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Andrea Kitta, "The Kiss of Death: Contagion, Contamination, and Folklore" (Utah State UP, 2019)
01:09:41
Disease is a social issue and not just a medical one...
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
Go beyond the verses and achieve a deeper understanding of Scripture with the Rebind Study Bible App. An audio experience of the Bible interwoven with expert commentary. The Rebind Study Bible App reads Scripture to you, enriching your comprehension with insights from the world renowned New International commentary on the Old and the New Testament in an accessible podcast episode format.
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Tim Thurston
Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew chapter 6 each day will have its troubles, but by God's grace they can be survived.
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Marshall Poe
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- [01:02]
Andrea Kida
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Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do to day. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that fill out the form and we can talk.
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Tim Thurston
Hello and welcome to New Books and Folklore, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. I'm Tim Thurston, one of the co hosts of the channel. And today I spoke with Professor Andrea Kida of East Carolina University about her new book, the Kiss of Contagion, Contamination and Folklore, recently published with Utah State University Press. This book examines a variety of issues ranging from patient zero narratives to. To popular culture's representations of zombies and vampires, to ideas about the safety and the effects of the HPV vaccine. It was a really fascinating conversation. I learned a tremendous amount, and even though it's a little bit longer than the normal podcast, I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I did. Thanks very much. Hello and welcome to New Books and Folklore, a podcast channel of the New Books Network. I'm your co host, Tim Thurston, and today I'm joined by Andrea Kida, who is associate professor of folklore at East Carolina University. Andrea, welcome to the podcast.
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Andrea Kida
Thanks so much for having me.
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Tim Thurston
Today we're discussing your new book, the Kiss of Death, Contagion, Contamination and Folklore, recently published with Utah State University Press. But before we get to the book itself, I was wondering if you would. If we could start a little bit personal. Folklorists. Folklorists always have the most interesting stories about how they came to the discipline. And I was just wondering, I just have to know, what's your folklore origin story?
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Andrea Kida
Oh, that's a good one. So I started out as a history major. That's what I did my undergrad in. And I really enjoyed history. I loved history. But I would always get sort of irritated of how oral history was often used where it was sort of used to collaborate what people already knew instead of coming up with new information. And that really bothered me. So I had to. I had to kind of figure out what else I was going to do. So I love to tell my students now if they make mistakes in grad school, that's okay. I quit a grad program where I was fully funded, which is very horrifying to think of now. So I started out in a history MA and I realized pretty quickly, I'm like, no, this is not what I want to do. I have this. This interest in these other stories. So I started taking some extra classes, and I had a TA for cultural anthropology class who said, you know, you should do folklore. And I was sort of like, what's that? I don't even know. Like, that's a thing I can do. So I started, like, immediately went Home and started looking into it. And I think I started my applications that day. So I was like, yes, this is it. This is exactly what I've been looking for. This puts everything that I'm interested in together, because I was sort of interested in the things, too, that sort of historians sort of brushed off. So I was interested in conspiracy theories and belief and, you know, sort of all of these other areas that folklorists love to talk about and they're really passionate about. But I felt like a lot of other disciplines just sort of ignored.
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Tim Thurston
And so that was the beginning. And then. And so you did your. Am I right that you did your graduate work at Munn Memorial?
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Andrea Kida
Yeah, I did. Yeah. I did my. My MA at Western Kentucky and then my PhD at Memorial.
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Tim Thurston
Okay, excellent. So across your career, you've written on a number of different topics, but they all. But health in particular seems to be something that's been really central to your works. This is your second book, as I believe, right?
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Andrea Kida
Yes, it is.
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Tim Thurston
And your first was on vaccinations and public concern in history, and now this book on contagion and contamination. So how did this sort of health focus come to be for you?
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Andrea Kida
You know, it was something. When I got into folklore, I realized that it was the thing I was the most interested in when I started looking at all the things I could study. And it was sort of both health and belief. And the more I looked into it, the more I thought, this is the core of what I'm trying to do, is I'm trying to figure out why people do what they do. I try to figure out how they make those decisions, what influences those decisions. And I thought that was so fascinating when it came to medicine, because there's so much evidence. And I was. I was just sort of blown away about how many times you could tell someone the facts. And that didn't make a difference at all in that. What choices they would make. And it was just. It was so interesting to hear that. And I also secondarily, too, had. I was. I was mad on a lot of levels because I saw the way that sort of standards or sort of official medicine treats people. And that made me really angry of how they really. It was so paternalistic, and it was so, you know, looking down on people. And I kept thinking like, this is why people choose folk medicine or they choose alternative medicine is because there's. There's so much conflict here in this space, and there's so much issues with authority and power. And I just. That just absolutely fascinated me because to Me, it was so obvious why people would choose alternative medicine or folk medicine or vernacular medicine, whatever you want to call it, over sort of the official medicine that we see in hospitals and those kind of things. So it's been interesting, too, to see how medicine has responded to that as a discipline and as a professionalization process of how much cultural information do they include or exclude and how important does that become? So, yeah, that was kind of all the stuff I was interested in trying to figure out why this, like, why what threads bring all these things together and how do people make decisions that are honestly very important decisions, and how do they make conflicting information work in their head? And that's kind of how I wound up here.
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Tim Thurston
It's so interesting and so important, I feel, because, I mean, one of the things I've been noticing recently is there's been this real sort of emphasis on getting data right and putting the facts out there. But I feel like. I feel like the public health people also probably need to get their storytelling right as well.
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Andrea Kida
Absolutely. Yeah. Because that storytelling is actually what's more convincing to individuals. I just got back from a vaccine conference at UCLA and we were talking about this and how it doesn't like, the facts kind of don't matter. And it's so funny because we are very much, especially with the area of fake news where we're thinking of facts and talking about how to make facts matter more. And it's. It's because in part, they've never really mattered. It's been that the story about. We tell about those facts is what matters. So I talk about this with scientists all the time and say, like, no, you know, you can have all the best information and it can be, you know, beautifully put together and in a wonderful package, but unless there's a narrative behind it, it's not going to work. So you have to have that storytelling there, I think.
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Tim Thurston
I mean, it makes so much sense. And I think you actually touch on it in the book how sort of you bring it out of the health frame and into sort of a contemporary political frame. And I had a point in reading it. I was thinking, yes, there are certain parts of society where, unencumbered by facts, they can just make up stories. And it works really well. And the people who have a lot of facts to work with and data to work with sometimes really struggle in that regard.
