Embodying Contagion

• Brings together new research that lays out the current state of contagion studies, from the perspective of media studies, monster studies, and the medical humanities. • Offers fresh perspectives on contagion studies from disciplines such as the social sciences and the medical humanities, introducing new methods of collaboration and avenues of research, and demonstrating how these disciplines have already been working in parallel for several decades. • Covers a wide variety of international media and contexts, including literature, film, television, public policy, and social networks. • Includes key, recent case studies (including public health documents and the popular Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet) that have not yet been analysed anywhere else in the field. • Bucks the current trend of going back to plague literature and historical plagues in the search for meaning to address current and late-20th century epidemics, diseases, and monsters.

Contemporary contagion narratives can tell us a lot about how a society will respond in a crisis. Embodying Contagion helps us understand these narratives, exploring how we can make more ethical decisions in today's networked world.OPEN ACCESS From Outbreak to The Walking Dead, apocalyptic narratives of infection, contagion and global pandemic are an inescapable part of twenty-first-century popular culture. Yet these fears and fantasies are too virulent to be simply quarantined within fictional texts; vocabulary and metaphors from outbreak narratives have now infiltrated how news media, policymakers, and the general public view the real world and the people within it. In an age where fact and fiction seem increasingly difficult to separate, contagious bodies (and the discourses that contain them) continually blur established boundaries between real and unreal, legitimacy and frivolity, science and the supernatural. Where previous scholarly work has examined the spread of epidemic realities in horror fiction, the essays in this collection also consider how epidemic fantasies and fears influence reality. Bringing scholarship from cultural and media studies into conversation with scholarship from the medical humanities and social sciences, this collection aims to give readers a fuller picture of the viropolitics of contagious bodies in contemporary global culture.