Mad dogs and ecofascist spectres: The CDC’s midcentury rabies films and contemporary settler-colonial upkeep

Abstract

This article performs a genealogy of how the CDC’s attempt to contain rabies in 1950’s America depicted zoonosis, arguing that these images of diseased animals have consistently been charged expressions of national belonging, anxiety, and paranoia. Closely analysing the aesthetics, production and reception of two midcentury early rabies control films produced by the CDC – ‘Striking back against rabies’ (1950) and ‘Rabies control in the community’ (1956) – as well as the essays on film production in the CDC Bulletin, this article demonstrates how images of zoonotic disease operated as an explicit form of what Neel Ahuja calls ‘the government of species’. Here, as Ahuja argues, the political possibilities for a community are navigated through the contours of interspecies contact. In these CDC films, the particularly American setting of a small town comes to represent the American population as a whole – a community that is uniformly presented as White and heterosexual – which exercises its fears of dissolution through the figure of the rabid animal. Ultimately, the article concludes that such forms of representation, where the body politic is articulated through the representation of animals as disease vectors, has become all the more prevalent and contested as governments struggle to manage changing relationships with nature. The CDC’s images from the 1950s help to position our current media environment, especially with regard to how whiteness is defined in the context of an ecological threat.