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Andrea Kida
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that is, in part, it's missing in their training in a lot of different places that they're not taught about this importance of how to communicate they're taught things like, okay, you know, this is how you get a medical history, or this is how you bring up this topic. But they're not really taught about how to tell their own stories. They're seen as this removed, abstract thing that is not really involved in the healthcare. When so many people tell me, I trust my doctor, and it's like, well, why do you trust your doctor? Well, I just get this impression from them. Like, I just. I can tell they're sincere or because they told me this story. So sometimes it's even getting that trust is just depends on how the physician communicates with the patient. And they're missing the mark so much so often on that. When it's really the things that, you know, it's the little things that really kind of connect them with their patient.
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Tim Thurston
Absolutely. Now, so from health more broadly into this book in particular, how did this book come to be sort of this. This attention to contagion and contamination in folklore?
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Andrea Kida
So it's kind of funny. I was kind of finishing up my. My tenure packet and thinking about what was next, and I looked at all of the things that I was doing, presentations on all these little things that. These topics that sort of really got me excited and got me interested, and I thought, oh, my gosh, these are all over the place. I was like, these are. These don't make any sense at all if you're. You're looking at, like, a research trajectory or whatever you want to call it. But then I was sat there, I was like, no, there is a common theme. And that common theme, it took me a while to figure out, was contagion and contamination. So I thought, okay, that's why I'm interested in all of these things that don't seem to match up. It's not only just the belief and the medicine aspects of these things, it's also that there's that sort of underlying idea of contagion and contamination and how we use those words and. And how different that is than how medicine uses them or even other disciplines use them compared to how this sort of, you know, the lay public uses these kind of terms. So I started thinking more and more about, like, how do we talk about this? And. And I was really getting pretty worked up about, especially the MMR autism debate, because there were so many people who kept talking about, like, how it was sort of weird the way they were talking around it. They weren't directly saying this, but they're sort of talking around this idea that they would rather have a child that d than A child with autism. And that really bothered me because that was not necessarily the overt message, but it was definitely there. It was definitely in the context of what they were saying. And that was really upsetting to me because, you know, for obvious reasons, that's a terrible thing to say. So I just sat down and I started thinking, like, my gosh, what are people. What are some of the other things that we're silently coding and not even realizing it or we're saying a lot more than what we think we're saying when we talk about this stuff. And a lot of it was about contagion and contamination and what we thought about it and what we. We kind of experience in this idea that things that are contagious or contaminated, that really aren't contagious or contaminated, but we still treat them like they actually are.
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Tim Thurston
That's. I mean, it's. It's really interesting because when. When you look at the book, I. You definitely sort of. There. There is that sort of idea that this is a whole bunch of different topics, but also that contagion and contamination do really hold everything together as these sort of theoretical topics. But so. So you just said, you know, thinking about the definitions and what we mean by contagion and contamination, and this is something that you're sort of doing in the introduction itself is. I mean, as. Among many other things, the introduction covers a tremendous amount of theoretical ground. But so. So how. How are we meant to think about contagion and contamination? Or from. From the perspective of this book, how are you. How are you helping us think about these terms?
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Andrea Kida
You know, I really want them to be thought of socially and. But I also want people to think about the implications that has. Especially for people who might be considered by our, you know, our sort of vague standards of contagion and contaminated. You know, how does that affect the people that we're actually talking about? Because I think a lot of times the stories we tell and the words we use, we don't always think about sort of the larger implications of those things or the larger implications of those narratives. One place this really bothers me, I think the most, is talking about military sort of narrative and this sort of, like, military aspect of things like vaccines and things like cancer and other conditions where people talk about, like, losing battles or, you know, that kind of stuff. I just. To me, that's such a problematic narrative because when we talk about it in those terms, we make it sound like it's something that if they just tried harder, they could overcome. And that really bothers me. It bothers me in disability studies. It bothers me. And you know, all the sort of larger health context of, you know, maybe us just thinking a little bit more about when we say that kind of stuff, it's probably not something that we're necessarily aware of. And, you know, I know I say things all the time that I don't think about the larger implications of, but, you know, maybe we should think about those things and maybe we should start to contemplate, okay, well, what does it mean if I say, you know, I believe that MMR causes autism, so I'm not giving my child that shot? What are the larger implication of that? So I think sometimes that's what we kind of forget about in these narratives. Is that where we are talking about people? Right. And I, as folklorists, we should be hyper aware of that. If any other field can't, you know, is going to be aware of, of how involved we are with our, our. The people we interview and the people we talk to, it should be us.
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Tim Thurston
Absolutely. And, and I mean, I think, I think, I think that's a great point. Sort of paying attention to the, the language and the metaphors that we accept in our discourse.
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Andrea Kida
Right.
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Tim Thurston
When we talk about these situations. That's a really interesting point. So thinking about this introduction, because, I mean, other parts of the introduction, you're talking about the stigmatized vernacular and tellability, which comes up a little bit later as well, and folklore and popular culture. How do all of these sort of come together for you? Like sort of the issues of. So there's contagion and contamination, there's folklore and popular culture and, and, and issues of tellability and stigma. Like how, how do these. This is. These are a lot of different sort of strains of, of folklore study in some ways, but in other ways they're. They're natural partners. How do you see that working out?
