My thinking around the boundaries and animacies of the living and nonliving throughout this essay is further informed by: Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke University Press, 2012); John Dupré and Stephan Guttinger, “Viruses as Living Processes,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, no. 59 (2016): 109–16; What Is Life?, ed. Stefan Helmreich et al. (Spector Books, 2021); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (Basic Books, 2002); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Harvard University Press, 2004); Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” in Forum NHI: Knowledge for the 21st Century, vol. 1 (Institute NHI Stanford, 1994), 42–73; Kathryn Yusoff, “Geologic Subjects: Nonhuman Origins, Geomorphic Aesthetics and the Art of Becoming Inhuman,” Cultural Geographies 22, no. 3 (2015): 383–407.
From 2006 to 2010, my early artworks attempted to follow and make sensible the spatial choreographies of viruses, contagion, medicine, and care. Life Cycle of a Common Weed, Viral Confections, Traces, Transfers. They were eggs to contain my rage. Leaky containers, obviously. They leaked and they haunted, made messes and embarrassments. Caitlin Berrigan, “The Life Cycle of a Common Weed: Viral Imaginings in Plant-Human Encounters,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40, no. 1–2 (2012): 97–116.
See Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Duke University Press, 2008); Neel Ahuja, Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Duke University Press, 2016).
More than a theory, kinship is a practice. While the list is too great to enumerate the practices of imaginative and subversive kinship that have informed my thinking and critiques, some luminary theoretical works include: Octavia E. Butler, Dawn, Xenogenesis (Warner Books, 1987); Heather Davis, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022); Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W.W. Norton, 2019); Noriko Ishiyama and Kim TallBear, “Nuclear Waste and Relational Accountability in Indian Country,” in The Promise of Multispecies Justice, ed. Sophie Chao, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey (Duke University Press, 2022); Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, 25th anniversary ed. (Walker, 1994); José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 10th anniversary ed (NYU Press, 2019); Kim TallBear, “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family,” in Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations, ed. Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018), 144–64; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015).
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford University Press, 2000), 3. Emphasis in original.
See →.
The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments, 1769 New King James Version (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2006).
Lanford Wilson, Balm in Gilead, and Other Plays (Hill and Wang, 1983), 4.
Wilson, Balm in Gilead, and Other Plays, 20.
Richard Anderson, “Pharmaceutical Industry Gets High on Fat Profits,” BBC News, November 6, 2014 →.
Jocelyn Kaiser, “NIH Gets $2 Billion Boost in Final 2019 Spending Bill,” Science, September 14, 2018 →. As cited in David Mitchell, oral statement, The Patient Perspective: The Devastating Impacts of Skyrocketing Drug Prices on American Families, US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform, July 26, 2019 →.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Making Medicines Affordable: A National Imperative (National Academies Press, 2018).
A story about viruses and pharmaceutical capitalism told at greater length in Caitlin Berrigan, “Atmospheres of the Undead: Living with Viruses, Loneliness, and Neoliberalism,” MARCH, September 2020 →.
See →.
Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity during This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso, 2020), 26.
As with Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), there is a troubling whiff of the logics of eugenics in the ecologically motivated call to “make kin, not babies” in Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).
Gaia, a Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology, ed. William Irwin Thompson (Lindisfarne Association, Inc., 1987), 96.
Emily Klancher Merchant, Building the Population Bomb (Oxford University Press, 2021), 27.
See also Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family (Verso Books, 2019).
The concept “organized abandonment” is developed around the carceral logics of state-engineered vulnerability through organizational barriers to accessing basic resources in Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag : Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007).
David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (Vintage Books, 1991).
“Sympoesis” is Donna Haraway’s elaboration of “autopoesis” as means to describe the mutual processes by which living things are sustained through regenerating systems. See Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 33; Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, and Ricardo Uribe, “Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, Its Characterization and a Model,” BioSystems, no. 5 (1974): 187–96; Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What Is Life? (University of California Press, 2000).
Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011).
On chronopolitics, see Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indiana University Press, 2013); Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Ellen Samuels, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2017).
Donatien Serge Mbaga et al., “Global Prevalence of Occult Hepatitis C Virus: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” World Journal of Methodology 12, no. 3 (May 20, 2022): 179–90.
Pier-Angelo Tovo et al., “Chronic HCV Infection Is Associated with Overexpression of Human Endogenous Retroviruses That Persists after Drug-Induced Viral Clearance,” International Journal of Molecular Sciences 21, no. 11 (January 2020): 3980.
Kjetil Bjornevik et al., “Longitudinal Analysis Reveals High Prevalence of Epstein-Barr Virus Associated with Multiple Sclerosis,” Science 375, no. 6578 (January 21, 2022): 296–301.
Berrigan, “Atmospheres of the Undead.” See also the many conflicts within Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work : Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018).
See Fabian T. Pfeffer, “Multigenerational Approaches to Social Mobility: A Multifaceted Research Agenda,” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, no. 35 (March 2014): 1–12.
US Senate Committee on Finance, “The Price of Sovaldi and Its Impact on the US Health Care System,” December 2015, 114–20 →; Andrew Hill et al., “Minimum Costs for Producing Hepatitis C Direct-Acting Antivirals for Use in Large-Scale Treatment Access Programs in Developing Countries,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 58, no. 7 (April 1, 2014): 928–36.
US Senate Committee on Finance, “The Price of Sovaldi.”
Édouard Glissant, as quoted in Manthia Diawara, “One World in Relation,” Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 2011, no. 28 (2011): 4–19. This poetic concept is further developed by Fred Moten, The Universal Machine, Consent Not to Be a Single Being 3 (Duke University Press, 2018).
See Davis, Plastic Matter.
Acknowledgments: With much gratitude to the generosity of Samuel Hertz, Virginie Bobin, Eliana Otta, Miriam Simun, S. J. Norman, Perel, Meredith Bergman, and Eben Kirksey.