1. ‘You can’t live a bubble’: choice immunity and related technologies Mark Davis Paper for ‘Epidemic Apprehensions: materiality and relationality in encounters with infectious diseases’, Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference, Sydney, 6 December 2012

2. Overview Immunity as corporeal vitality The interdependence of immunity and community Choice immunity

3. Background... the immune system is a map drawn to guide recognition and misrecognition of self and other in the dialectics of western biopolitics. That is, the immune system is a plan for meaningful action to construct and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other in the crucial realms of the normal and the pathological. {Haraway, 1999 #3837: 204}.

4. Background cont’d Self/non-self Choice biography Possessive individualism

5. Research approach Pandemic Influenza: People, Policy, Science (ARC Discovery Project). Interviews and focus groups with 116 people in Melbourne, Sydney and Glasgow People with respiratory and immune-related illness; people aged 71+; women pregnant in 2009; and the self-reportedly healthy Inductive, thematic analysis

6. Corporeal vitality Interviewer: Do you think you can avoid the flu? Maude: No, I don’t think so. I think you can take measures to help. You know, with your hygiene and disposing of tissues carefully. I suppose that’s what you can do, but I suppose when you send your kids out to nursery, if they’re going to get it, they’re going to get it. If you travel on a bus you don’t know who you sit next to. If you go on holiday you don’t know who you sit next to. I don’t think you can take every element out of it. I think that you can reduce your risks, but you can’t eliminate them all.

7. Cont’d I suppose I’m very much ‘If you’re going to get it you’re going to get it’ and just try and keep fit and healthy generally so that if you do get these things, then, you’re better equipped to fight them off you know. And I think I’m sure I read this somewhere that children need to have 6 colds in their first year to develop their immune system and part of me thinks is that we do need some illness, that’s what keeps us fit and healthy most of the time. So we have to build up our immune systems and we have to have some exposure, otherwise how do you know what to fight against?

8. Immunity/community Like what methods to stop the spread of the flu? You know, just your hand washing and using tissues and throwing them out. There’s so many people that wipe their nose and then go and touch something or, you know, like if you go to Woolworth’s and you look at the people that, you know, wipe their nose with their, you know, tissue, put the tissue back in their pocket and then touch the cash register and hand your money. Like just little things like that, like if you actually watch people, we’re kind of gross. So, and most of the time it’s fine. Like you can’t, you can’t live in a bubble and you can’t live in a sterile environment or you won’t have an immune system at all. (Syd10, Mitzi, 31-40, COPD, Sydney)

9. Choice immunity 1 Interviewer: So what do you guys do to kind of stop the flu? Terry: Eat garlic and chillies, and … I eat it and it seems to you know, like in chillies and garlic – Dana: They reckon garlic does. I use garlic sometimes. Terry: I try to squeeze a few oranges or something like that. Drink many fluids. Dana: I think you just eat the good nutrition, you know. Get all your vitamins and whatever, you know. General food. I don’t take any of that. Terry: I don’t believe in antibiotics. No. Interviewer: No? What about like hand sanitiser or face masks? Terry: No. Interviewer: No? Mary: Yeah, but there are germs all around you. (SydFG01)

10. Choice immunity 2 Know anyone that got the swine flu? No. No, not at all. Actually, yes I do, yep. My cousin. My cousin, XXX. Yes, she, apparently she got it. Oh right. So what happened? Well she’s up in and she was really crook with it, the flu. You can’t get out of bed at all. Aching. Aching body. Really bad migraines. She was really… I don’t think she threw up. Just basically flu-like symptoms and, yeah, aching body, headache. And did anyone else get it? No people in the family, no-one else got it. And I think she had it for, would it be about a week or more? Yeah. And did she have any idea how she caught it?

11. Choice immunity 2 cont’d Sorry, sorry, no, she didn’t, no. My cousin, she didn’t have it: my other cousin, YYY, had it. That’s right. 'Cause he goes to the gym a lot and he’s into, you know how when people get eat at certain times and only certain foods, apparently his doctor said that he wasn’t eating proper food so he didn’t have a good immune system. So he got the flu seriously. And yeah, he had it for, yeah, a week or more. And he was really bad. Yeah. But I remember he could not get out of bed. (Melb13, Dylan, 20-30, healthy, outer Melb)

12. Conclusion Multiple immunities Immuno-cosmopolitanism? Obliged to be immune