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Andrea Kida
So I think it works out so beautifully sometimes, especially on the Internet, so kind of talking about the medium as well. But it's so interesting to see how a topic becomes tellable when we start talking about it. So it's this sort of weird vicious circle of you can't talk about it, but you're supposed to talk about it. And that talking about it's the only way to make it something that we can actually have a discourse about and start to destigmatize, but we're not supposed to talk about it. So that makes it really complicated. So I love this that so many people, especially in different forums online and all these different Social media platforms are starting to talk out about things that maybe they wouldn't have talked about before. And in part because I think they do feel protected in some ways by the, you know, the anonymity of the Internet. They can put something out there, and it's just out there, and it's okay. They're not saying it to another person directly and they can't see the expression on their face all the time, but it resonates with other people, and maybe not people in their immediate community, but in their larger community. And I find that really interesting to see how especially something like the destigmatization of something like mental illness is really happening completely on the Internet. And it's all these people saying, hey, listen, you know, I have this. This is what it's really like, all of this stuff. Maybe you should think about it when you're, you know, saying, when you're using different words or you're talking about different phrases, or when you're, you're just conception of, or, sorry, your perception of what people are like. This, this is me as an individual. And, and hey, look, I'm not alone. All these other people like this post or they, you know, are reblogging or reposting and, and, you know, this, this becomes this larger story about tellability. And finding a place to be able to tell those stories is so important because I think a lot of times too, this, this does influence medicine. Diane Goldstein wrote about this with menopause, where all these women on the Internet were talking about their conditions and saying, like, hey, listen, here's all these symptoms of menopause that aren't being recognized. Let's start giving those, like, we recognize them, we know this, we're telling each other. Let's start telling other people about it. And I think when you start to move that into that, you have that small group of people that you can tell, and then you sort of have the larger world that you can tell. And when those stories get out there, that changes the tellability, it changes the notion of authority. It changes all of these different things. And fundamentally, for the positive, for the most part, I think for most people in these communities, it's not always 100% positive, but I think in general, they do seem to get a benefit out of this ability to talk to other people about their conditions and have them. I mean, sometimes that's all we want is somebody else to say, yes, I understand you. I'm going through the same thing. And that's definitely happening, especially in when it comes to issues related to health.
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Tim Thurston
That's really interesting. But at the same time, I think you. You also say that not every story needs to be told and not every sort of thing needs to get sort of preserved or. Or needs to be sustained.
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Andrea Kida
Right? Absolutely. And that's kind of the other side of it, is that some stories shouldn't be told or they. They come at too high of a cost to the teller. And that's something we have to think about. Also. No one owes us their story. Right. That's. That's a big part of this as well, is. Is thinking about, is it, what's the cost? But also that some stories, you know what, they don't need to be retold. They're already part of the dominant narrative, that we don't need to hear about them anymore. We need to hear other people's stories. So sometimes those stories, you know, they keep getting repeated, and they keep getting repeated. And I think that folklorists like to at least. We like to at least think that we're going out there after the marginalized voices, but we're still making a choice. And that choice is based on a lot of different things, including things like our own personal background and race and our own experiences. So sometimes I think we don't intentionally give voice to the wrong people. I don't want to say the wrong people. There's no wrong people to give a voice to. Well, maybe there are some, but there's a few. But for the most part, we think we're giving our voice to, or we're trying to help people get their own voice. But maybe we need to think about it in different terms because we're still thinking within our own communities to some extent. We can never get away from that when it comes to ethnography. Always going to be a part of that situation, and that includes the decisions we make of who to study and who not to study. So by choosing to study one group, we're choosing not to study a whole bunch of other people. And that's definitely a part of this. This decision that we have to make and that we need to make very thoughtfully.
- [21:34]
Marshall Poe
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Tim Thurston
That's a really excellent point. I feel like we could. We could keep pushing on this for the entire hour, but I don't want to take up too much of your time with that alone because there's so much other interesting stuff to cover. But I think I'll try to make an interesting segue here. Now that I'm being very transparent about the method. The question of marginality sort of comes out right in the beginning of sort of the next chapter of sort of chapter two, where you're talking about sort of stories of immigration and Patient Zero. Can.
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Marshall Poe
Can.
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Tim Thurston
Can you sort of introduce the listeners a little bit to sort of how these. How these stories are working in sort of that socializing, the idea of contagion?
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Andrea Kida
Sure. So this is so interesting to me because before I really even started writing this book, I thought of Patient Zero as being a scientific concept. I did not realize how vague it is. So a lot of times Patient Zero is defined as the first known person to have a particular illness, But a lot of times it's just the first person that the one particular individual has found. And a lot of times they find that person because they're looking in places that are what they. They anticipate culturally they will be. So that's really problematic because then that leads to more further stigmatization because of that. So if you're already going into, like, an Ebola epidemic and you're like, okay, well, you know, obviously I have to go to Africa. Okay, well, if we're having Ebola epidemic in the US and you're saying we have to go to Africa, you're probably not incorrect. But if we're doing something like along the lines of, oh, we're having a measles epidemic, and what A lot of people did was, okay, great. We should look at these communities that don't vaccinate, like the Amish. It's like, no, actually that's not the way to do this. Measles doesn't work like that. So we need to look at the. The larger community and all of the people who might not be vaccinating and these sort of things. So Patient Zero is this very vague concept that is very, very culturally motivated. And if we start to look at who Patient Zero has been, both historically and currently, it really does fit into people's stereotypes about who it should be instead of who it might actually be. And honestly, there's no real benefit to knowing exactly who the first person was. The first community. Yes, because you're looking at spread, but even then that's not that important. You need to know where else it's spread. So it doesn't really matter who is first, it just matters where it is. So it's so interesting that we have to have that narrative, though, and that Patient Zero as a person and a character. I don't know, it's sort of a folk anti hero, I guess. And knowing who they are and what they did becomes so important to us because it's the way we avoid the thing happening to us. So if we can look at Patient Zero and say, like, okay, well, they did this thing and this thing and they're this type of person, well, I'm not those things, so I'm safe. And I think we forget that that's a really problematic idea. Yes, it makes us feel better, but then it really stigmatizes large groups of people because of, you know, going into that situation with an. Already with a cultural bias.
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Tim Thurston
Absolutely. And I think this comes out really well in the chapter, especially as you are sort of. I mean, you use so many different examples from Typhoid Mary all the way into sort of the. What is it, the H1N1 scares and SARS. I mean, there are so many different examples that get used, and it really comes across nicely. The next chapter, though, takes us to a very different idea of contagion or. Or of these issues. Looking at Slender man and Slender Sickness and bullying, which is something that I had not actually heard of. So can you give us a brief introduction to Slender Man, Slender Sickness, and how these help us to understand the contagion argument that you're building here?
