Biopolitics of “Acquired Immunity”: The War Discourse and Feminist Response-Abilities in Art,Science,and Technology During COVID-19

Abstract

If we are to adequately decipher and make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which large populations as well as their immune systems have responded to the virus, we ought to map the broader sociomaterial contexts in which a planetary health crisis, such as COVID-19, has been situated. Adopting a biophilosophical approach and feminist versions of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this article problematizes the virality of the war discourse and its tactical uses for the sake of biopower during COVID-19. Also, a queering lens is used to question the military metaphors deployed during COVID-19. Queering is understood in this article as to make change, and to act in a way that is disruptive of allegedly oppressive power structures. Queering seeks to expose or otherwise uncover that norms are, in fact, just limitations on a far broader set of possibilities. With the aim of exploring how critical associations can extend their response—abilities for the exploitative, authoritarian, and racist forces of biopower, the article examines the skilled practices and intra-actions of a feminist collective, FEMeeting—Women in Art, Science and Technology. Acknowledging the social relevance of a core community for acquiring immunity and its role for the future, a feminist conception of the virus played a key role in queering all kinds of anthropocentric and essentialist views by biohacking, DIY (Do It Yourself) and DIWO (Do It With Others) techniques in the actions and coproductions of FEMeeting. Of note, the war metaphor operated as a tactic for camouflaging and obfuscating the facts in the course of the pandemic. The findings reveal that paratactical commoning, which is a self-reflexive collective knowledge production in artistic and hacktivist research, emerges as a way in which political ontological potentials can be critically activated within communities of action. The feminist lenses on COVID-19, and the paratactical commoning presented in this article, are of broad interest to systems scientists to explore the ways in which biopower, and the previously unchecked war discourse and militaristic metaphors coproduce COVID-19 acquired immunity and the social injustices. Understanding not only the biology but also the biopolitics of acquired immunity to the control of COVID-19 is, therefore, crucial for systems medicine and planetary (health) care that is at once effective, resilient, foreseeable, and just.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) infection is a planetary health crisis that was transformative in rethinking both biology and society. The pandemic deepened the existing structural, colonial, environmental, and gendered social injustices. More than ever, large populations were left to their own means in the struggle for survival in the course of the pandemic. These abrupt and seismic changes paved the way for a self-reflexive rethinking about how everyday life and social interactions can radically transform through biological sciences, biotechnology, and biopolitics. If we are to adequately decipher and make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which various communities as well as their immune systems have responded to the virus, we ought to map the broader sociomaterial contexts in which COVID-19 has been situated.

COVID-19 has been predominantly embedded within biopower. Biopower literally means situating power over life, and power over bodies. It relates to the practice of modern nation states, built as “great immunitary dispositif to protect life, as Hobbes said” (quote by Roberto Esposito, cited in Christiaens and De Cauwer, 2020), as well as their regulation of their subjects through “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault, 1976, p. 140). Control of populations is maintained by managing life processes such as births, deaths, reproduction, behavior, health, and sanitation. Biopolitics of populations consists in all sorts of techniques to make interventions in life processes, which require the collection of enormous amounts of data about populations, analysis of the data and, finally, production of knowledge (Arnason, 2012).

Indeed, today life and bodies of various populations, both humans and nonhumans, have become a biocapitalist resource, which is governed, managed, ruled, exploited, colonized, and commodified. Valuation of life is also “materially embedded in relations of domination and exploitation; that is, in a biopolitical economy” (Bird and Lynch, 2019, p. 304). As witnessed during COVID-19, and with hopes to capitalize on the pandemic, state administrations, bioindustry, and their shareholders pushed forward to maximize their profits although some vaccines have received significant public funding for their development, not to mention the publicly funded science that laid the groundwork for their development.

As a reflection of disaster capitalism, Attiah (2021) noted these concerns, “even in a global emergency, the potential for profit weighed more than saving lives,” as with Allen (2020) “much of the pioneering work on mRNA vaccines was done with government money.” For example, a report by Public Citizen (Rizvi, 2021) revealed that although, the U.S. government has the mRNA-1273 vaccine recipe of Moderna in its possession, and has “unlimited data rights” under a $483 million contract that would “allow the government to use, reproduce, and share data—or recorded information—for any purpose,” the state administration has not shared key information with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the poorer countries to facilitate increased vaccine production.

In a similar manner, at 2020 World Trade Organization talks for temporary waivers on coronavirus vaccine patents and copyrights, the United States, the European Union, and Britain also helped to block the measures to create more expedient access to the knowledge and technology needed to produce doses for larger populations, arguing that such waivers would undermine drug makers' incentives to innovate and invest in research and development. Thus, biopower elite gradually has not defended the rights of commons and commonings, but rather enhanced their control and power on the—capacities and profits of—pharmaceutical industries as well as their associates and shareholders.

Moreover, the discourses on COVID-19 vaccine discovery and health innovations lacked a human rights lens, not to mention being embedded in vast disinformation. Health has been part of the right to health and the universal human rights since the mid-20th century (United Nations, 2008). When health products essential to public health and human existence/survival become a commodity, in much the same way as cars and shoes for trade, they are threatened and cease to be a human right. Most of us would find commodification of and withholding from people of a public utility with existential significance, for example, clean air free from pollution and carcinogens, unacceptable.

It is noteworthy that commodification of health and health products and essential medicines, instead of their recognition as a universal human right, prevails as a disinformation globally, both in an era of a pandemic like COVID-19, and in elective times. The market- and competition-based approaches to health innovation remained as the dominant master narratives amidst a devastating pandemic that required instead planetary mutual aid, and despite the fact that cooperation-based frameworks can be very well suited and empowering for innovation in ways that are also ethically and socially just. In all, such disinformation and forced amnesia erase in the public mind and master narratives that health is part of the right to an adequate standard of living as recognized by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

When populations of citizens, their health and sterility became a governmental issue for the nation states, categorical distinctions and division of labor have been refined not only among classes, but also among racial and ethnic lines, and more precisely, between “worthy” and “unworthy” lives that are essentially identified by the biopower elite. In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the discourse of war was tactically used, once again, and revealed how “[v]aluable lives are enriched by exploiting the life of invaluable lives” (Taşkale, 2022, p. 3). Thus, while the war discourse went viral, as with the SARS-CoV-2 that propagated itself across nation–state borders and vast geographies, militaristic metaphors also became inherently another exercise of updating colonial, patriarchal, racist, and authoritative sovereign power in the 21st century in ways that were both stealthy and direct, and nonetheless, inadequately checked.

The present article aims at extending the boundaries, performativities, and capacities for critical associations, which enact on, modify or create “life = multiplicity” processes (Thacker, 2005). Adopting a biophilosophical approach and feminist versions of STS (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1997; Haraway, 1991; Mayberry et al, 2001; Jasanoff, 2015; Jasanoff, 2004; Jasanoff, 2001; Alaimo and Hekman, 2008), the research explores how political ontological potential can be paratactically activated for the sake of commons and commonings (Bollier, 2016) within communities of action.

