiology, these accounts portrayed COVID-19 as a mild disease and imagined a population of robust and physically normative individuals who would survive an epidemic unscathed and ready to return to work. These appeals articulate with powerful cultural tropes of survivorship, in which statistical calculations of relative risk and life chances—ostensibly cited to inspire hope for an individual outcome—conceal a zero-sum calculus in which ill or susceptible individuals are pitted against one another. In contrast to the construct of biosecurity—the securing of collective life against risk—necrosecurity paradoxically imagines the deaths of vulnerable others as a means of managing shared existential dangers.

Between Life, the Curve and the Hammer Blow: Family, Poverty and Abandonment in the Time of COVID-19 in Lima, Peru

The COVID-19 pandemic brought anxiety, contagion and death to Peru, which registered 288,477 cases after the first 100 days of the outbreak, leading to a state of emergency. The quarantine measures and mobility restrictions characterized as the “hammer blow” produced significant impacts on the most vulnerable and poor populations across the country. While the Peruvian government implemented a subsidy that augmented social welfare programs, unfortunately many poor families and independent workers were left out. The resulting impact of COVID-19 and the quarantine measures has exacerbated existing inequalities in Peruvian society, particularly along the lines of gender and class. This article uses extensive survey and other data from the city of Lima to analyze the social experience of the pandemic from the perspective of the family, the impact of the pandemic on the domestic economy and household management, and finally the dilemmas of care and routines within families.

Becoming MSM: Sexual Minorities and Public Health Regimes in Vietnam

This article explores the discursive and practical marking of male sexual minorities in Vietnam, as targets of a series of biopolitical regimes whose aim, ostensibly, was and is to secure the health and wellbeing of the population (from the French colonial period to the present), regimes which linked biology, technoscientific intervention and normative sexuality in the service of state power. Campaigns against sex workers, drug users, and briefly male sexual minorities, seriously exacerbated the marginalization and stigmatization of these groups, particularly with the emergence of HIV/AIDS in Vietnam in 1990. This article also considers how the contemporary apparatus constructed to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic, one funded by the US, did not do away with these old forms, but reinscribed them with new language within a new regime that prioritizes quantification and technoscience.

Medical Populism and COVID-19 Testing

This paper uses the lens of medical populism to analyze the impact of biocommunicability on COVID-19 testing through a case study approach. The political efficacy of testing is traced through two mini-case studies: the Philippines and the United States. The case studies follow the approach of populism scholars in drawing from various sources that ‘render the populist style visible’ from the tweets and press releases of government officials to media reportage. Using the framework of medical populism, the case studies pay attention to the ways in which coronavirus testing figured in (1) simplification of the pandemic; (2) spectacularization of the crisis; (3) forging of divisions; and (4) invocation of knowledge claims. Identifying and critically analyzing how knowledge is generated is an essential step to recognizing the impact that political styles have on the COVID pandemic. The political actors in each case study have shaped knowledge of the epidemic, in the way they construct the idea of ‘testing’, and in how they mobilize testing as an ‘evidence-making practice’. Their actions shaped how the pandemic—as well as their responses—is measured. This framework contributes to public policy debates by providing evidence of the impact of medical populism on pandemic response efforts.

Authoritarian Violence, Public Health, and the Necropolitical State: Engaging the South African Response to COVID-19

Following COVID-19’s arrival in March 2020, the South African government implemented a restrictive state-led response to the pandemic, limiting infections along with the survival strategies of those at greatest risk of illness. While the country’s aggressive tactics towards the pandemic have been lauded by some, the public health response has taken a violent turn towards the country’s historically marginalized Black urban population. How are we to make sense of the ruling African National Congress’ decision to utilize the South African state’s capacity for violence towards poor and working-class Black urban communities? How can this disease response be contextualized within the broader dynamics of citizenship across South African history? Building on these questions, I analyze South African efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic alongside the state response to an outbreak of bubonic plague during the colonial era. I propose that the South African state carries within it divergent historical continuities, some of which carry forward the necropolitical modalities of the colonial and apartheid eras and others that redistribute resources to safeguard life.

Freedom over Fear: Fundamentalist Populism and the Challenge of COVID-19

Although public responses to national and international crises are never without contestations and conflicting truth claims, the COVID-19 pandemic draws attention to the stark political and cultural divisions presented by conservative populism in the age of the Tea Party Movement and Donald Trump. Beginning with research among Tea Party activists in 2010 and continuing through the Trump Administration and “reopen” protests, I have documented a shifting cultural world of right-wing populism. The vivid and symbolically elaborate performance of patriotism and indignation by the Tea Party Movement declined in 2012, being replaced by a more belligerent and less colorful form of populism with Donald Trump. As Trump-inspired protests opposing COVID-19 mitigation policies emerged in 2020, however, Tea Party themes and symbols reemerged as frames for resistance to government restrictions. Yet, despite the shifting styles, there was a constant theme of what I term “fundamentalist populism.” This style illustrates political identities characterized by vilification of opponents, distrust of existing political and social institutions, ideological rigidity, and a rededication to individualism and personal freedom. Ethnographic and documentary research shows how these themes animate a small yet vocal resistance to the science-based and cooperative guidelines prescribed by public health experts

Pathogenic Politics: Authoritarianism, Inequality, and Capitalism in the COVID-19 Crisis

We provide an introduction to this special issue on the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, presenting some of the key findings and central arguments of the articles collected herein, and discussing their significance in relation to the broader political context of the pandemic. We address the roles of necropolitics and “necrosecurity”, pointing to their relationships to colonial and eugenicist histories, as well as some of the ways in which a globally-ascendant authoritarian populism contributed to the often-disastrous mismanagement of the pandemic. We consider how unequal structures of social and public obligation were reproduced to the detriment of lives and livelihoods, and the challenges facing institutions of protection, care, and social reproduction. Finally, we consider some of the ways in which the pandemic may have opened up avenues for more systemic transformations—for good or for ill.