- [26:52]
Andrea Kida
Sure, absolutely. So I got interested. I had written another article on Slender man and I had come across this concept of Slender Sickness, and that was really fascinating to me. Because it was a list of symptoms. And I thought, oh, well, that's interesting. Is this, you know, sort of a, you know, anthropologist and other public health people tend to call them cultural bound syndromes. And I was thinking, oh, this is interesting, maybe this is like a culture bound syndrome. And, and you know, what are these kids describing? Because it was mostly teenagers that were kind of engaging in this. And I also love that they had a quiz online that you can take to see if you have it, which I thought was pretty funny. So I had to look at this because I was like, oh, wow, a list of symptom. Let's figure out what they're talking about. And when I sat down and started comparing the list of symptoms, I thought, oh my gosh, these are the symptoms of bullying. This is almost an identical list to the symptoms that people would talk about when they were talking about is your child being bullied. It was nearly identical. There's only a couple of things that didn't fit or that I sort of was like, oh, well, maybe that could fit, but maybe it couldn't. It depends on your definition. So I found that really fascinating to think about that as a way of talking about bullying in this way that the kids, I keep saying the kids a lot of different people. But Slenderman does tend to be a little more heavily in the adolescent area. But it was a way for the people who are experiencing bullying to talk about bullying without using the word bullying. And I thought that was really, really interesting for them to kind of talk about the Slender sickness idea, but also that they were, were kind of seeing this as contagious. They were seeing that that bullying was something that affected large groups of people. It wasn't just something that one bully did to another person. It spread out through the community. So even if you weren't the person being bullied, it still affected you in a lot of different ways. So it kind of reminded me both of the, the way that we pretend to perceive the supernatural as being contagious, or if we pay too much attention to it, it's going to kind of keep coming after us. If we talk about it too much, it will find us in that sort of way too, with bullying, that there's this fear not only with that, but then, you know, kind of taking it to the next level is suicide. And there's a concept known as suicide contagion, where the more suicide happens in a community, the more people, you know, try to die by suicide, which is really interesting too, that it starts to be seen as a, an option I guess, or maybe previously it was not seen as an option. So that is a really interesting idea that these things that are not. I mean, they are medical in some ways, especially if you look at some of the symptoms. They are. They're physical symptoms to bullying. So they are medical, but also that they are spiritual and they are. You know, they're contagious on a lot of different levels. So it's really interesting to see how people talk about that. And I sort of looked at. Also looked at fan fiction in Slender man and how a lot of people were using that as a way of kind of making themselves feel better. So they were also using Slender man not only to kind of show the face of bullying, which, of course, you know, Slenderman doesn't have a face, so that's really apt there. But also to kind of use him as a character who destroys their bullies for them, which is really fascinating to see. You know, that they're. They're kind of also taking that. That concept and. And turning it on its head and using Slender man as a way to. A way of. Sort of cathartic way of. Of destroying their bullying, what, Their bullies, without doing anything physical to them.
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Tim Thurston
It's really interesting. So. So do you think there's this sort of maybe a link to anthropological ideas of sort of sympathetic magic where sort of the. The.
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Andrea Kida
Yeah, I think so, for sure. That's. It's really interesting to think about how. Yeah, the notion of sympathetic magic is pretty important in all of this because that. That sort of light, curing like idea. A lot of belief about Slender man is that he is a Topa or Gregor or sort of all these other things that we've thought him into being. So if we can think him into being in one way, maybe we can do it in other ways as well. Right. So it becomes kind of contagious in that way. But that. When we can also, to some extent, control him because we've made him up. Right. So we can make up his weaknesses. We can make up all those things, which makes it even more fascinating that Slender man doesn't have weaknesses. There is no way to destroy Slender Man. There's no sort of universally accepted way of solving this problem of Slender man, which makes it even more interesting that then he's linked with things like bullying and suicide.
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Tim Thurston
It's really fascinating. But then there's this one example that gets used with this native community. Was it Pineapple?
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Andrea Kida
Pine Ridge.
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Tim Thurston
Yeah, Pine Ridge. Can you talk a little bit about that and sort of how does that sort of Expand from. Or expand our thoughts. Because it's not. It's. It's a slightly different situation, right?
- [32:16]
Andrea Kida
Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of the things I read about Pine Ridge were how the media was portraying them and how they, at least their interviews were being used by the media. Because, you know, honestly, going into a Native community would have required a lot more fieldwork and permissions and a lot of those things. Not that I didn't want to talk to people, but it was one of those things where I was really interested in how they're being portrayed and wondering how they. They kind of felt like that. But there was a huge article came out that sort of linked Slenderman to suicide contagion in a specific region, and it was also linking it to bullying. And I thought, wow, this is really fascinating that this is happening in this Native community and they're using. Or at least they. The young adults in that community are using Slender man as sort of a way of talking about this. So they're kind of combining in some ways a sort of concept of medicine and of spirituality into a form that they're calling Slenderman, even though they've had sort of more traditional versions of that in the past. And seeing that kind of combination of older traditions and newer Internet folklore being combined by the young people in this community was really fascinating to see the, you know, the kind of talking about it in that way. But it also, you know, really got to that larger issue of. Of cyberbullying and of bullying and of, you know, sort of the intergenerational trauma that a lot of these. These kids were facing and. And how high the. The rates of suicide were there. And it was. It was just fascinating to kind of see this come out when all of the other stuff about Slender man was out and seeing how this was a different sort of interpret. But then I was also sort of bothered by the way that, you know, there was so much push of. Of we need to tie this to a traditional Native American spirit. And, you know, there. There certainly is some connections, but it's sort of also. That's a much more complicated sort of topic to actually do that. But so many people really wanted to push that because that was. That fit into their concept of. Of, you know, what. How. What they think Native Americans are.
- [34:30]
Tim Thurston
Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah, that sort of almost Orientalist, for lack of a better term, sort of assumption. Very interesting. So going from sort of this more sort of vernacular Internet phenomenon, chapter four turns its focus to sort of full on pop culture with. With your attention to vampires and zombies as tropes for a physical and moral comp. Contamination. That's the word for that. That help us sort of think about our presence. Can. Can you talk a little bit about how popular culture is using these. These characters to do different sorts of social sort of.
