A CHILD FELL ON THE FLOOR

contamination and viral coupling in the curriculum

Abstract

A viral coupling (with HIV) is a composition that tests the mechanisms of temporality of sexual reproduction and social relationality. In this article, we analyze the field that crosses sexuality and degrees of anxiety and panic, exploring the dimensions of contamination within a broader framework of ecological policies. This text is a narrative experiment from trajectories of children living with HIV in schools in which we argue that the imminence of contamination of bodies in the curriculum invites us to think the entanglement between life and death and life and nonlife. Inspired by the debates on biopower, we suggest that the virus is a power figure through which materialisation difference is produced as a metabolic error of the time of reproduction and the projection of the future. Therefore, the experience of these children provides a supplement to the (bio)political considerations of environmental debates. The viral coupling (with HIV) puts existing interlinkages in the curriculum between sexuality and political ecology that has received little credit in the recent debates on the Anthropocene. These ties complicate the ethical imagination of social life by expanding the body beyond the human. They allow us to address how and where the power arrangements of curriculum can be configured by collapsing bodies as separate and hermetically sealed units.