COVID Societies

Theorising the Coronavirus Crisis

Deborah Lupton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000554540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

COVID Societies presents a compelling and accessible overview of key sociocultural theories that can help us make sense of the diverse, dynamic and complex elements of the COVID crisis. These include discussions of the political economy perspective; biopolitics; risk society and cultures; gender and queer theory; and more-than-human theory. The book provides insights into everyday life around the world as people battled with containing the pandemic and explores the broader historical, social, cultural and political contexts in which these responses have developed.

COVID-19 is the most serious pandemic to affect the world in the past century. We have all lived in 'COVID societies', the long-term effects of which have yet to be experienced or imagined. The COVID crisis has affected countries, regions within countries and social groups within regions in strikingly different ways. These impacts are continually changing, just as the novel coronavirus has mutated into different strains and variants. Throughout the book, a series of intertwined threads cross back and forth between the macropolitical and micropolitical dimensions of COVID-19: contagion, death, risk, uncertainty, fear, social inequalities, stigma, blame and power relations. Overarching these threads are five complementary themes: the historicity of COVID societies; the tension between local specificities and globalising forces; the control and management of human bodies; the boundary between Self and Other; and the continuously changing sociomaterial environments in which the world is living with and through the shocks of the COVID crisis.

This book will be of great interest to anyone seeking to understand the manifold complex sociocultural consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

1COVID in contextHistories and narratives of health, risk and contagion

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200512-2

Introduction

Contagious disease outbreaks have presented serious challenges globally throughout recorded history, with continuing recurrences of influenza, cholera, plague, typhus, smallpox and yellow fever (Bashford, 2016; Kavey & Kavey, 2020; Mack, 1991). Recent evolutionary genetic research has identified DNA evidence that humans in East Asia were encountering coronavirus infections more than 20,000 years ago (Souilmi et al., 2021). Along with inspiring fear and dread about threats to human health, major new or recurring infectious disease outbreaks are always accompanied by significant sociocultural and political disruptions and transformations. These crises often call into question ways of viewing and living in the world, as well as exposing and entrenching forms of social discrimination and inequalities.

This chapter provides an overview of the historical, sociocultural and political contexts of the COVID-19 crisis. Medical historians, sociologists, anthropologists and cultural geographers have shown that social, cultural and political responses to the emergence or return of deadly pathogens often bring to the surface hidden, unacknowledged or long-established beliefs and practices. The chapter demonstrates how these perspectives have offered much of value in relation to the analysis of the sociocultural and political dimensions of previous serious infectious diseases. This discussion is followed by an account of how the new virus SARS-CoV-2 and the new disease COVID-19 emerged in the early months of 2020 and developments in the pandemic throughout 2020 and into 2021.

Changing concepts of health, risk and contagion

Many of the responses and experiences we have felt and seen in COVID societies harken back to previous infectious disease outbreaks. Concepts concerning health, risk, disease and contagion play a significant role in how societies and cultures configure pandemic narratives and imaginaries and conduct their everyday lives accordingly. These concepts have changed dramatically in Western cultures since the Enlightenment. Ideas about human bodies and disease have shifted significantly even within the past century, incorporating centuries-old ideas as well as bringing in new ideas from other cultures or introduced by scientific or medical discoveries about the body.

In societies of the Global North in the contemporary era, people are encouraged to see themselves as a continuing unfinished project, requiring work and effort to shape and improve, seeking to impose order and certainty upon what is perceived to be a chaotic, uncertain, disorderly world. The role of fate and chance in structuring people’s life opportunities and well-being is repudiated. Instead, it is believed that most aspects of life are malleable and amenable to the exertion of will. As I argued in my book Risk (Lupton, 2013), in Western societies, the belief prevailing in pre-Enlightenment times that dangers and catastrophes are caused by fate or supernatural forces has given way to the conviction that these phenomena are often human-made and that someone or some organisation can be identified and held responsible. Nonetheless, much older understandings of embodiment and risk sometimes re-emerge and can be identified in pandemic narratives and imaginaries, including contemporary responses to the COVID crisis.

