Aegypti: Gender ideology, feminism and extinction

Abstract

This article raises the connections between the object “gender ideology”, technoscience and sex and gender technologies in the recent zika epidemic. In order to do so, it takes Colombia, Puerto Rico and Brazil as examples. In this way, it articulates the co-production of the links between feminism and extinction in the Wolbachia bacterium and its potential to intervene the very substance of life by undoing the sexual difference and feminizing the aegypti. Thus, a whole field for this meaning is established, that articulates the sciences of life, capitalism, zika, female mosquitoes and gender ideology, a field in which women occupy the place of eternal debtors in a political economy of promise. In this configuration, zika’s neurotropism threatens the future of nations and emerging economies, and the Wolbachia appears as a savior and destroyer at the same time.