The Queer Contagion: On Sociogenic Epidemics and the Body as Social Mirror

We tend to think of contagion as something to fear, something that seeps through a community and leaves it trembling. But what if trembling is precisely the point? What if the shake, the faint, the cough, or the collective fit is not the sign of weakness, but of a body, many bodies, refusing to hold the weight of the world’s denial any longer?

Sociogenic epidemics have always haunted the margins of science and belief. They arrive where pressure builds and language fails: a factory floor, a girls’ school, a small town on the edge of collapse. One person coughs and another follows. Someone faints and another’s knees buckle. No toxin is found, no virus isolated, yet something is spreading, the unbearable atmosphere of social strain finding its form in flesh. Medicine calls it psychogenic, a kind of mass hysteria. But the term only repeats the violence it tries to describe. These outbreaks occur most often among those without voice, women, queer youth, the working class, colonized communities, those already forced to swallow their discomfort until it ferments. The trembling becomes a kind of speech, a body saying what cannot otherwise be said.

If Judith Butler taught us that the body performs what culture inscribes, then the sociogenic body performs the failure of that inscription. It refuses coherence. It convulses under the weight of imposed order. Each tremor, each symptom, is a gesture of resistance against the demand to appear well adjusted to a sick society. Frantz Fanon once described sociogeny as the way the social world produces illness. For queer and racialized bodies, this is not metaphor. The social enters us through fear, shame, invisibility, or the daily calibration of self to survive. The so-called psychogenic illness is not false; it is the real made visible. It is the social wound returned through the skin.

Queer theory knows something about contagion. For decades, queerness itself was framed as a kind of epidemic, something that spread through proximity, imitation, or desire. The AIDS crisis crystallized that fear, making the queer body a site of both danger and mourning. But if contagion was used to stigmatize us, it also revealed our capacity for affective kinship: the ways we catch each other through care, through touch, through grief shared at the scale of the world. To be moved by another’s suffering, to feel it in your own nerves, that too is contagion. And it’s queer. It resists containment. It leaks across categories, across genders and generations, spreading not through pathology but through recognition.

Today, sociogenic epidemics have migrated online. Young people develop identical tics after hours spent watching others on TikTok. Panic disorders spread through message boards. The body mirrors what it sees, performing distress like a language it suddenly remembers. These viral symptoms are not frivolous. They are modern hysteria’s remix, a choreography of collective overwhelm rendered in the syntax of the algorithm. But perhaps we can read this differently, not as dysfunction but as data. The body is always keeping the archive of its time. It records the vibrations of anxiety, alienation, and longing that pass through the social field. To convulse together, even digitally, is to testify to something real, the impossibility of being fully separate in an era that insists on isolation.

A queer epidemiology might begin here, at the intersection of affect and embodiment. It would study not only how fear spreads, but how care does. It would listen to the shiver, the mimicry, the collective breakdown as a form of chorus. It would stop asking what is wrong with these people and start asking what has happened to them. Contagion then becomes reimagined as kinship. It is how we register one another’s tremors. It is how the social moves through us, undoing the fantasy of the autonomous self. Queerness has always known this, how love, like panic, is catching. How laughter, like grief, can ripple through a room faster than reason.

Perhaps the body is not sick at all. Perhaps it is simply honest.