The coronavirus epidemic seems like an update on Michel Foucault's lectures on biopolitics, security and territories. Biopolitics is the power that orders the politics of life, namely, they are tactics that regulate which bodies must live and which bodies can be disposable. The explosion of an epidemic is an intense moment in biopolitics: in the name of collective protection, bodies are controlled, real or imaginary borders are drawn to health. So it was with the Zika virus epidemic in its emergence. With Zika, however, global panic was brief, as it was quickly realized that the risk of the disease was confined to tropical countries. For this reason, all biopolitics becomes necropolitics when inequality regimes determine which bodies are at risk.
There is a new disease ongoing, and there is no controversy about the truth of the virus — the World Health Organization describes it as COVID-19, a flu-like respiratory-infectious disease. Because it is a new virus, the infection rate is high, as there is no immunity from previous disease or protection from the vaccine. A disease is presented as dangerous to populations due to its potential for contamination or the risk of death. In this sense, the corona and zika viruses are similar in epidemiology: populations without immunity and risk of death concentrated in certain age groups — in the case of coronavirus, among the elderly; in the case of Zika, between boys and girls.
But the noise of the two epidemics was different. There was compassion for the women and their children with small heads, the risks of the disease were discussed when leaving the South for the North due to the risk of sexual transmission, since the mosquito, the main factor, was concentrated in the precarious houses of the tropics. However, there was no slowdown in the global economy, fluctuation in the stock market, or cancellation of fashion shows, academic conferences, and business meetings, as with the coronavirus. There is a real "collective panic", according to Giorgio Agamben, whose exaggeration of the answer would really be a pretext for authoritarian governments to move the "state of exception".
Agamben is correct in describing that the state of fear in which we live feeds on moments of “collective panic”. The coronavirus makes it possible to close borders, impede mobility in cities, confine individuals in houses. If the politics of fear explains the exaggerated response and its usefulness for authoritarian regimes, for us, there is another peculiarity in how the Zika epidemic was responded to compared to that of the coronavirus: Zika was a disease with global risk, but it was shown a disease of miserable people and a sentence of life for anonymous women.
Our strangeness is not resentment of Latina women who, even today, accompany the pilgrimage of Zika survivors with their children. Like anyone else, we are exposed to the coronavirus, but unlike poor women in Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, or Venezuela, we are not at risk for Zika virus disease. It is necessary to specify which women experience the Zika virus as a threat to the future — the most vulnerable women, black and indigenous, young and poor. That is the path from biopolitical to the necropolitical of epidemics: the coronavirus triggers the collective panic of authoritarian regimes that do not want foreigners on their own land; The Zika virus leaves women most vulnerable to abuse by patriarchal governments that pursue sexuality and reproduction.
Debora Diniz is a Brazilian, anthropologist, researcher at Brown University.
Giselle Carino is an Argentinean, political scientist, director of IPPF / RHO.
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