Pandemic as Heterotopia: The Counter-Sites of COVID-19 and AIDS

Pathogens are both literal and metaphoric in how they are described and the spaces they occupy. Pandemics expand the spatiality of pathogens by breaking down corporeal and national bodies at a massive scale, threatening the stability of both. The deadly nature of pandemics is juxtaposed with the potential for change and even social improvement, as seen in correlations between epidemics and pandemics and social unrest and change (Censolo & Morelli, 2020). This presentation explores this relationship of pandemics to different bodies through a consideration of pandemics as heterotopia, a seemingly incompatible space of destruction and creation. Using the COVID-19 and AIDS pandemics, I will consider pandemics through corporeal, institutional, and discursive spaces that unsettle assumptions of order. As pandemics require space—that of bodies and of regions or nations—they can be understood as heterotopic: in our world and yet not of our world; a world within a world that reflects and disrupts. The delineation of these spaces, however, is unstable: the very nature of a pandemic is a threat to boundaries as the virus moves through bodies, borders, and bubbles. Pandemics are unique in their disease-space orientation: transmission, mitigation, and communication all require spaces, whether physical or digital, and this space is both literal (bodies, isolating in a home, etc.) and representative (the language used to articulate these spaces). As heterotopia, pandemics expose the failings of the real spaces we occupy and illustrate the relationship between order and disorder, stability and instability that extends beyond a pandemic.