In fact, derived from the term parataxis, paratactical has been used as a military, literary, and political technique since the 12th century. For example, as an innovative war tactic against Seljuk Turks in Central Anatolia, parataxis was first devised by the Byzantine Emperor, Alexios I Komnenos, during The Battle of Philomelion in 1116. He deployed a defensive positioning, a “hollow square” with the baggage in the center, infantry on the outside, and cavalry in-between, as each unit was arranged side by side, from whence they could mount attacks (Papathanassiou, 2022). Broadly speaking, parataxis has been embraced to gain power by tactically composing independent entities, whether words, troops, citizens, or syntactically equivalent clauses, side by side, and along with one another, distributed without clear hierarchy, as coordinates rather than subordinates.

At this point, it is also critical to note that today “within the realm of everyday life parataxis is often exploited by the forces of capital (or Spectacle) as a tool of ideological manipulation, deception and disinformation” (Kaczmarski, 2018, p. 284).

The super-short sentences emphasize certainty and determination; build up layer upon layer, like bricks in a wall themselves, toward a conclusion and an emotional climax. It's a style that students of rhetoric call parataxis. This is the way generals and dictators have always spoken to distinguish themselves from the caviling civilians they mean to sweep aside. Wikipedia aptly quotes Julius Caesar's famous summary, not of his invasion of Britain, but of his victory in the Battle of Zela—“Veni, vidi, vici,” “I came, I saw, I conquered”—as a classical example of parataxis (Thompson, 2016, p. 71).

In contemporary politics, especially among far-right populists, “even if Trump, Le Pen or Boris Johnson rely on paratactic structures to radicalize and deceive their voters, there is no reason to assume that all parataxis is inherently and universally reactionary” (Kaczmarski, 2018, p. 280). In this article, paratactical refers to a dynamic force as well as a situated positioning, which is not only in opposition to but also alongside, beside, or beyond (–para) the control tactics of biopower in contemporary capitalism (Yetiskin, 2020).

Thus paratactical commoning relates with what Esposito theorizes as “affirmative biopolitics,” power no longer over life and bodies, but of life and bodies (Esposito, 2008, p. 157; Esposito, 2011, p. 3) (Box 1, see, point “a”). Of note, paratactical commonings, as collective ways of (un)learning, (re)generating, and (un)knowing through “skilled practices” (Haraway, 1988, p. 587) and information artifacts, can explore biopolitical tactics by: (1)

critically reusing them to explore and reveal hidden or unknown facts about the sheer absurdity and arbitrariness of contemporary biopower;

(2)

ignoring and subverting them to create alternate visions, possibilities, speculative futures, innovative research methodologies for commons and of commons.

Thus, paratactical commoning can be practiced within proactive and subversive interventions of self-organized, self-reflexive, and self-aware networking assemblages that pluralistically protect the rights to access, use, and manage commons, as shared planetary public goods (PPGs). Relevance of a lens of PPGs and systems medicine in the way vaccines are designed and developed to stem the COVID-19 has also been discussed in OMICS (Fulci et al, 2021; Von Schomberg and Özdemir, 2020; Wang et al, 2021) and elsewhere (Springer, 2020) in the course of the pandemic.

In this article, it is noteworthy that the commoning practices such as paratactical commoning emerges to take back control of redistributing power to take care and “response-ability” (Haraway, 2008, p. 88; Barad cited in Juelskjær and Schwennesen, 2012, p. 208) of commons as well as commoners. Understanding not only the biology but also the biopolitics of acquired immunity to the control of COVID-19 is, therefore, crucial for systems medicine and planetary (health) care that is at once effective, resilient, foreseeable, and just.

Materials and Methods

Instead of limiting the scope of research by studying an object or an individual organism as the unit of analysis, the present research article is developed by exploring the multiplicity of associations, skilled practices, “intra-actions” (Barad, 2007), and queerings of essentialist, anthropocentric, and techno-solutionist views within a self-organized feminist collective, FEMeeting—Women in Art, Science and Technology.

As a feminist collective launched in 2017, FEMeeting “was driven by the desire to develop and promote more direct collaboration between individuals who identify themselves as Women, independently of their sex. […] FEMeeting's main purpose is to disseminate projects that are being carried out by women in order to contribute (a) to the development of research methodologies in art and science, and (b) to the development of collaboration strategies that can increase knowledge sharing and bring communities together.” (https://femeeting.com/description/).

The research process of this article was twofold. This biophilosophical study involves my critical positioning within FEMeeting and as such, did not include human subjects nor required institutional research ethics board approval. As one of the critical tenets in feminist STS research is the ability of the researcher to become embedded within the “nature cultures” (Haraway, 2003) that are being explored and studied in a self-reflexive way, in the first phase (2017–2020), I have been one of the initiators and active participant-observers of FEMeeting community.

In the first phase of the research, I have been actively engaged with the collective to explore the processes and boundaries of community building and its “coproductions” (Jasanoff, 2004, p. 43) of the collective by presenting proceedings at its conferences, giving talks at its public engagement events in art and technology festivals, writing journal articles, and exhibiting artworks (Box 1, see, point “b”).

In the second phase (2021–2022), lockdowned in Istanbul, I took a critical distance from the dynamic associations of FEMeeting, and developed immune tolerance by situating myself keep doing collective curatorial research in between multiple sites, triangulating different data, and validating my research findings with other various self-organizing translocal feminist research communities in art, science, and technology (Box 1, see, point “c”). Therefore, this article is of my self-reflexive feminist response-ability to the ways in which biopower has been actively operated during COVID-19 at a planetary scale (Box 1, see, point “d”).

Results and Discussion

Addressing the opening of the World Health Organization's annual assembly of member states on March 23, 2020, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated that “our world faces a common enemy: COVID-19.” As one of the powerful decision makers, he called for solidarity and the application of wartime logic to the inequitable access to the weapons needed to fight the pandemic (Box 1, see, point “e”). As one of the most popular samples of a commonly used war discourse during COVID-19, this statement can be critically examined and paratactically reused by adopting a microscopic view.

Recently many scholars argued that the war discourse and militaristic metaphors were, once again, widely imitated-repeated, and became viral during COVID-19 (Lehtinen and Brunila, 2021; Castro Seixas, 2021; Panzeri et al, 2021; Semino, 2021). Militaristic metaphors have long been used in health crisis in political and media communicative practices (Castro Seixas, 2021). The metaphor of war and conjuring up military actions have been prevalent in elective times against noncommunicable diseases as well—when there were no imminent ecological crises from infectious diseases. For example, Vannevar Bush (1890–1974), an electrical engineer, and the driving force for the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb who authored the widely influential report Science, The Endless Frontier (Bush, 1945), Bush has harnessed politically expedient narratives such as “For the War Against Disease” and “For Our National Security” (Bush, 1945; Thorp, 2020).

These master narratives and military metaphors that are often unchecked in the forcefully depoliticized world of science have played out powerfully in soliciting support for biomedical research and the atomic bomb, respectively. At the same time, such unchecked discourses undermine efforts to make science democratic and accountable, and COVID-19 pandemic experience was not too dissimilar from the deployment of the war discourse, which embodies a knowledge gap that this article aims to address.

Although their uses were extensively criticized for being “inherently masculine, power-based, paternalistic and violent” (Hodgkin, 1985; Ross, 1989, p. 55; Stibbe, 1997, pp. 68–69; Sontag, 1979, pp. 64–66; Sontag, 1989, p. 94; Reisfield and Wilson, 2004, p. 4025), the war discourse has been managed to be sustained over the course of past decades because of its capacity to be transmuted into new variants, such as the “war on terror,” “the war on cancer,” “the war on drugs,” “the war on AIDS,” “the war on science,” and so on, and as highlighted formerly in the case of Bush's report as well (Bush, 1945).

