A PANTHEOLOGY OF PANDEMIC: SEX, RACE, NATURE, AND THE VIRUS

ABSTRACT

Rubenstein explores some of the recent, theologically retributive appeals to nature within early, informal, literary responses to the COVID-19 outbreak in the US. Depending on whom you ask, the disaster we've come to encapsulate as COVID-19 is either godly or natural retribution for our manifold sins against "nature." According to American punitheology, ecology is just as much a sin against nature as are women's ordination, masturbation, and LGBTQIAness. Yes, along with the anti-racists, the feminists, and the queers, modern-day vegans, composters, and water protectors are turning the nation into a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah. Under the jurisdiction of the pantheological mythology, the imperative can be neither war nor atonement nor sacrifice, since each of these presumes an externa], monotheistically modeled, arbiter. Rather, within the stubborn immanence of a pantheological "nature," the imperative can only be responsible cohabitation.