Viral ecologies : resurgent nature, COVID-19, and the discourse of transgender contagion

Brice, Sage and McNulty, Felix (2024) Viral ecologies : resurgent nature, COVID-19, and the discourse of transgender contagion. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 7 (6). pp. 2343-2364. ISSN 2514-8486

Abstract

During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, popular narratives of a ‘resurgent nature’ and portrayals of the virus as a form of ‘revenge’ prompted geographical reflection on the promises and limitations of ecological perspectives on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Revisiting these reflections in the light of what we have learned from the pandemic, this article asks what is to be gained by attempting to think critically with the virus about human space as multispecies composition. Thinking ecologically with the virus can become a method for critically reconsidering naturalised and dualistic orders of exclusion and inclusion, health and unhealth, or belonging and unbelonging. Specifically, we focus in this article on the overlap of immunological and trans-antagonistic discourses with viral imaginaries of the pandemic, exploring the paradox of vulnerability that arises at this point of intersection. COVID-19 simultaneously highlights humans’ mutual vulnerability as a horizontalising force and amplifies differential social vulnerabilities. In examining this paradox of vulnerability as it relates to viral discursive constructions of transness, we explore tensions between different modes of engaging, identifying and thinking with the virus in recognition that the social and the ecological cannot properly be considered as separate domains. The aim is not simply to propose an extended epidemiology that takes into account the complex human–nonhuman entanglement, but to explore the social, cultural and political implications of pandemic vulnerabilities and of thinking ecologically with the virus. We trace the shared conceptual underpinnings of ecological and immunological thought, showing that these same conceptual lineages manifest in political responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and exploring how they are expressed in queer- and trans-antagonistic discourse and policy. Building on these analyses, we develop a proposal for ‘transing’ the virus and a model for ‘thinking ecologically’ that is simultaneously liberatory, messy and agnostic.