The war discourse has always been a practical instrument for strengthening and mobilizing the states' subjectivity and biopower, which complements sovereign power by allowing for new areas of life to be governed (Foucault, 1976, pp. 187–188). During COVID-19, powerful institutions, such as some nation states, tactically positioned and represented themselves as vulnerable and pacified victims of the virus (SARS-CoV-2), and promised “a better future” for “the new normal.” Upon such promise, they legitimized their urgent need for a more authoritarian administration, exceptional law enforcements and technocratic mode of governance as normative and essential solutions.

“The calls for solidarity” and displaced responsibilities within the war discourse

As Barry (2013; 2002; 2001) would argue, what becomes biopolitical is a matter of what has been made biopolitical through associations. In my view, as a biopolitical technique for problem solving, which is restoration of the status quo ante, “the calls for solidarity” within the war discourse arises not from the recognition of diversities, but of subjugations and similarities of large populations. That is also the reconfiguration of associations, which would allow the recognition and reproduction of subjugations and similarities in times of crisis. To explore how associations have been reconfigurated, perhaps one should begin reconsidering the popular understanding and common sense of society and sociality. This would also reveal the shift in rethinking and adopting “the common” purposes.

Indeed, if “‘[W]e’ Are In This Together, But We Are Not One and the Same” (Braidotti, 2020), then, who are ‘We’? “The calls for solidarity” accompanied by the war discourse, are based on a Durkheimian take of sociality. To be more precise, COVID-19 has been considered as an anomie in Durkheimian terms, a pathology of “the division of labor” (Durkheim, 1997). By the combination of moral and legal obligations, the autonomous individual parts, whether be nation states, institutions, corporations, or citizens, are called for contributing and subjugated to the lives of others, the life of the society as the great unity and immunity of the harmonious whole, that is, Humanity. Ironically, these shifting and subjugating narratives of solidarity through war metaphors were running, at the same time, in the face of an assortment of vaccine nationalisms, and a discourse of “survival of the richest” when it came to, for example, access to the new vaccines.

Nevertheless, when similar accounts, such as “the calls for solidarity” within the war discourse, have been imitated-repeated in high frequencies by publics quasi-automatically, then perhaps one should also explore what constitutes its virality. Virality, here, is by no means a metaphor. In (Gabriel) Tardean monadology and epidemiology, especially when there is too much “differentiated vulnerabilities” (Lorenzini, 2021) in various populations at a planetary scale, social agencies imitate-repeat quasi-automatically owing to dynamic forces, which are desire and belief (Tarde, 1903). For Tarde, imitation-repetition flows emerge when one agency believes in and desires to possess value(s) of another.

During COVID-19, the use of war discourse associated with “the calls for solidarity” created a communicative time/space, and sociality in which various agencies can also interact, exchange, oppose, compete, destroy, and reproduce with one another. For instance, a random Google search on August 3, 2022 for the translocal use of a COVID-19 slogan, such as “Together, We Will Win,” reveals that it is quasi-automatically imitated-repeated by various agencies, some of which are executive directors of transnational institutions; presidents, prime ministers, and ministers of states; CEOs and board members of corporations and platforms; municipalities and mayors; school directors and university rectors; head of religious affairs and churches; medical doctors and health workers; experts, NGOs, and pop-stars.

It is critical to note that sociality, in this positioning, is understood, from Tarde's perspective, as a kind of somnambulism. Tarde argues, “to only have ideas suggested by others and spontaneous beliefs is the illusion that is natural to the sleepwalker as well as the social person” (Tarde, 1890, pp. 72–73). Therefore, one should not reach a reductive conclusion that all of those that imitate-repeat using the war discourse necessarily desire and believe in possessing similar or same values and means.

For Tarde, “the imitation of ideas precedes the imitation of their external manifestation, and that ends are imitated before means” (Tarde, 1903, p. 211). That is, those that struggle to survive during COVID-19 can imitate-repeat the manifestations of the war discourse but desire and believe in possessing differentiated values and means. The calls for solidarity during COVID-19, which was situated within the war discourse, may also be a call for becoming organized and managed by possessing oppositional and ignored desires, beliefs, and values.

What is disguised and black boxed in this kind of sociality is very critical and it requires a deeper examination because public opinion is managed within affective representations, in which all kinds of dualistic oppositions and conflicts are systematically sustained and multiplied within the war discourse so that large populations that struggle to survive can believe in and desire to possess value(s) of those that are represented as having forces, sources, capacities, and potentials in “winning.”

Accordingly they can (become coerced to) recognize, identify with, and subjugated to the associations that are controlled by the biopower elite. For instance, despite the biopolitical war discourse that emphasizes solidarity of “all” societies at a planetary scale as “We,” by the end of 2021 only 8.5% of people in low-income countries have received at least one vaccine dose, versus 76–78% in high and upper-middle-income countries (Ritchie et al, 2020).

This reconfiguration process of sociality further creates a worse problem for commons and commonings. Whether the war is to be on terrorism, inflation, drugs or domestic violence, each day vulnerable populations have become extremely occupied with a determined conception of “life,” which is precisely viewed in philosophy of biology as “life-as-one” and “life-itself,” in which one, as if, must imitate-repeat considering, opposing, conflicting, and fighting with another, and even killing one another, if found necessary, for having a similar purpose in “life,” which is the “right to live”—a common.

Today, commons have become one of the fundamental resources of biocapital. Besides, conventional conceptions of living and nonliving, binary categorizations within the war discourse of biopower, such as self and other, became indeed a very complicated problem for publics. With the rise of social media platforms, the public have been informed more and frequently about the systematic exploitation and expropriation of commons. Moreover, during COVID-19, blaming, shaming, and targeting of individual organisms as nonself other(s) and “common enemy” tactically shifted from one entity to another, such as the virus (e.g., SARS-CoV-2), the disease (e.g., COVID-19), citizens of a nation state (e.g., Chinese, Syrian), ethnic minorities (e.g., Hispanic or Black), and certain animal species (e.g., bats and pangolins).

As an ordinary part of the evening news, the declared mortality rates, virulence thresholds, and the charts of hospitalized cases have been tactically represented alongside the statistical information graphs and data about the inflation, unemployment, debt, waste, trans-femicide, child abuse, censor, imprisonments, and pollution. Exploited workers, exiled refugees, displaced animals, destroyed forests, contaminated air and waters, despoiled cultural heritage, dismissed academics, silenced peasant insurgents, detained activists, censored journalists, and enfeebled prosecutors have generated the similarities among various and dynamic clusters of large populations.

As discussed previously, the ubiquitous use of the war discourse during COVID-19 has been strongly associated with the control of public opinion as well as the commoning practices, which are mainly based on the necessity to fight with one another for accessing, using, and managing the restricted resources, the commons. In the case of COVID-19, treatments and vaccines are being pursued by a mix of for-profit, often publicly funded firms explicitly seeking patent rights and public or not-for-profit initiatives and collaboratives that may open up successful innovations for open-source manufacture (Hensher et al, 2020). However, it is also critical to note that it is through the reuse of the term common(s), the interests the war discourse serves for the authority of the few privileged—the financially and judicially immuned biopower elite—have been clouded and sustained.