- [35:21]
Andrea Kida
Yeah, absolutely. So I always found vampires and zombies to be just fascinating because they. They come up so often and they're sort of a cycle that just is never ending. Right. You'll see the sort of rise in vampire zombies for a while and then they'll. They'll kind of fade to the background and then they're back up again. But we're never really without those two things. There's always going to be something out there about vampires and zombies and, you know, to. To sometimes serious, sometimes funny, but there's always that narrative out there and really fascinated by how much of those stories are directly about contagion and contamination. They're about, you know, a zombie virus or they're, you know, they're so directly related in so many different ways. And we've used this as such a great metaphor for so many different things, especially for the change in. In people and this. This idea that it's someone that looks like a loved one but is no longer that person. So it becomes that. That other and such an interesting way, but in a very scary way too, because it. It's an other that looks just like the person that we knew. So I really thought that was really fascinating. But there's so much there to talk about and it's such a flexible metaphor for so many different things and cultures. So you see, you know, vampires and zombies representing, you know, the. The worst in humans or, you know, actual viruses or anything to, you know, like, let's talk about, you know, paranormal romance and vampires, which is just fascinating too, where you have the. These sort of. It's almost you always a male vampire and a female almost always who fall madly in love and then she has to get him accepted by the community in some sort of way. So instead of that. That older sort of trope of, you know, the. The othering vampire coming and stealing away your white women, now, you know, your. Your women are saying like, hey guys, let's. Let's accept the vampire into our culture. So it's such a flip of sort of the traditional vampire narrative, which. Which really kind of make it. It makes it interesting and fun, but it also shows you how are. Because they're. They're talking about a totally different. They completely changed the narrative. Instead of the, You Know, the white woman being captured away. Now she is the one that's. It's empowered and is, you know, feel strongly. She is the one who offers forgiveness and, you know, sort of salvation for the vampire by forgiving him. So she takes a much more empowered role, but also is the sort of bridge between the other and, you know, people and their own communities. So it's really such an interesting narrative to watch, kind of how it's flipped.
- [38:04]
Tim Thurston
So much, but at the same time, the onus is still on the female characters.
- [38:10]
Andrea Kida
Yes, absolutely. Yeah, she's got to fix everything.
- [38:16]
Tim Thurston
I mean, it's nice to see she has that power, but it's also, I don't know, it seems a little unfair to put all that burden on her.
- [38:22]
Andrea Kida
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it really is. But I also love too that there's less of that. That sort of why did she embrace the dark, you know, kind of thing, and more of a, you know, like this is, you know, this is being normalized in some sort of way of. Of, you know, that women are going to marry people outside of their small social group. So that's kind of interesting too. But yeah, she's still got to do.
- [38:48]
Tim Thurston
All the work, I guess. You can't change everything all at once.
- [38:53]
Andrea Kida
No, you can't fix all the problems yet. So.
- [38:57]
Tim Thurston
So does it become easier, though, to talk about sort of this interesting correlation of supernatural and moral contagion when these problems are not stories about us or about us humans?
- [39:12]
Andrea Kida
Absolutely. And that's kind of what I love about the. The. The genre of both horror and sci fi is that's a place where we've always explored these ideas without actually directly talking about them. So if you sort of like look at the history of. Of any kind of movie that's like a sci fi or horror movie, they talk so much about what's happening right then and there in culture. And it's a way of us talking about it and kind of playing with those ideas and those fears without actually directly talking about them. So, you know, we can say something like, you know, I'm really worried about, you know, vampires and zombies, when what we're really saying is I'm really worried about immigrants. Immigrants, right. We're worried about these other people coming in. And it gives us a place to talk about that in a way that's like, well, we're not talking about that. We're talking about this other thing. So I think that's a really important space for us to process and think about this stuff. And I was actually just talking to Somebody about this yesterday where we don't realize how much these things are influenced by science. So sci fi and horror always have a sort of what's happening in science element to them. So we're talking about, you know, oh, I'm afraid of, of zombies, but we're talking about, I'm afraid of viruses. H1N1 freaked me out. And I'm worried that my kid's gonna get measles because there's all these people out there not vaccinating. So this gives us a kind of different way of talking about that. And that's really important because it does reflect our culture in our society, but it also reflects what's, what's actually happening in science. And I think that's really fascinating.
- [40:46]
Tim Thurston
Absolutely. But I, I was just thinking when reading, when reading the chapter about sort of the, the plethora of shows and films that seem to have a b. A bad guy, an antagonist. That's the right word. Who seems to be, who. Who's trying to be too draconian about climate, for example, is. I feel like there are several shows that do that now and sort of this anxiety about the climate, but also about how we go about, about trying to do it.
- [41:17]
Andrea Kida
Absolutely. I saw a great horror short that was, it was a sort of Lovecraftian kind of thing where the reason why Cthulhu comes back is because the polar caps are melting. So I thought, wow, what a great combination of our fear about, you know, what's happening climate change wise. But, you know, linking it to this sort of older notion of horror.
- [41:40]
Tim Thurston
That's incredible.
- [41:41]
Andrea Kida
Yeah.
- [41:42]
Tim Thurston
Can you maybe, can you maybe bring out one example from the zombie vampire oeuvre to sort of demonstrate some of these ideas that you've developed?
- [41:56]
Andrea Kida
Oh, gosh, now I'm trying to think of one. This is always the hard part. Trying to actually remember what I've written is also very difficult because it feels like it's so long ago now.
- [42:09]
Tim Thurston
Fair enough. I mean, it takes time to get these published.
- [42:12]
Andrea Kida
Yeah, it really does. I feel like I started this a very long time ago. I think probably if we're talking like from a pop culture standpoint, there's this, this beautiful moment in True Blood that's in every single episode because it's in the opening credits where they go past a sort of light up sign that says God hates Fang. And like, that's just such an obvious callback to other things that people have said that God hates. And it's just, it's so in your face in that moment that it's it's just such an incredible cultural moment because it kind of gives you that parallel of, you know, the way people are treating vampires in this show is the way that we perhaps treated people who are, you know, who were gay in the past. And this is, you know, this is such an interesting cultural moment to talk about. Okay, well, who then is going to be stigmatized next? Who are we going to be afraid of next? If we get more accepting of this, then what does that mean that's going to come up next? And that's such an interesting sort of moment to look at and just to think about. Even in the first episode of that show, they did a great job of really playing with stereotypes about who you thought would be the vampire. So you have this sort of guy that looks sort of stereotypically goth coming into at a convenience store and he looks what we perceive to be as a vampire. And then we learn pretty quickly that it's actually the guy behind the counter who looks like a sort of stereotypical redneck character is the actual vampire in this situation. So it really kind of plays with our ideas of who this story is going to be about.
