Bodies in Space: For a Queer Ecology of Contagion

Abstract

Bodies are essential instruments for cognition and interpretation, as well as the experience of our surroundings and the outer world. However, dominant powers have often influenced sets of ecological affordances to exercise control over bodies and their experience, where public health has been a recurrent motivation justifying critical standards, narratives, and coercive measures. This article, instead, aims at looking at the possibility of contagion as necessary to create new ecologies. Through the analysis of two installations from the Portuguese context, Ama como a estrada começa (Loving as the road begins, 2019) by João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira and Vampires in Space (2022) by Isadora Neves Marques, the disruption of the normative understanding of contagion is subverted in a celebration of encounters and fluidity (both metaphorical and literal), addressing possible ecologies between queerness and fantasy.

Keywords
Bodies and embodied perception, control, contagion, queer ecologies, vampires