To be more precise, biopower is based on the “sovereign power to make live and let die” (Foucault, 2003, p. 247). During COVID-19, I observed that the use of the term “solidarity” accompanied by the war discourse operated as a tactic for camouflaging and obfuscating the facts about (the desires and beliefs of) possessing power over life and power over bodies of vulnerable populations, which share a variety of problems in a similar way, and let die by sovereign power and its proxy associations. Those inflicted by the disease have been called to combat with an invisible enemy in constant mutation as if their survival depends on inherent willpower rather than medical, social, and economic factors far beyond their control (Freedman, 2020).

Thus “the calls for solidarity” within the war discourse operate also as a social construction of making individual organisms accountable and responsible for the crisis so that the “response-abilities” of large populations can be managed and controlled. The war discourse associated with the calls for solidarity tactically displaced the responsibility and accountability of the states and their associates, the biopower elite.

“Application of wartime logic” and “Weapons needed to fight”

One has to note that today “[t]he transformation of sovereign power into biopower leads to a shift from a political-military discourse into a racist-biological one” (Lemke, 2011, p. 40). Within the war discourse, the so-called “the application of wartime logic” resonates an imitation-repetition of the “totalizing logic of the Word War I” (Horne, 1997, p. 3). Over the course of last decades, one can also recall how “the application of wartime logic” and “weapons needed to fight” in the so-called the “War on Terror” became a hegemonic tactic for getting public's consent to adopt and adapt to the supposed “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Therefore, it is critical to explore what kind of epistemological and ontological tools are imitated-repeated and black-boxed within the biopolitical associations of war discourse during COVID-19.

Beyond individual action and identity politics, COVID-19 pandemic generated a rethinking of racism, which “structures social fields of action, guides political practices, and is realized through state apparatuses” (Lemke, 2011). However, the war discourse has been strongly attached to anthropocentric and essentialist views, which are embedded in philosophy of biology. To be more precise, in this article, anthropocentrism, in its most relevant philosophical form, is understood as an ethical belief that all entities “hold value only in their ability to serve humans, or in their instrumental value” (Goralnik and Nelson, 2012). In essentialist rationalizations and justifications, one mainly works with generalizations, reductions, categorizations, and dualistic oppositions (e.g., inferior and superior, human and nonhuman, living and nonliving).

From Tarde's perspective, one may argue that today biopolitical recognition of anthropocentrism has been associated with the virality of desires and beliefs in possessing the instrumental value of philosophy of biology, such as consolidating the authority of essentialist thinking, which also serves the needs of those in power to justify (also the authority of) existing socio-bio and economic classifications and hierarchies.

That is, within the war discourse during COVID-19, the so-called “application of wartime logic” and “weapons needed to fight” indicate that the processes and conditions of mediating, sometimes an intrinsic anthropocentric knowledge production, which has also been situated within an essentialist view, lies at the core of many reductive, discriminatory, or extremist ideologies (Kurzwelly et al, 2020). Thus, the virality of the war discourse in the coronavirus pandemic became inherently a somnambulist exercise of updating colonial, patriarchal, racist, and authoritarian sovereign power.

For instance, within the war discourse of biopower “the problem” was formulated, represented, and dramatized as follows: the virus, depicted as an invisible enemy in constant mutation, was acting faster and more effective than (the immune system of) the humans, the institutions, the corporations, and the nation states as well as their proxy associations.

Accordingly, science, seen as a close institutional ally, was immediately expected to give the necessary response, reveal the objective truth, explain the causes to The Public with relevant facts, and suggest innovative solutions as counterattacks for what techno-solutionist policy makers, corporations, and industries would also require. Scientists, along with health workers, especially those who work in line with the interests of biopower elite, which is an extension of the insular community of the “Military-Industrial-Academic Complex” (Martino-Taylor, 2008), were represented as the progressive sources of The Enlightenment, and popularized sometimes as the frontline fighters in mainstream media.

Castro Seixas (2021) argue that the war metaphors facilitated the public understanding of the pandemic so that the public gave consent to exceptional measures and sacrifices. Indeed, similar to Gramsci's “organic intellectuals” (Gramsci, 1971), some scientists have played a hegemonic role in the way that their knowledge production, expertise, and public communication facilitated the control of public opinion and social behavior during COVID-19. However, when ignorance of publics about technoscientific knowledge production processes and methodologies combined with the uncertainty and controversies among scientists, Science was represented as a failure, and accordingly, the essentialist thinking of failure within the war discourse of biopower facilitated “the application of wartime logic.”

Meanwhile, large populations were constantly traumatized, feared, masked, tested, isolated, exhausted, and let die in crisis. If publics were to desire and believe in “life-itself,” they were also constrained to trust and recognize the undemocratic and exceptional measures of the States, although they were not necessarily rationalized and legitimized by Science, but perhaps approved by certain religious sects. The instructions were vague and sanctions were not democratic after all.

For instance, the instruction of “Stay Alive” and “Stay Home” was not a democratic option especially for those who were imposed to socioeconomic inequalities, domestic violence, inaccessible sources, and infrastructures. Vaccines were unevenly distributed in world populations. In short, this dramatic narrative represented within the war discourse of biopower, reminded “the essential task” of Science and Scientists, to manufacture consent for the sake of biopower elite.

On the contrary, owing to tactical use of the war discourse, and its reproduction of essentialist thinking, whether be an individual, a corporation, an institution or a community, those that question, criticize, reject, disrupt, and reveal the workings of the biopower elite and its correlated proxy associations were generalized, reduced, and categorized within the dualistic oppositions as—pros or—cons. Alongside some scientists, in more authoritarian regimes, many journalists, lawyers, health workers, company owners, academics, activists, and students who adopted critical, oppositional, and distanced positioning to the controls of biopower have been identified, accused, and charged sometimes as “terrorists” because they were not obeying the given protocol, that is, within the refined division of labor, they were not working for manufacturing consent to the exploitative, racist, and violating actions of the biopower elite.

For this reason, dissidents have been systematically ignored, devalued, blamed, shamed, dismissed, targeted, imprisoned, and silenced in various parts of the world. Mostly accompanied and justified by within legal frameworks such as court decisions, peer reviews, board meetings, and omnibus bills, the right to critical expression, which is a common, and resilience, which can be an act of commoning, were generalized, categorized, and reduced into essential acts of danger, insecurity, risk, terrorism, and treason (Box 1, see, point “f”).

With the increase of racism and nationalism, democratic inquiries were systematically reduced into whether one explicitly desires, believes in and serves for the sake of the absolute control power of the nation states, and accordingly its proxy associations, the biopower elite. The States required full obedience and coerced participation in newly formulated instructions, regulations, protocols, surveillance infrastructures, and procedures. The crisis of truth, belief, trust, and (health) care also became the pushing factors of the dramatic increase in the making of a community-based society. In other words, to control autonomous thinking, collective action and generation of alternative visions, social practices, and forms of peer governance, the reproduction of all kinds of categorizations, reductions, generalizations, definitions, and otherings frequently suggested as essential “weapons needed to fight.”

