Abstract:
This article examines the role of pandemics and viruses in cultural perceptions of
Antarctica over the past century. In the popular imagination, Antarctica has often been framed
as a place of purity, refuge, and isolation. In a series of fiction and screen texts from the nineteenth
century to the present, viruses feature prominently. The texts fall into two categories:
narratives in which Antarctica is the sole source of safety in a pandemic-ravaged world and
those in which a virus (or another form of contagion) is discovered within the continent itself
and needs to be contained. Viruses in these texts are not only literal but also metaphorical, taking
the form of any kind of threatening infection, and as such are linked to texts in which Antarctic
purity is discursively connected to racial and gendered exclusivity. Based on this comparison,
the article argues that ideas of containment and contagion can have political connotations
in an Antarctic context, to the extent that they are applied to particular groups of people in
order to position them as “alien” to the Antarctic environment. The authors show that the recent
media construction of Antarctica during COVID-19 needs to be understood against this disturbing
aspect of the Antarctic imaginary, and also that narratives of Antarctic purity are imaginatively
linked to both geopolitical exclusions and the melting of Antarctic ice.
