Affect Work and Infected Bodies: Biosecurity in an Age of Emerging Infectious Disease

Abstract

The movement of viruses is, in part, enabled when frontline workers straddle the sites of where illness meets health or where mobile bodies meet those that are fixed. Using the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto as a lens, this paper explores the neoliberalisms and managerialism that render nurses and hotel housekeepers vulnerable, then turns attention to how their affective immaterial labour was simultaneously demanded and dismissed during the outbreak. I argue the affective labour of both nurses and hotel housekeepers is mobilized to perform unquantifiable but essential life-management and that they function as a frontline of the barrier in thwarting the mobility of SARS as an infectious disease. Thus, nurses and hotel housekeepers are precarious gatekeepers, in vulnerable positions as they perform tasks of biosecurity as they monitor borders of transmission.