The notion of the ‘civilised’ body, emerging in early modern Europe, is particularly important to contemporary Western understandings about the ideal body. The civilised body is understood to be that which is self-controlled, which is autonomous and self-regulated. Its boundaries are kept contained from the outside world and from others. In contrast to this ideal notion is the ‘grotesque’ or ‘uncivilised’ body, the body that lacks self-control and self-discipline and is constantly breaching its boundaries. The body that is suffering pain or illness, that is deformed or disabled, that is dying, tends to conform far more closely to the ‘grotesque’ body than to the civilised body (Shilling, 1993).

Cultural theorist Susan Sontag (1990) wrote about the contemporary moral meanings of illness in her influential essays ‘Illness as metaphor’ and ‘AIDS and its metaphors’. She observed that there is a long history of punitive approaches to disease and that: ‘Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning – that meaning being invariably a moralistic one’ (Sontag, 1990, p. 58). Sontag gave the example of the figure of the leper in medieval times: individuals whose outward signs of fleshly decay were believed to be displaying their internal corruption, and who were therefore shunned and relegated to the outskirts of communities or kept in special facilities well away from townspeople. This meaning lives on today in the simile describing people being treated ‘like a leper’: that is, socially excluded for reasons that may not be related to health.

Ideas about the human body and its relationship to the social and physical environment in pre-Enlightenment eras in Europe drew on the natural philosophy of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The ‘humoral’ model positioned disease as caused by imbalances between the four humours (blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm) and the four elements (air, earth, water and fire), as well as influenced by ‘non-naturals’: exercise, food, drink, sexual activity, sleep and frame of mind or affective state (Hartnell, 2018; Lupton, 2012). It was thought that illness and disease in the form of foul vapours, or ‘miasmas’, entered the body through the skin and bodily orifices. Therefore, medieval Europeans believed that the body could best be protected against such vapours by wrapping it in tightly woven clothing, reinforcing the ‘closed’ nature of the body. Carrying fragrant herbs was another way that people sought to avoid the odours they believed caused disease (Vigarello, 1990).

Systematic public health measures for the containment and control of the plague were introduced from the fourteenth century, which remain part of infectious disease control today. These measures include cleaning of odorous places or those believed to be infected, contact tracing, restrictions on movement, closing of borders and identifying certain social groups (usually the most disadvantaged) as more contagious and contaminating than others. Quarantine as a way of managing infectious disease outbreaks has been traced back to medieval and early modern European approaches to controlling leprosy and bubonic plague from the twelfth century by enforcing a 40-day period of isolation on all travellers (the word quarantine comes from the Italian for this length of time) (Bashford, 2016). These practices were based on the observation that disease could be airborne and that the sharing of space and place and people having close contact with each other could spread disease; even if it was not initially understood that microorganisms were involved in this infectious process (Newman, 2012; Pamuk, 2007). The first recorded use of the term ‘pandemic’ (from the Greek ‘pan’ meaning all and ‘demos’ meaning people) was by English physician Gideon Harvey in 1666. He used the term ‘pandemick’ interchangeably with ‘epidemick’ to describe a malignant disease that ‘haunt[ed] a Country’ (Honigsbaum, 2009, p. 1939).

Bubonic plague, or ‘the Black Death’, provides a compelling example of the social upheavals that pandemics can leave in their wake. Several regions of the world were devastated by recurring major outbreaks of bacterial bubonic plague over 400 years between the fourteenth and early eighteenth centuries, with the pathogen spreading from Central Asia into Europe by way of vast trade routes. It is believed that the Black Death was so named because of the darkened appearance of the painful swellings, or buboes, that appeared in the lymph nodes in the groin area of its victims’ bodies, as well as their blackened extremities from gangrene (Totaro, 2011). It has been estimated that one third of the population of western Europe died from it between 1348 and 1350. Plague outbreaks also contributed to economic depression due to the death of agricultural workers and tradespeople as well as the disruption of trade and regular major dislocations of urban populations. These changes in turn led to social reforms, such as the decline in feudalism, an increase in wages for the workers who survived, and eventually the Renaissance (Newman, 2012; Pamuk, 2007).