Along with neoliberal populism, promising hope and victory that may be illusory, and paving the way for the acceptance of “the violence of the treatment” and “collateral damages,” “life-itself,” which has been considered as an essence and an organizing principle within philosophy of biology, was simply reduced and categorized by two episodes within essentialist thinking: before and after the pandemic. To regain the “normal” life, just as before the pandemic (as if it was “normal,” and what is “normal” at a planetary scale, in anyways?), the war, it is claimed, must have been won collectively.

With this aim, to have “a better future,” similar means were to be desired, believed, and possessed. Technocratic solutions, such as tracking and monitoring applications were popularized and suggested as essential innovations, and accordingly related industries gained profit and power because many states adopted them as obligatory public health instruments without any democratic discussions.

The terms of the protocol was clear: the virus must have been attacked and defeated with the collective participation of “all.” This protocol was also goal oriented: the everyday life as well as social associations must have been reconfigured (especially by social distance and isolation techniques, surveillance technologies, algorithmic platforms, big data, and biotechnology industry). For this purpose, the reconfiguration of social associations has operated within the growing “epistemic bubbles” and “echo chambers” (Nguyen, 2020) (Box 1, see, point “g”).

“Social autism that purposely distorts society's understanding of the problem” (Martino-Taylor, 2008), “systemic stupidity” (Stiegler, 2015), and “a passion for ignorance” (Salecl, 2020) have also become viral along with biopolitics of the war discourse during COVID-19. Thus closed circuits of judgment were tactically generated to manufacture consent for the sake of biopower elite's interests.

Besides, as a regenerator of essentialist thinking, polarization technique became extremely instrumental for consolidating biopower by cacophony (Yetiskin, 2013). As an extension of the “shock doctrine” (Klein, 2007), cacophony can be described as operational noise, which is generated with big data extracted from large populations by way of disinformation to be consumed massively and affectively.

In a crisis situation, like COVID-19, cacophony was excessively fabricated by fake news, polemics, conspiracy theories, bots, memes, trolls, avatars, inconsistent political economic statements, fabricated documents, and misleading statistics in an increasing manner to create a somnambulist sociality under control. The main goal was to occupy and dynamically channel the critical masses' desires, beliefs, and attention to temporary zones so that hidden and illegal actions can be performed within that temporal gap.

Affirmative biopolitics and paratactical feminist response-abilities

COVID-19 has also highlighted the critical associations among affirmative biopolitics, immunity, and community. How can one adapt to the extreme conditions of biopower and act on it for commons and commonings without or besides reproducing the biopolitical violence quasi-automatically? From a sociological perspective, Tarde argued, oppositions, or counter imitation-repetitions, are resolved, either through the destruction of imitation-repetition flows or through adaptation, which also signifies “creative joint production” (Tarde, 1898 [1921], pp. 9–10 cited in Djellal and Gallouj, 2014) and innovation.

Although essentialist view of immunity is based on the binary distinctions between self/nonself and the negation of community, Esposito argues that immunity and community share “a complex dialectic in which neither term is limited to negating the other but instead implicates the other” (Esposito, 2011, p. 5). Indeed, the virality of war discourse accompanied by “the calls for solidarity” also manifested the affirmation of desires and beliefs in possessing the values of (also by becoming a part of) powerful associations in forms of communities, cluster, or herds.

Meanwhile nation–states around the globe [have been] debating whether herd immunity or lockdown [was] the best response, as the competition continue[d] for the development and roll out of effective vaccines against coronavirus and as the economic costs of implementing strict containment measures [were] weighed against public health costs (Ajana, 2021). This was also an extension of another technocratic solution: the control and management of large populations by identifying various groups with some essential criteria, characteristics, classifications, and qualifications in accelarationist platform capitalism.

The social practice of commoning implicitly favors “community without community” (Nancy, 1991), which shifts the question of, or on, community away from one invested in the notion of identity and belonging to an idea of the community that ceaselessly works to produce more democratic, open, and fluid associations with others to foster a sense of “being with” (Nancy, 1991). As an active, interruptive idea, community without community calls for a continual unworking of totalizing and exclusionary myths of collectivity upon which community is formed.

In that sense, a community can also be conceived as a dynamic process in which various associations and dissociations can be engendered. It also signifies shifts in values and practices that enable communities to be generative instead of extractive. That said, it would be a mistake to assume that all communities and commonings inherently opposed to resource (e.g., data, oil, and gold) extraction. For instance, some of them have embraced extractive industries as a driver of community development and as a means of furthering goals of self-determination.

“Staying with the trouble,” Haraway argued, “[t]he task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response” (Haraway, 2016, p. 1). Response-ability, in its most concise reiteration, is “an ability to respond, to respond to the world beyond oneself, as well as a willingness to recognize its existence” (Kuokkanen, 2007). However, under chronic stress, fear, anxiety, isolation, fatigue, hopelessness, impoverishment, ignorance, traumatic events, and more work for fewer wages, reciprocity, response-ability, and resilience may well be taken as another “task” to be completed, and indeed a vital challenge for a wide range of differentiated vulnerable populations.

Besides, during COVID-19, it became clear that the rhetoric of resilience was mobilized within the war discourse as a “shock doctrine” (Klein, 2007) tactic to sell products, “negotiate consent for new regimes, and to manage people's experiences of various kinds of loss, trauma and circumstantial difficulty, in ways designed to keep us working, keep us biddable and keep us compliant (Hamad, 2022, pp. 318–319). This is why (health) care, reciprocity response-ability, and “[r]esilience is a feminist issue” (Hamad, 2022).

Feminist response-abilities are not only a counter act of political struggle, but a folding process, in which the mutual constitution of entangled agencies, as abilities to act, and halting voices turn into a collective dynamism of forces through their “intra-action” (Barad, 2007, p. 33). It is also about fostering “relational accountability” and opening up possibilities for rendering one another capable in responsiveness, learning, being/becoming, and participating in world-making as human and more-than-human collectives (Wilson and Wilson, 1998, p. 157).

In fact during the pandemic, there were many emergent feminist response-abilities and commonings (Box 1, see, point “h”). However, one can merely distinguish various differentiations by taking a closer look and coproducing “skilled practices” (Haraway, 1988, p. 587) from within. To explore feminist response-abilities of paratactical commoning, first, it is critical to examine how various agencies are entangled with each other within communities of action.

Feminist queerings of “wartime logic” and “weapons needed to fight”

A feminist perspective to commoning gives a particular attention to the “everyday practices, social relations and spaces of creativity and social reproduction where people come, share and act together” (Federici, 2019; Federici, 2011). Cofounded and orchestrated by the artist Marta de Menezes and scholar Dalila Honorato, FEMeeting associations were mainly based on quasi-automatic imitation-repetition of organizing networking conferences since 2017.

However, the differentiated informal settings of FEMeeting: Women in Art, Science and Technology Conferences primarily served as a community-building infrastructure that aimed at creating travel experience, trust, affinity, affiliation, and information exchange among women in art, science, and technology. The collective has been cultivated as a critical feminist response-ability and resilience by coexisting, reusing, and subverting the tactics of biopower and biopolitical control of collective knowledge production, alternate imaginaries, speculative future designs, and performative experimentations. FEMeeting community also desired and believed in possessing multiplicity of values by contributing to the development of innovative research methodologies and creative collaboration schemes that would encourage coexistence, reciprocity, resilience, knowledge sharing, trust, and care among community members.