- [43:53]
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- [44:41]
Tim Thurston
Oh, that's great. You know, and that that particular example is perhaps a little bit apartment because in the next chapter sort of sexual orientation comes up again. Part, but is only part of this larger discussion of. Of questions of HPV and the HPV vaccine.
- [45:02]
Andrea Kida
Yes.
- [45:04]
Tim Thurston
Can you tell us a little bit about sort of the legends and rumors surrounding the HPV vaccine and how the sort of the discussion of sort of how the choice of vaccination or non vaccination is perceived in different communities?
- [45:28]
Andrea Kida
Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot of different rumors about The HPV vaccine and HPV in general, it's a really complicated sort of illness or virus, I should say, because it's sexually transmitted technically. So it's one of those things that you get it through sexual transmission. So it's technically a sexually transmitted disease. However, almost everybody has it, so it's sort of widespread, but, you know, only certain strains cause cancer. And it's sort of this weird thing because of that. So it's something that almost everybody has, but we don't want to talk about it because it's sexually related. So that makes it really complicated to kind of have these discussions about it. And it's interesting too, how because of the way that they've chosen to get the vaccine out there, we. We tend to think of it as a female problem when it actually isn't solely a female problem. And for some reason they made the choice to start vaccinating women before instead of women and men, which is how they should have done it all along. They should have been vaccinating everybody. But for some reason they chose to focus on women. And they've really made it this issue that it's become stigmatizing for women. And in part because there's this idea that. That for a while that people felt that this was going to make women more promiscuous. And especially because we give the shot so young, we give it to usually about 12 is the oldest age, we really want to give this shot. We want to do it even earlier if we can. There was this idea that somehow it was going to make it like it was going to make young girls more promiscuous, because I was like, yes, that's exactly what's stopping young women from being promiscuous is the fear of maybe eventually getting cervical cancer. That's obviously not what's going to happen. But it was so interesting to see how many people out there were talking about this and saying, like, hey, you know, I think this is going to make. Make women more promiscuous. Of course it's not. That's not what this is going to do. So it actually led to all of these studies where people went out to prove that the HPV vaccine does not cause promiscuity. There's nothing in the ingredients that causes promiscuity. Which was kind of mind blowing to me because I sat there and watched this and watched this happen and, you know, medical articles being published. And like, a part of me was like, this the dumbest thing I've ever seen. And also I was very Very jealous, because why didn't I think of this and apply for a grant and get a whole bunch of money for it? But I was a little upset with myself for that. But anyway. But then I realized how useful it was because then when you search for things like promiscuity and hpv, the first thing that comes up is all of these medical articles about how it doesn't cause promiscuity. So that was kind of a genius idea in the long run. But there's also to. This idea is because we decided not to give that vaccine to young, we ended up also causing a secondary issue of them thinking that it meant something specific if a doctor offered it. So when we started to get it to men as well, or young men as well, there became this idea that somehow that meant something about the boys who are getting it. And it became a rumor that this was linked to thinking that. That your son was gay. And that's why they were suggesting the vaccine, which is ridiculous, because it's for herd immunity, because the HPV causes more cancers than just cervical. It causes a lot of other types of cancers. So there's a lot of reasons to get this vaccine for everyone. But this sort of rumor started that. No, it was because your son was perceived as being gay. And I just thought, like, wow, that is so interesting and kind of ridiculous and crazy. But I first heard about it because I had, you know, one of my cousins called and said, hey, you know, I. They're suggesting this vaccine for my child. How do they know that he's gay? I was like, what do you mean, how do they know he's gay? I had not even heard of this. And so I realized that there was a sort of rumor going around that this was, you know, part of the belief system that was happening. And it wasn't even that people were upset about it. They just wanted to know, like, what were the signs? Like, how can I tell when my child is 6 if he is going to be gay or not? And that was just fascinating to kind of hear people be sort of obsessed with that knowledge or wanting to know that at that age. So it was really kind of interesting to see how people were perceiving this in so many different ways and how they were using especially humor to talk about this.
- [50:09]
Tim Thurston
Yeah, and I mean, the humor point is really interesting to me because there was sort of. I mean, the, the. Perhaps the. The most. The clearest examples in my mind were around the. Were around sort of the, the Bachman affair that you mentioned where, where she had said that that she had heard something about the HPV vaccine. And then, then people like Stephen Colbert came out and were sort of being. Doing their satirical thing, sort of mocking people who have that belief. And you link that also back to the question of tellability and untellability around. You know, if you're going to be mocked for a vernacular belief, then it becomes sort of untellable. But at the same time that the idea that sharing experiences is an effective way to push the needle on some of these issues. Can you talk about how that works?
- [51:14]
Andrea Kida
Yeah, absolutely. So it's problematic because there's a part of me that's, I mean, I laugh at these things too, because it is kind of, especially Colbert, sort of the journal of some lady that I just met, I thought was great. So on one level, as an academic, it bothers me. But then on another level also as an academic, I'm thinking, oh my gosh, you're shaming people for their belief. That's really problematic. You know, instead we should be having these discussions because all that's going to do is actually solidify their belief. They're just going to say, oh, well, these people are just making fun of me. I can't trust them. I can't talk to them about these things. So I think that's where it becomes really, really problematic in that. That notion of tellability. So instead of having a conversation with someone where you say, oh, really now, why do you believe that? Or, you know, how can we talk about this some more so you can realize that maybe that's not true now we've just totally shut down that conversation. And that's problematic because that actually stands out even out further than just one individual. It becomes people like that, which will might extend out to educated people. Educated people are going to make fun of me for my beliefs. So I'm not going to tell them my beliefs, which means there's no room to have a discussion about these beliefs. So. And that, like I said, that kind of extends out. So you see Colbert make fun of it and then you start to think, well, okay, my doctor will probably make fun of me too, so I'm not going to bring this up. And then that's where we have like some real issues with it.
- [52:42]
Tim Thurston
Yeah, I can, I can see that being a, being an issue. Now. Are there any sort of. When, when talking about so personal experience narratives as being a good antidote. Antidote to this and to. As you were suggesting, the ability to say these things online to. Has pushed our needle the needle on issues of mental health. For example.
- [53:01]
Andrea Kida
Example.
