Pandemic Revanchism: Political Ecologies and Situated Ignorance of COVID-Positive Administrative Grotesquerie
Topics: Health and Medical
, Socialist and Critical Geographies
, Feminist Geographies
Keywords: pandemic, biomedicine, administration, racism, banality
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 56
Authors:
Shiloh Krupar, Georgetown University
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Abstract
In May 2020, a maskless President Trump toured the Arizona-based Honeywell aerospace factory that had pivoted to manufacturing masks for the coronavirus epidemic. During this rare venture outside of the White House following the onslaught of COVID-19 across the country, the President received a briefing on the properties of mask materials just as the facility’s sound system belted the Guns N’ Roses cover of the song “Live and Let Die.” Through a Pred-ian performative appraisal of the operational banality of “live and let die” in US pandemic response, this paper reveals a mixture of “banal doings (regimented, invasive, everyday, often quiet, violent, and normalized) with the phantasmatic (arbitrary and efficacious) imaginative geographies of class, gender, racial difference, health/sickness” (Clayton 2015). Former President Trump serves as the mouthpiece of this “live and let die” logic as seen in his efforts to deny the virus exists (i.e., “Democratic hoax”), repudiate public health expertise, refuse to mitigate the individual risk of contracting COVID-19, and dogmatically spread not only misinformation but the virus itself to his family members, White House workers, and campaign event supporters. The paper scrutinizes how US pandemic revanchism "propag(and)ates" the virus (Pred 2007), by sensationalizing the trivial and normalizing the extraordinary, profound, or absurd. These forms of administrative grotesquerie tie "freedom" to a viral and (literally) infectious white supremacy that demands retaliatory collateral mortality.
Pandemic Revanchism: Political Ecologies and Situated Ignorance of COVID-Positive Administrative Grotesquerie
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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