Quarantine
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Kathryn Staiano-Ross
Abstract
Disease is never truly a thing, but always an event. It is polysemic, multilayered, historically full, and dynamic. It is constructed over time and encumbered with interpretants according to the needs and preconceptions of those who argue they search only for the truth. The act of quarantining an individual or a community is an expression of governmental power, equal in its effect and the strength of its narrative to the government's authority to institutionalize the mentally ill, deprive criminals of their liberty, and draft individuals to serve in the armed forces. Power flows from and accrues to those who have been granted the right to identify and group those bodily “signs” that designate someone as dangerous. The public will likely be faced many times with a potentially fatal and infectious disease that requires that we identify and isolate those considered dangerous; we will once again face the ethical dilemma of how to choose between individual rights and the public's safety. Who is to be isolated from the balance of society, for what period of time, and under what conditions, may depend more on the individual's social, economic, and political status and categorization as “other” than upon his/her actual threat to the public's health.
© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Blending in mathematics
- Film as specific signifying practice: A rational reconstruction of Stephen Heath's “On screen, in frame: Film and ideology”
- Quarantine
- An inconvenient truth? Can a film really affect psychological mood and our explicit attitudes towards climate change?
- Crime and punishment: An analysis of university plagiarism policies
- The materiality of discourses and the semiotics of materials: A social perspective on the meaning potentials of written texts and furniture
- Reading movies as interactive messages: A proposal for a new method of analysis
- Fame and politics: The persuasive poetics of leadership
- Cosmos and creativity: Man in an evolving universe as a creative, aesthetical agent — some Peircean remarks
- Nonwestern semiotics and its possible impact on the composition of semiotics theory in the future
- IT terminology, translation, and semiotic levels: Cultural, lexicographic, and linguistic problems
- Formation of interpretants in Roentgen semiotics
- Automation of the linguistic translation processes: A study on viability
- An excess of signification: Or, what is an event?
- The illustration of beauty: Super-exposed in the U.S., veiled in Iran
- A novel semio-mathematical technique for excavating themes out of group dynamics
- Compound constructions: Waterproof three-storey brick and tile fire stations?
