THE PANDEMIC IMAGINERIE: Infectious Bodies and Military‐Police Theater in Australia

Abstract

When pathogens and their movement between people cannot be seen, we imagine them. That imagined menagerie—imaginerie—of infection then becomes associated with marginal others whose bodies and actions become popularly conflated with disease and its transmission. This essay explores how methods of imagining and managing the COVID‐19 pandemic in Australia echoed historical scripts for policing borders and containing the bodies of outsiders deemed threats to the national body.