Many of us take eating as merely a fact of life: something bodily, social, but certainly not intellectual. Others, like food bloggers and instagrammers consider it a hobby and marker of individual or cultural identity. Either way, there’s no doubt that eating is one of life’s greatest pleasures. In fact, many of our strongest memories are about certain foods. Whether it’s the ubiquitous turkey dinner at Thanksgiving, or in my case, my grandfather’s spaghetti sauce, food often links us nostalgically to a sense of place, home, and identity.

This year, a global pandemic has conscribed much of our world to the home. Among the many contradictions of late capitalism, few have been so palpable: as we chart the global circulation of a virus, our own individual circuits—our worlds—have become, by necessity, increasingly circumscribed. But even as the border between the home and the world is enforced, by government mandate and by social consciousness, each uncannily bleeds into the other.

Let’s say I asked you to tell me what you associated with the color blue. Or yellow. Say I polled the entire class. We might find ourselves to be, to some extent, in agreement on the associations or what the colors symbolize: blue symbolizes sadness or vastness or loneliness; yellow symbolizes cowardice or sickness, etc. Color symbolism is in one respect one of the most recognizable devices for communicating meaning in literary and visual media; on another level, our symbolic categories and associations with color remain largely under-interrogated.

The philosopher-historian Michel Foucault famously declared that, far from being repressed, discourse about sex has exploded since the nineteenth century. We talk about sex at school, in church, at government policy debates, to our doctors, to each other, and sometimes even to our partners. We form identities around whom we have it with, how often, in what way, under what circumstances. And the apparatuses of the nation-state strive to prod, shape, and channel our talk about sex, even to the point of assigning and removing rights based on it. 

“I may be crazy, but it keeps me from going insane.” -Waylon Jennings

This course will explore the concept of contagion and the fears, real and imagined, that surround it. What does it mean for a body, a place, a community to be “clean” or “unclean”? What does life look like in “plague-time”? And finally, what can we learn from these fictional and historical sites of contamination? We’ll be examining the idea of pollution in a variety of contexts in order to compare the ways that humans respond to crisis and otherness, from the level of the individual to the global.