Strict quarantine measures were implemented in England in the late sixteenth century in response to recurring plague outbreaks. Parishes in afflicted areas were required to institute and enforce household quarantine and establish public ‘pesthouses’, where people who had been exposed to plague cases, together with members of their households, were kept inside. People were forcibly isolated in their houses, with doors padlocked by officials, painted with a large red cross and emblazoned with the words ‘Lord have mercy upon us’. By law, watchmen were stationed outside, to ensure that no one entered or left the house. People who did break quarantine were dealt with harshly by the law because of the threat they posed to the public health. These people tended to be from the lower social orders, while wealthy people escaped this level of scrutiny and policing and in some cases were able to escape the pestilent city to seek refuge in the country (Newman, 2012).

Writings during the times of plague – or ‘plague literature’ – recounted the terror of living through these waves of outbreaks. The plague was used as a metaphor for cultural and moral degeneration, afflicted societies thereby deserving God’s punishment, or imagined utopian futures where the lessons of the plague would inspire better societies (Totaro, 2011). Accounts such as Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722 but referring to the plague of 1665, vividly depicted the feelings of horror and desperation that were part of living in plague times in England, including the physical suffering of those afflicted, the near collapse of social order, massive burial pits heaped with the dead bodies of plague victims, the intense threats posed by having any contact with other people and the importance of physical isolation to ensure survival (Lau, 2016). The cultural resonances of the plague remain in contemporary Western societies. For example, we talk of being ‘plagued’ by a problem and Shakespeare’s line from his play Romeo and Juliet, ‘A plague on both your houses’, is a well-known epithet today.

Even in these early times, quarantine was a controversial approach for the effects it had not only on people’s health but on their psychological and economic well-being, as well as signalling ‘problem’ social groups or populations as requiring stringent measures of discipline and containment (Bashford & Strange, 2003). Despite the growing evocation of the discourses of scientific authority to justify traditional preventive measures such as quarantine, the contagion narratives and practices employed into the twentieth century often went beyond simple disease containment and moved into highly political and symbolic realms. Used in later eras, quarantine frequently became a way for nations to position the Other as contaminated by virtue of their potential contagion. This portrayal frequently was associated with nationalist, colonial and racist sentiments about the bodies of non-white peoples. In the newly federated nation of Australia in the early twentieth century, for example, quarantine practices and policies contributed to the concept of the ‘pure’ nation that required protection from pathologised non-white Others to achieve cohesion and good health (Bashford, 1998).

It was only a century ago that the Spanish influenza pandemic killed tens of millions of people worldwide. The influenza virus causing this pandemic, believed to be of avian origin, was extremely infectious and had a high mortality rate due to secondary bacterial pneumonia that afflicted those who become ill. It was named the Spanish influenza because a Madrid newspaper was the first to report the outbreak, but it is unlikely that the virus originated in Spain. Indeed, medical historians now suggest that the virus developed on a farm in the US state of Kansas, spreading quickly from there via the post-World War I rapid movements of populations across the globe using networks of steamships and railway lines. Due to these mass mobilities, the virus causing Spanish influenza infected an estimated 500 million people – approximately one third of the world’s population – and killed at least 20–50 million people worldwide (Chandra et al., 2020; Kavey & Kavey, 2020).

There was far less understanding of how viral pathogens operated and spread in 1918–1919. Scientific medicine was just beginning to learn how to control the risks of infection from viruses and bacteria. It was known that basic hygiene measures and quarantine were effective in controlling the spread of pathogens, but exactly what they were and how they affected the body, or how to treat the disease they caused, was not yet understood (Kavey & Kavey, 2020). There were no possibilities for testing people for infection, providing antibiotics to treat the secondary bac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: COVID societies
• 1 COVID in context: Histories and narratives of health, risk and contagion
• 2 The macropolitics of COVID: A political economy perspective
• 3 The biopolitics of COVID: Foucauldian approaches
• 4 Risk and COVID: Risk society and risk cultures
• 5 Queering COVID: Insights from gender and queer theory
• 6 More-than-human COVID worlds: Sociomaterial perspectives
• Conclusion: Reflections on COVID futures
• Index