Fearful Intimacies

Abstract

This article explores how COVID-19 could be reshaping human–microbial relations in and beyond the home. Media sources suggest that intimacies of companionability or ambivalence are being transformed into those of fearfulness. While a probiotic sociocultural approach to human–microbial relations has become more powerful in recent times, it seems that health and hygiene concerns associated with COVID-19 are encouraging the wholesale use of bleach and other cleaning agents in order to destroy the potential microbial ‘enemies’ in the home. We provide a brief background to shifting public health discourses on managing microbes in domestic settings over recent decades across the industrialised world, and then contrast this background with emerging advice on COVID-19 from news and advertisement sources. We conclude with key areas for future research.

Abundance and absence: Human-microbial co-evolution in the Anthropocene

“…(2) This ‘paradoxical’ situation unfolds through the interaction between different material-discursive practices towards microbial lives, and the ontological vitality of microbial life itself, as it moves to constantly respond to and disrupt these practices. Thus, as we move away from antibiotic worldviews and an ‘antiseptic-consciousness’ (Ironstone, 2019) towards probiotic mentalities (Greenhough et al, 2018; Paxson, 2008; Paxson and Helmreich, 2014), we are simultaneously seeing the emergence of novel pathogens and viruses that respond to disinfectants (McLeod et al, 2020) and whose emergence is historically linked to antibiotic practises in the past. In other words, changing views on human-microbe relations such as probiosis unfold incompletely, alongside and amidst other antibiotic practices in various mixtures, a picture that becomes even more complex when it is read through the uneven socio-economic conditions that constrain and enable different relations with microbes within and between different parts of the world (Nading, 2016).…”