Covid-19 Conceptualizations: Corona-Monsters as Warners, Revealers, and Explorers
What do these monster-icons and -symbols tell us? While the depictions are necessarily context-dependent, the cultural and cognitive universality of monsters has long been recognized. Monsters appear at times of crises to serve as transversaldisruptors of order. From time immemorial, we have needed monsters to define ourselves against, to teach our children what not to do, to sound warnings about the future, and to dream about the impossible.
In many ways, the ‘corona-monster’ replaces the familiar mythic figures that have always been intimately entangled with human becomings. As figures of an ‘in-between’ nature, these entities function as threatening or apotropaic supernatural forces, operating as bringers of disease, death,
and misfortune, or as protectors against these same hazards. In the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017), the ‘monsters’ of human-induced environmental change are seen as threatening the survival of the shared planetary ecosystem: “Monsters ask us to consider the wonders and terrors of symbiotic entanglement in the Anthropocene [the geological epoch defined by human disturbance of the earth’s ecosystems].” Amabie, for instance—portrayed with a half-human, half-fish body and a beak—reflects the entanglements of symbiotic multispecies ecosystems.
Conceived of as “coronavirus countermeasure”, its animal-human hybridity points to the often ignored and forgotten connections that humans have with nonhuman species. Amabie alludes to the fact that, like the majority of emerging infectious diseases impacting human communities around the world, COVID-19 is zoonotic in nature. Corona-monsters show that the pandemic we are currently facing emerges out of an increasingly dysfunctional relationship between human communities and the broader community of life on earth.
