Toward an immunological turn in nineteenth-century studies

Abstract

This essay surveys the evolution of scholarship that embodies what (Anderson and Mackay [2014], Intolerant bodies: A short history of autoimmunity. Johns Hopkins University Press) have called the “immunological turn,” an interdisciplinary critical movement that takes immunity and vaccination as its primary critical objects. While interest in the relationship between immunology as a field in the life sciences and immunity as a cultural discourse has existed since the 1980s and 1990s, this piece traces the development of this thinking over time across the fields of political theory, anthropology, sociology, the history and philosophy of science, science and technology studies, as well as literary and rhetoric studies, that together articulate and critique the centrality of immunity to Western society. This article considers how the immunological turn models an approach to the nineteenth century that draws together the humanities and the sciences in both carefully historicized and deeply theoretical ways. This survey of the field concludes with speculations on new directions for the immunological turn that interdisciplinary scholars in the nineteenth century might take up to intervene in ongoing debates over vaccine hesitancy and refusal.