The social life of viruses: a queer sort of science

A burgeoning microbiology field, sociovirology is the study of how viruses interact with one another and the effects such interactions have on social evolution. Challenging dominant narratives that viruses are individualistic pathogens, sociovirologists explore the social interaction of viruses through the language of cooperation, altruism, and cheating, social concepts with biological definitions. Viruses cannot self-replicate—they must rely on living cells to reproduce—and thus are commonly believed to be biologically nonliving. By focusing on virus-virus interaction and evolution, sociovirologists are displacing reproduction as a chief engine of aliveness and queering biology and the concept of life. I contend that in sociovirological publications, the aliveness of viruses is indexed through sociovirologists’ use of language reserved for the interactions and social behaviors of life-forms alongside viruses’ ability to evolve. This paper illustrates that by attending to social behavior and evolution, sociovirologists are proffering novel approaches to both viruses and the concept of life that displaces individual organism reproduction and vertical inheritance as normative of life with species reproduction and species evolution as normative for viruses even if nonnormative for biological understandings of life. Viruses are alive because, as species, they evolve despite an individual viral particle’s fate.