The modern international world has been governed by an investment in ‘anthropological difference’ since the early modern era when the geopolitical sphere called “Europe” first emerged.

Plague Bill
Once upon a time, there was a plague. Fearing disease and death, people led a hermit-like existence, distanced from each other in their domestic cells, advancing masked against a contaminated and untrustworthy reality defined by pestilence, pain and suffering.

If shit has long operated as the primary figure of queer cinema’s scatological experimentalism, from George and Mike Kuchar’s films to John Waters excretory fabulations, perhaps it is time to attend to a cinema of piss. Has it whizzed by without anyone knowing it, everywhere and nowhere, ubiquitous and rarefied, quotidian yet elusive?

The current deadly pandemic demands a radical reconsideration of all forms of critical investigation—not only immunology, demography, epidemiology, and health studies, but also practices of knowledge that address the braided futures of racial justice, global capital, climate change, and the public good amid the predations of fast and slow violence.