Acknowledging the social relevance of a core community for acquiring immunity and its role for the future, the collective idea started with a basic protocol, which identified common objectives, matters of concern, and a shared understanding of a problem definition. Of importance, from the beginning, FEMeeting situated itself within a wide range of feminisms—by not adopting straightforward classifications and binaries, anthropocentric essentialism, technoscientific solutionism, the war discourse of biopower, including “the application of wartime logic,” and “weapons needed to fight” in any ways. FEMeeting opened itself to queerings of essentialist accounts and categorizations, including the category of “Women”, “Art”, “Science,” and “Technology.”

To be more precise, queering is understood in this article as to make change, and to act in a way that is disruptive of allegedly oppressive power structures. Queering rejects both “the normal” and “norms” as the essential standard, particularly but not entirely limited to issues of sex, gender, and sexuality. The purpose of turning “queer” into a verb is not to accuse dominant groups and discourses in society of imposing a systemic power structure upon marginalized and oppressed populations, but to resist ones it believes are in place (Lindsay, 2020).

To queer something, then, is to challenge those normativities by acting or behaving not only outside of them, often in ways that are intentionally absurd or exaggerated (i.e., in strategic resistance, strategic essentialism, technoscientific determinism, pastiche, and politics of parody), but also despite and along with them. Queering, ultimately rooted in the concept of performativity, seeks to expose or otherwise uncover that norms are, in fact, just limitations on a far broader set of possibilities—social constructions that we feel suck in performing but that could be otherwise if we shook ourselves out of the stagnant patterns of thought, dominant discourses, and constraining social expectations that keep us doing them. This is considered subversive to the existing normativities, and transformational in that it can open up new possibilities beside, alongside, and beyond them (Lindsay, 2020).

For instance, in FEMeeting, more specifically, as for “Women,” biological sex is not taken as the essential factor in determining gender. Accordingly, the shared understanding of the problem and the common matter of concern were formulated as such: Women, independent of their sex, who work at the intersections of “Art,” “Science,” and “Technology,” have an unquestionable presence worldwide. Besides adopting and adapting technoscientific and cultural techniques, such as biohacking, DIY (Do It Yourself), and DIWO (Do It With Others), a feminist conception of the virus played a key role in queering all kinds of anthropocentric and essentialist views in the coproductions of FEMeeting community.

SARS-CoV-2, like any virus, is an entity that holds an ambiguous status between the “living” and “non-living.” From a philosophical perspective, the virus challenges the conceptual boundaries of what “life” is. It emerges as an enmeshment of processes defying (or queering) straightforward classifications and binaries (Radomska et al, 2021, p. 7).

It is often acknowledged that “[t]he body's ability to distinguish self from other (non-self) is essentially recognized as the definition of immunity” (Weasel, 2001). However, as I have discussed previously, I argue that the dominance of war discourse in immunology's lexicon, (such as attack, defense, enemy, defeat, victory, invaders), and its wide application and translatability to other domains (such as legal immunity) dramatically regenerates and empowers the self/other dichotomy, as well as other binary distinctions and the privileged regard of individuality over community.

During the pandemic, as a kind of hybrid practice in art, science, and technology, FEMeeting community adopted and adapted a transgressive liminal approach and challenged the socially constructed boundaries between self and nonself, the human and the nonhuman, the living and the nonliving, and the natural and the artificial.

Looking at the virus from a biological point of view, it does not fulfill the four basic criteria of “life” (the entity has a body; it metabolizes, reproduces and is capable of movement). In the context of viruses, the criterion of reproduction (combined with the inheritance of genetic information) is not valid because, in order to replicate, viruses need host cells. (Radomska et al, 2021, p. 7)

Recognizing by rejecting the essence of what is conventionally known or recognized as “life,” the works of FEMeeting became creative coproductions for making a series of thought experiments, as well as speculative interventions that presented multiple views of a biotechnological future that also perhaps be considered alternative, irrelevant, controversial, or even “hostile” within the war discourse of biopower (Box 1, see, point “i”). In this way, the collective also suggested ways of fleeing from the lockdowns residing in essentialist thinking of the autonomous body as a political, social, economic, and medical entity (Foucault, 1973; Agamben, 1998).

Living besides and alongside (-para) the tactics of biopower and its war discourse, FEMeeting community critically questioned whether differences in immunological responses of various entities are necessarily a lethal risk for one another at a planetary scale. The collective stressed the importance of symbiotic activities (e.g., in the gut), which are critical immunitary, physiological, and evolutionary processes. In its wide range of coproductions, the formation of associations among various community members revealed a paratactical and affirmative positioning by queering, subverting, and disrupting the tactical reappropriation of immunity and community besides, alongside, and along with the war discourse of biopower.

“Acquired immunity” and “antibodies” as resilient feminist response-abilities

The immune system is understood as a sensor of change rather than a structure. The sensitivity of such a cognitive system mediates multifarious immune reactions, some of which involve tolerance, recognition, and activation of rejection. It also requires coordination and modulation of the responses of collective molecular ensembles, in which diverse elements together determine the extent of the immune response (Daëron, 2014).

Instead of thinking and acting as an autonomous individual organism, the virus-like collective needed host cells, such as active community members that coexist symbiotically, to replicate, to act, and to “live with.” Therefore, as an extension of the virus logic, FEMeeting community stimulated multiplicity with the formation of translocal nodes so that it would act within a decentralized and nonhierarchical manner, a community without community. It is in this sense that after two FEMeeting conferences, which took place in Portugal (organized by Cultivamos Cultura) in 2018 and 2019, two meetings were planned to take place in Troy (organized with Media Sanctuary's NATURE Lab Initiative), and in Paris (organized with Leonardo/Olats) in 2020.

However, the events were cancelled because of the COVID-19 restrictions. Instead of being limited and inactivated that the war discourse of biopower would impose, FEMeeting community situated its praxis, paratactically, in relation to failure, which became a commons during COVID-19. That is, failure was considered not as an end or a defeat, yet another departure point, and a value for change and collective action. Thus, as a kind of paratactical commoning, the community updated its response-ability in making ad hoc maneuvers.

As an extension of care feminisms and feminist solidarity, to deal with the insertion of fear, anxiety, and despair that also became viral affects along with the war discourse, the collective members regularly met and interacted in 36 informal Zoom meetings entitled, FEMeeting TeaPot Chats. The conversations in these meetings manifested differential vulnerabilities and potentialities of community members that were lockdowned and isolated worldwide. Instead of counter-imitating and repeating the tactical control of biopower by militaristic metaphors, the collective desired and believed in possessing the value of “the logic of the gift” (Kuokkanen, 2007) and adaptation, which also regenerated further creative coproductions, skilled practices, and intra-actions.

As a result of the postponed grants and cancelled art events owing to regulations of public health, in April 2020, Dalila Honorato, who searched for the possibilities of interactive engagement during the COVID-19 lockdown invited four FEMeeting contributors, Isabel Burr Raty, Louise Mackenzie, Robertina Šebjanič, and Karolina Żyniewicz, to form a working group and develop an artistic research on the theme of “Staying in Touch: Post-Coronavirus Art Curating” (MacKenzie et al, 2021) within a research project, “Biofriction” (Box 1, see, point “j”). Collaborating remotely across Slovenia, the United Kingdom, Poland, Belgium, Greece, the United States, and Portugal, the working group reused and subverted the tactical uses of war discourse in COVID-19.