- [53:02]
Tim Thurston
So. So are there any, like, when we make something tellable and when we tell these personal experiences, it contributes to that process, presumably. Are there any sort of factors or features that make for a good or an influential or an impactful personal experience narrative, as far as you can tell?
- [53:22]
Andrea Kida
Oh, absolutely. I think emotion about it, and I don't want to say just emotion. It's sort of emotion and passion together. So feeling strongly about something, I think really makes more impactful speaking, you know, about it from the heart, I guess, for lack of better terms. And I hate to make it sound that way because it sounds like, I don't know, there's. It. You know, the sort of idea of emotional things are not only frequently linked to how women speak about things or women are perceived to speak about things, but also as being irrational. And I really hate that because I think that you can use emotion and passion to talk about something in a way that's very effective, but is also correct or is, you know, in line with medical science or all of those kind of things. So I. I don't see. I think a lot of times when we hear those terms, we think immediately of someone being too emotional or something like that. But I think showing passion and showing that you care about something is a great way to talk to other people about it and get them. Them involved about it and excited about it too.
- [54:29]
Tim Thurston
Absolutely. Okay, that's. We can all work on that, I reckon. Okay. And so the final chapter that's sort of the body of the book is about sort of. The story is about sort of the kiss of death and sort of this. This issue with kissing and intimacy. And you start by talking about this idea of sort of the intimate other or the intimate stranger that reminded me of Eden, of Ian Brody's the Vulgar Art, where he. He talks about sort of these intimate others. The comedian, as intimate other. But you mean it in a very different way.
- [55:06]
Andrea Kida
Yeah, yeah. I'm. I'm looking at the intimate other as someone that you don't really know yet, but you may have been intimate with in some ways. And it might be something like going out on a date or a kiss or. Or someone that you've had sex with but maybe is not well known to you at this particular point. Point.
- [55:25]
Tim Thurston
Okay. And so how do the narratives of sort of dangerous intimacy potentially help us understand issues of gender and comfort in. And contamination in broader society?
- [55:40]
Andrea Kida
I guess, yeah, it's a great question because it's really fascinating to look at all of these as sort of a large body of work about kissing and intimacy, especially because when we're talking about like the intimate other and this person who you don't really know very well and maybe is outside of your group. And if something bad happens to you because you've been intimate with them, and again, it might be varying levels of intimacy. So if you go back to the urban legend that's commonly known as the necrophiliacs kiss, it's about a woman who goes out on a date with a guy and at the end of the night he invites her to his house. She says no, typically, but they kiss and then they kind of go on and you know, this is a successful date. It is an okay date. Like everything is fine. They're probably going to go out again until she starts to sort of develop this rash around her mouth. So she goes to someone to see what's going on with that and she finds out that it's caused by usually they even call it like a corpse worm or something like that. So that she has gotten this condition from kissing this person who is clearly someone who is engaging in necrophilia. So that they're either a cannibal or they're, they're a necrophiliac, but it's. Someone isn't that working with dead bodies in a very inappropriate way and that she has gotten this sort of near miss. She has almost been. Not only almost been infected, but she has been infected to some extent, but she could have maybe been the next victim as well. So there's. And then some narratives, they actually go on to the finding out that the, you know, the police going after this person who is, is doing these inappropriate things with dead bodies. So all of that really, that kind of tells you about this sort of near miss of, of putting yourself out there and being in a, in a situation where maybe you are dating and you're being intimate in these ways that, that lets you know about some of the dangers of those situations, which I think a lot of, a lot of urban legends actually kind of circle around that, that goes back to the, you know, the, the hookman legend and all of that kind of stuff too. Whereas all about dangers of intimacy with people that maybe you don't know. And there's about this larger idea of not just the person you don't know, but what they're capable of. And it's, it's kind of interesting too to link those back even to like the HPV type legends where a lot of people might remember the, the early AIDS campaigns where they talked a lot about how like, you're not just having sex with the person that. And you're having sex with everyone they had sex with, and they would sort of frighten you into this. Thinking about this as a larger sort of issue of it's not just that person, that person is fine, but what about all those other people that are associated with that person? So it really kind of brings that idea out into this sort of broader context of contagion and contamination in a lot of different ways. So it's fascinating to kind of sit back and look at that. But when we start to look at the larger legend. Complex. Complex, the intimate other, you know, sometimes bad things happen, sometimes they don't. But if it's someone. If the kiss happens from someone that you love or that you really care about, or is someone known to you, like, you are definitely going to die from that kiss. So a lot of the other ones, you might survive, but if it's a kiss from a loved one, you are dying like 100 of the time. Okay.
- [59:06]
Tim Thurston
Remember that. So, and is this mostly about controlling female bodies and female behaviors? Or is. Or is this something where both male and female characters can struggle with this sort of kiss of death?
- [59:25]
Andrea Kida
You know, that's a great question because I think historically it's been mostly about female characters and females being in danger, which is pretty common in most urban legends. But I think it's actually starting to shift a little bit. So we're actually seeing this in other types of legend too, where there's becoming more and more about. About male bodies being in danger too. So I think that really started to happen with the AIDS Mary type legends. And now we're starting to see it happening a little bit more with. With some of these other legends too. So one of the ones that. One of the legends I talk about in there is the peanut butter kiss, which is based off of an actual incident of a woman who kisses her boyfriend. He has recently eaten a peanut butter sandwich. She is allergic to peanuts, and she eventually dies from this contact. And that one I've actually seen. I still primarily see it as the woman dying in that situation, which is very urban legend, sort of focused, where the woman suffers the most. But I'm starting to see shifts in it now too, where it's, you know, the boyfriend dies instead of the girlfriend. And so we're starting to see like little shifts where some of that revenge is happening by women or some of that. In this case, it's obviously not a revenge situation. It's. It's just a. A simple thing. That we would do all the time. But it reminds us both of the dangerous situation, especially with allergies. But there's. That there's also danger, even when we. We feel safe and comfortable, that there's still danger in our lives.
- [60:57]
Tim Thurston
Oh, that's really interesting. I'm. I'm really intrigued by that development.
- [61:04]
Andrea Kida
So.
