Viralities and vitalities

edited by Isabella Neubauer

Six years after the beginning of the worldwide quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us look back on the year we spent indoors (or, for many, risking our lives as essential workers) with a sense of distance and detachment. Illness and disability, such relevant topics that year, have largely faded from political conversations, even though the disease remains deadly and the impacts on social communities drastic. The CDC estimates that from October 2025 to February 2026, anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 people died from COVID-19 (2026). Virtual work, schooling, and quarantine orders disrupted the ways we engage with our communities; and the disparities in healthcare access and quarantine ability has continued to have deep impacts across the globe. 

The reviews in this section center recent scholarship on disability, debility, and the relationship of the body to its physical, political, and imaginative communities. Although none discuss the recent COVID-19 pandemic, its presence nevertheless makes itself felt in scholarship about illness and the politics thereof. The double meaning of ‘viralities’ in this section’s title invites inquiry into the rapid spread of both disease and information, making use of the dual networks of the internet and the body. Recent events, including the deletion or selective revision of government-owned webpages, remind us of the porosity of these media, the permeability of the body to temporary or chronic disease and of the internet to ideologies of harm. However, the books reviewed in this section do not limit themselves to scholarship of the spread of harm—instead, many discuss the ways in which communities form and persist amidst hostile conditions. 

The first two reviews in this section use literary criticism to engage with ideas of disability from two very different times. Jared Nabhan’s review of Milton and the Network of Disability, Embodiment, and Care, edited by Angelica Duran and Pasquale Toscano, marks the way in which this volume both engages with a long tradition of scholarship on Milton’s blindness and early modern concepts of disability and opposes ableist thinking contemporary to both Milton and ourselves. However, this volume’s true intervention comes with its investigation of the word “incapable,” and its attendant argument that both Milton’s disability and Adam’s fall serve as an “incitement to action” rather than representation of lack. Courtney Welu reviews Pandemic Genres: Imagining Politics in a Time of AIDS, by Neville Hoad, which adds hints of memoir to critiques of art about the African HIV/AIDS pandemic. Both reviews engage with the problematics of sanitizing disability and its representations so as to appeal to a wider, more culturally-conservative audience.

The next three reviews in this section interrogate how the policies of national and multinational interests, of governments and corporations, work to destabilize health and community—and the ways in which these communities fight back. Giulia Oprea’s review of Interface Frictions: Digital Debility and the Politics of Design by Neta Alexander reveals the harm, both purposeful and unintentional, caused by the digital world and its desire for endless engagement. Our digital culture harms both its producers and consumers, but Alexander stresses its complexity, including the fact that what may function as an accessibility feature for one consumer may enact harm upon another. I. B. Hopkins reviews Indigenomicon: American Indians, Video Games, and the Structures of Dispossession by Jodi A. Byrd, which explores the possibilities (and realities) of both coloniality and indigenous resistance within video games. Finally, Reid Pinckard’s review of Queer Traffic: Sex, Panic, Free Trade by Jennifer Tyburczy leaves the digital, investigating the traffic of queer peoples and materials across national borders and the policies which are meant to stop them. These reviews shed light on digital and physical resistance to oppressive technology and policy, emphasizing the complexity of life as a member of a marginalized community—including disabled, Indigenous, queer, and other peoples—in the 21st century.

This section concludes with Alexander Cathis’s review of Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science by Kwame Anthony Appiah, which reveals the social scientific theory behind the formation of religious communities. While distinctly more theoretically than the other reviews in this section, Cathis’s review provides a framework that underpins not only the study of religion but which can be usefully applied to the formation of any of the communities discussed in the previous five reviews. 

All reviews in this section explore what it means to live with a (queer, racialized, ill, etc.) body situated within a particular historical moment. What does it mean to be vital—to be alive—when harm is inescapable?