I don't want Chinese ppl to think this racism surrounding the Coronavirus panic is unique to us. Lots of parallels to this & Ebola, even HIV/AIDS. Every time a new illness emerges, certain individuals are rendered as pathological entities, as objects of public moralizing. 1/
Certain individuals are seen as sources of pollution & often public reactions around an emerging illness tells you a lot abt what needs to be contained & controlled--the border, in the case of Coronavirus/Ebola & sexuality in a deeply conservative era, in the case of HIV/AIDS 2/
Another ex: cultural historian Sander Gilman looked at representations of ppl w. syphilis in 15-20th cent. Euro artwork, & he found they were usually rep. as isolated, sexually deviant, marked by the "stigmata” of his symptoms, and polluted by his own disease 3/
Plus, the carrier was usually depicted as a foreigner--most German depictions rep. the syphilitic as a Frenchman and referred to the illness as “Franzosekrankheit,” implying the disease did not originate from within but was introduced from the outside 4/
Similarly, Japan and the East Indies blamed their outbreaks on the Portuguese, the Persians on the Turks, the Poles on the Germans, and the Russians on the Polish. In nearly all the images, the syphilitic was depicted as a man. 5/
Conversely during the Enlightenment, syphilitics came to be depicted as unchaste women. These representational shifts across time periods reflect concurrently shifting notions of what needed to be contained w/in that context, whether it be national borders or women's sexuality 6/