Instead of becoming pacified within an error-giving environment, the working group developed a hacktivist speculative fiction in which art is the virus, and art practitioners act as frontline workers. Entangling the criticisms of conceptual art, architectural, and bioart practices, they also did not only develop “a better future” for “the new normal,” but potential futures for postpandemic art spaces, resulting in a fictional account of a series of art exhibitions that coincide with a pandemic event. The research was synthesized in the form of a pseudo-documentary and a videoconference, moderated by Marta de Menezes.

In a similar line of research, the working group “Non/Living Queerings,” which was assembled by The Bioart Society and composed of Marietta Radomska, Terike Haapoja, Margherita Pevere, Marcus Schmidt, and Mayra Citalli (some of which are also within FEMeeting community) discussed the ways of defining a crisis, various narratives on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, the virus as a nonliving entity that is presented to have an agency catalyzed and implied in various processes, and the change in understanding Human and Humanity during the pandemic. The working group also focused on the following enquiries in a videoconference moderated by Erich Berger:

What is the role of art in the unpacking/understanding of the now? How can art mobilize a better understanding of possible futures?

How can we understand the long- and short-term (temporal); local and global (spatial); micro- and macroscales of more-than-human and non/living actants and the processes of the Anthropocene they are involved in (like previously unknown viruses, for example)?

What are the conceptual and material boundaries of living and nonliving as well as their potentials and limitations as actants?

What ethical and political response may such an onto-epistemological revision of understandings generate?

As an innovative and experimental research community in art, science, and technology, during the pandemic, FEMeeting also conceptualized its works under the working titles, “Acquired Immunity” and “Antibodies” as resilient feminist response-abilities. Organized with Kathy High and Branda Miller, from Media Sanctuary's NATURE Lab Initiative (North Troy Art, Technology, and Urban Research in Ecology), and Annick Bureaud, from Leonardo/Olats, together with FEMeeting cofounders Marta de Menezes and Dalila Honorato, with the support of Cultivamos Cultura; and launched as FEMeeting WEB: Antibodies included the “All Women Crew Podcasts,” the 2020 Space Art-Science Workshop organized to celebrate women in art, astronautics, and astronomy, and “Acquired Immunity,” the video podcasts sent by the members of the FEMeeting community at large in response to COVID-19 crisis.

It is worth noting that the collection of these online videos, curated by Kathy High, presented a snapshot in times of early COVID-19 responses. “Acquired Immunity” and “Antibodies” were dedicated to the production of digital self-immunization, an alternative form of assemblage, and encouragement to collective personal exchange on times of physical lockdown. As Esposito puts it, within the immunitary paradigm, the body defeats a virus by making it part of itself rather than expelling it outside the organism. This “exclusionary inclusion” (Esposito, 2011) makes life possible through its own negation. As I mentioned earlier, whereas the war discourse of biopower has been tactically used to control dissident and resilient communities in isolation, the inevitable rejection contrasted with the acquisition of a new form of recognition of one another afforded by the emergence of feminist response-abilities, “Acquired Immunity” and “Antibodies.”

Besides, a collective memory space has been created in Mozilla Hubs for Ars Electronica 2020: FEMeeting 2020 Garden. Inspired by the environment of the 2018 and 2019 conferences in Portugal and the structure of FEMeeting WEB 2020: Antibodies, in FEMeeting 2020 Garden, the collective built an open source library, which presented the immunological “memory cells” of the community since its inception. For instance, as one of the initial members of FEMeeting, I have contributed to a live panel entitled, On Roots and Fruits, together with Marta de Menezes, Dalila Honorato, Victoria Vesna, Kathy High, Maria Antonia Gonzalez Valerio, Laura Beloff, Ionat Zurr, and Jo Wei, with a talk on the impact and various futures of the FEMeeting activities.

Another section, FEMeeting Seeds included structured video interviews, video testimonies, images, and sounds of women from 11 different countries working today in art, science, and technology. In these works, situated positioning and partial views within the community generated a collective memory in which one can explore the multiplicity of values within the FEMeeting community.

From a biological perspective, one can note that immunological memory forms the basis of the adaptive immunological system. Once the infected organism eliminates an antigen, most of the lymphocytes generated to struggle with the infection experience a form of programmed cell death that occurs in multicellular organisms, apoptosis. However, some of these cells remain in the system as “memory cells,” enabling a more rapid reaction against the same infectious agent in the future (Janeway Jr. et al, 2001 cited in Radomska, 2016).

Transgressing and queering the dominant categorizations and binary distinctions between the living and the nonliving, and human and nonhuman agencies, these memory cells of the community were also considered as peers of community members that would be able to respond to the same and/or a variant of an infectious agent, such as the destructive and lethal effects of the war discourse of biopower, in the future. Besides, transcending the boundaries of anthropocentric and essentialist thinking in art, science, and technology, the community members, along with their material coproductions and associations, were considered as large amounts of “antibodies” specific to these epistemological and ontological toxins, with the aim of inducing immunity.

Curated by Marta de Menezes, seen as a symbiotic ecology, “Acquired Immunity” (2020) was also designed as an exhibition of experimental artworks, which displayed simultaneously in Cultuvamos Cultura in São Luis in Portugal and in the same, dematerialized and digitalized space on Mozilla Hub. The translation of the physical space of exhibitions and artworks into a web platform also aimed at rethinking the materiality of artworks and materiality of living conditions. One of the highlighted questions was whether it would be possible to live and interact with one another and produce creative outcomes in a virtual/real interface. Here immunity was understood as the product of an active computational state that constantly assesses the organism's internal state and the surroundings in which it lives (Cohen, 2007a; Cohen, 2007b cited in Swiatczak and Tauber, 2020).

Acquired Immunity is the immune response to a new environmental challenge, like a virus or an allergen. It is a creative response based on the production of antibodies never before seen in nature.

The virtual environment of the exhibition, The Cultivamos Cultura Garden, was perceived not as a nonliving entity but as a living organism, with different levels of organization at distinct scales: cells, tissues, organs, and systems. At its core, a community of artists–researchers–makers–scientists–activists–residents are seen as “antibodies” that exchange symbiotic associations for commons along with the local community of human and nonhuman members in the largest natural park in Portugal.

Besides, community associations were strengthened through links that reached various populations from diverse locations of the world. Transitioning from one unique activation state to another does not allow definitive delineation of organismal borders. Instead, the immune system acts as gatekeeper that controls the apparent boundary between the organism and its environment (Tauber, 1994; Swiatczak and Tauber, 2020). Thus, the view of immunity as protecting insularity shifts to recognizing its role in establishing and maintaining communal relationships (Skillings, 2016).

Conclusions

Today “[l]ife moves out of the domain of the given into the contingent, into quotation marks, appearing not as a thing-in-itself but as something in the making in discourse and practice” (Helmreich, 2011, p. 674). Although feminist STS emerged out of second-wave feminism, at its core, there is a politically charged critique of sciences and technologies, aimed at unmasking their suppressive effects and investigating the potential for rethinking the hierarchies of knowledge production and patriarchal power structures. If feminist STS has revealed anything, it is that the apparatus of science and technology has been nourished and shaped by its colonial, imperialist, racist, sexist, determinist, and hierarchical legacies. Thinking and acting collectively for commons through bioart can be a biophilosophical practice.

