Capitalism and the politics of disease: then and now

Çokay Nebioğlu R.

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES, cilt.26, sa.3, ss.339-357, 2022 (AHCI)

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 26 Sayı: 3
  • Basım Tarihi: 2022
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1080/13825577.2022.2148888
  • Dergi Adı: EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, Academic Search Premier, Communication & Mass Media Index, Educational research abstracts (ERA), Linguistic Bibliography, Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, DIALNET
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.339-357
  • Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli Üniversitesi Adresli: Hayır

Özet

This article crystallises the links between capitalism and the

politics of diseases. Capitalism is an economic and political

system that depends not only on the production of capital,

but also on the production of social relations. Just as it

produces commodities, it reproduces and distributes new

social relations by designating rivalries and alliances.

Pandemic outbreaks are ideal conditions for capitalism to

reinforce or reformulate these categories and put them into

practice by naming and metaphorising diseases accordingly.

The reconfiguration of capitalism brings about a shift in the

typologies of enemies, the metaphors used to describe diseases,

and the way diseases are confronted. This article aims

to trace the shift in the politics of disease in two film productions

dealing with pandemic outbreaks, Panic in the Streets

(1950) and Covert One: The Hades Factor (2006), and in the

mainstream media coverage of Covid-19 images in light of

capitalism’s evolution from the Keynesian model to its contemporary

understanding.