It is worth acknowledging the fact that experimental artistic and hacktivist research associations and outputs can be gradual, few, and ineffective as essential solutions for vital problems at a planetary scale in accelerationist capitalism. However, it is also important to recognize the fact that it is not relevant to get rid of the dominant and correlated associations of epistemological, political, and ontological accounts of biopower in the blink of an eye. Techno-fixes, history tells us, have a tendency of solving some problems and creating new, and in fact, bigger ones in turn. This is why critical feminist response-abilities and acquired immunity of commons, and for commons, is not only about desiring and believing in possessing the values of the biopower elite, but also creating alternative possibilities and futures of and for the forces of multiplicity.

Taken together, the paratactical commoning described in this research offers a feminist lens to bring about new potentials for reflexivity, and by extension, critically informed emancipation in the way we understand planetary health. Paratactical commoning is of broad interest, not only in social sciences and humanities but also for planetary health grounded in systems thinking by unpacking and holding to account the biopolitics of metaphors and narratives that coproduce acquired immunity to COVID-19. Conversely, overlooking the sociopolitical dimension of human–ecology interactions creates potentials for fragile health care systems especially in times of pandemics and other ecological disasters.

Box 1. Author's notes for further contextualization of the presented research

(a) The emphasis is mine.

(b) Yetiskin (2018 ). Paratactical use of algorithmic agencies in artistic practice. Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 16(3), 353–362, DOI: 10.1386/tear.16.3.353_1; Yetiskin (2018 ). Blockchain and Paratactic Media Works, Digital Culture & Audiovisual Challenges: Interdisciplinary Creativity In Arts And Technology Conference, Ionian University, Corfu; Yetiskin (2018 ). Algorithmic Agencies in Artistic Practice: Speculative Design and Alternative Futures. Taboo, Transgression, Transcendence in Art and Science Conference, Mexico City; Yetiskin and Süter (2017). Invisible Motion, 11. Audiovisual Art Festival, (Cur.) Dalila Honorato, Corfu; Yetiskin. (2017). Invisible Motion: Paratactical Curation of Bio Art and Performative Political Imaginaries. Technoetic Arts, 15(2), 203–213, DOI: 10.1386/tear.15.2.203_1

(c) Focusing on the “cacophony” (Yetiskin, 2018 ) of disinformation and public understanding of the pandemic, I co-curated online public seminars entitled, “STS Talks” along with the members of IstanbuLab: Science, Technology and Society Platform in Turkey. I also co-curated a ’21 Amber Network Festival and worked on “Post-Digital Ignorance” in another translocal queer feminist art and technology collective, whose contributors are mainly from Beirut, Istanbul, Izmir, Tehran, Berlin, Shiraz, Casablanca, Khartoum, Baalbek, Bishkek, and Cairo. Finally, I co-organized the 53rd International Conference of Association of Art Critics (AICA), which worked on the theme, “Intellectual Aftermath.” See relevant works of STS Talks in IstanbuLab website, Accessed on May 23, 2022, http://www.stsistanbul.org/category/sts-talks-sts-muhabbetleri/; and for an account of relevant research outputs see, Amber Network Festival (2021), Techno-Utopia and Post-Digital Ignorance, (Cur.) Ekmel Ertan, Ebru Yetişkin, Amirali Ghasemi, Cenkhan Aksoy, Ali Cem Doğan, Youssef El Idrissi, Rajaa Shamam, Mohsen Hazrati, Milad Forouzandeh, Hamza Chamas, Christoph Wachter, and Mathias Jud, https://ambernetworkfestival.org/en

(d) It should be noted that the article has been developed not as a reaction but as a self-reflexive feminist response-ability particularly to the withdrawal of Turkey from Istanbul Convention, which is a human rights treaty of The Council of Europe on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence; the repetitive promotion of a bill, which would legitimize child marriage and statutory rape in Turkey where the legal age of consent is 18; ongoing ecological destruction of the living spaces and letting humans, nonhumans, and more than humans displaced or let die by massive mining and construction projects; the growing poverty, famine, unemployment, “systemic stupidity” (Stiegler, 2015) and “a passion for ignorance” (Salecl, 2020), the use of refugees as unregistered labor, and framing them as “evolving, invasive and infectious species” living/(non)living in a liminal space; the misuse and instrumentalization of the concept of “terrorism offenses” as a pretext to oppress and criminalize dissidents.

(e) The emphasis is mine.

(f) For instance, during the corona crisis, the Turkish Medical Association (TMA), one of the most powerful critical NGOs in Turkey, criticized the Turkish government. It claimed that the Turkish Government was not transparent in its provision of information about the number of infections and deaths. TMA has also stated that the Turkish authorities did not take sufficient measures to prevent the spread of the virus and protect health workers from COVID-19. The officials of TMA condemned the closure of the Turkish Hygiene Institute in the midst of the pandemic, and the reliance instead on private institutions to research and develop the vaccine. They say this closure process, the vaccine development, and much of the pandemic process have been marked by obfuscation and a lack of clarity by the government. They also claimed that it is this lack of clarity that has actually created vaccine hesitancy. As a result, on October 14, 2020, President Erdoğan described the head of the TMA as “a terrorist.” Of all the medical doctors in Turkey, 88% are affiliated to TMA.

(g) For Nguyen (2020) an epistemic bubble can be described as a social epistemic structure in which other, mostly opposing and conflicting, relevant voices have been left out, perhaps accidentally, because members of epistemic bubbles lack exposure to relevant information and arguments. They do not even know what they do not know because they are not interested and willing to become aware of other relevant information and arguments. On the contrary, “an echo chamber emerges as a social epistemic structure from which other relevant voices have been actively excluded and discredited. Members of echo chambers have been brought to systematically distrust all outside sources.” They only know what they can know through gatekeeper(s) within the boundaries of closed circles. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined.

(h) For an account of some emerging feminist solidarity response-abilities, see Krazny (2020, p. 322).

(i) High et al (2020). Bioscientific Imaginaries: Virtual Exhibition, (Cur.) Byron Rich and Paula Burleigh, Incubator Art Lab, Accessed on August 8, 2022, https://incubatorartlab.com/bioscientific-imaginaries-virtual-exhibition/

(j) As part of the collaborative digital art residency, Braiding Friction, the coproduction of the working group emerged also as an outcome of a research project entitled, Biofriction with the goal of generating and facilitating spaces for exchange where artists, curators, theoreticians, and different social collectives, such as activists and educational projects, can collaborate in transdisciplinary experimental proposals that offer practical alternatives to existing problems, such as the rise of essentialist discourses that launch not only a worrying discourse but also policies of marginalization and exclusion.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The author thanks FEMeeting community as each one of them shared care, vision, curiosity, and tolerance that greatly assisted in the development of this ethnographic fieldwork research, although each one of them may not agree with all of the arguments and conclusions of this article. The author also thanks Prof. Vural Özdemir, Prof. Kathy High, Assoc. Prof. Erkan Saka, Marta de Menezes, Atilla Kılınç and Didem Ermiş for their deep insights, generous support, and critical comments that greatly improved the earlier version of the article.

Disclaimer

The views in the article and the conclusions drawn reflect the personal views of the author only, and not necessarily reflect the views of the affiliated institutions and working groups.

Author Disclosure Statement

The author declares there are no conflicting financial interests.

Funding Information

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Abbreviations Used

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