- [61:04]
Tim Thurston
So after that, you sort of finish off with this conclusion. And in the conclusion, you ask a number of. A number of questions, but then also sort of discuss how, or remind how narrative. Attention to narrative and storytelling and what you've been calling throughout the book is sort of monstrous hybrids and how. How these have an important role to play in the contemporary world. World. And I guess since we haven't really touched on this. This topic of monstrous hybrids, maybe we can sort of end with that. Can you talk a little bit about sort of how you see these hybrids and. And what they're doing in our discussions of. Of public health and beyond?
- [61:48]
Andrea Kida
Yeah, absolutely. So. And I. I think those. The, you know, and I love that term monstrous hybrid. I think it's just such a cool way of talking about it because we do tend to think of things instead of being greater because of their hybridity. They're somehow contaminated by their hybridity. And we tend to put that into the category of the monstrous. We tend to think of them as sort of, you know, going back to Mary Douglas and thinking of things that fall out of categories as being very good or very bad. In this case, it's almost always very bad. So we get this person that's sort of in between worlds. They are one thing, but they're not. They look like our loved one, but they're a zombie. They look like our loved one, but they. They have hpv. You know, it seems kind of like, oh, wow, that's, you know, that's a big jump to make. But that's essentially what we are saying in a lot of different ways is it's. It's someone that looks like us and acts like us or looks like a loved one and acts like a loved one, but isn't that person anymore. And I think that really kind of shows a lot of our fears about modern society. It shows our fears about contagion, contamination. It shows our fears about what happens when kids leave home or they go on the Internet or they do any other sort of host of things that worries us. It's that whole idea of control and not having control over who you come in contact and largely living in a more global world that we're influenced by the decisions Other people make. But we can't control those decisions. So there's nothing we can do about some of these situations. So we instead. Dead. This is a way for us to talk about them. It's a way to kind of mitigate our fear and to talk about our fears and explore them further and see if they're even. Even worth being afraid of.
- [63:33]
Tim Thurston
It's really cool. As a frequent traveler, I notice that I am a dangerous hybrid in my own ways.
- [63:41]
Andrea Kida
Aren't we all? I think about that every time I get on a plane.
- [63:46]
Tim Thurston
Absolutely. Um, so we. We've taken up a lot of your time. Um, before we get to my standard last question, I just really wanted to point out that. So you have this appendix that's a reading guide, and this is not something we see very often. And I think it's really cool. And I was just wondering. I just wanted to make sure that you got a chance to sort of talk about its inclusion and what it's doing.
- [64:08]
Andrea Kida
Thanks so much for noticing that. I really, really wanted to keep that in there. Um, and I. I kind of. Not that I was horribly opposed by it, but I definitely was ready to fight for it. Because I think there's this really. This idea in, I think, most disciplines that if we write a book for ourselves, that's great, and it needs to be extremely theoretical, and it must be this and it must be that. But if we write a book that other people can read, then somehow it's not really in our discipline. It's not real work in that discipline. And that always really bothers me because I'm like, why not both? I can write an academically rigorous book that can be understandable by other people, and hopefully that they'll pick it up and they'll say, like, wow, these ideas are really interesting. I don't know a lot about this. I'm gonna go look at this other stuff. And I was also thinking, too, of teaching it. Because when I was looking at it and thinking about teaching it myself, Although I'm always weirded out by teaching my own stuff, I don't. It's, you know, one of those weird, uncomfortable places. But I thought, you know, like, let's think about what other things go well with this. Like, what other concepts in folklore go along with this really well. And I think that's really important for us to kind of frame our work both in historically and what folklore has done. But to also think about, like, go back and read the original, because you might be inspired in a different way than I was, and maybe you know, fight me on it. That's awesome. I would love to have that conversation. So, like, I think that gives us more place to remember and play about our own discipline and. And it shows other people. Hey, look, folklore has been doing this kind of work for a long time. It's not just this one person who wrote this one book. There's this. This whole body of work that you don't know about. And maybe you should.
- [65:51]
Tim Thurston
It's really. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's. I mean, I think it's just really great to sort of see that in here because. Because I think, as you said, you know, to the extent that one would teach their own work, you know, having these. Having these in place is really nice. And, you know, it's. So it's including sort of relevant reading and as well for each chapter and maybe some questions to consider for chapters as well. And I just think it's a fantastic sort of way of doing it.
- [66:23]
Andrea Kida
Thanks.
- [66:25]
Tim Thurston
So, having taken up all of this time of yours, can I ask this one final question? Question? What are you working on now?
- [66:33]
Andrea Kida
Oh, wow. So I have been working on a couple of different things. I think right now. A lot of things I'm interested in right now. This is always how I work. I always have multiple projects at once. I'm really interested in how ghosts are really white. I guess it's the lack of better terms to say it, that ghosts don't represent diversity. And this has come out, out especially for me. I teach a study abroad in London every year. And London has been a multicultural city forever, basically. But all the ghost stories about London are about white people. And that blows my mind because this has always been a multicultural place. But when we start to look at ghost stories, like where is race playing into this? And a lot of times, especially where I live, if you hear about ghost stories about African Americans, they're always slaves. There are nobody else. If you hear about other types of ghosts that just do, I don't know, normal ghost stuff, I guess they're predominantly women or they're predominantly white people. And that's just really fascinating to me. So I'm kind of interested in why is that. And I'm sure it reflects a lot on the dominant culture. So that's one thing I'm working on my other big project. I'm really starting to look at the opioid epidemic and kind of how. How both I think, think in some ways the problem and the solution are within the folk themselves. And I think we're going about this in a Lot of different ways. And in part, that is my response to how places have been characterized that are where the opioid epidemic seems to be hit the hardest, especially places like Appalachia and how Appalachia is being represented in a lot of different ways, especially through books like Hillbilly Elegy and stuff like that. So I'm really, really interested in that. That idea of, you know, we have this crisis going on, we're talking about it, it's important, but there are definitely voices being left out of it. We don't hear them very much. We hear about a lot of sort of Appalachian notions of. Of the opioid epidemic, but without the recognization that. That. That black people live in Appalachia. That's something that people don't really talk that much about. So I think that's really fascinating, too, as a part of this sort of complex. And I think, in part, that we're paying attention to the opioid epidemic because it is something that's affecting white people, but it doesn't exclusively affect white people, and that's not part of that conversation. So that's part of what I'm also looking at, but it's also kind of personal because I grew up in western Pennsylvania, so this is an area. My hometown now has a methadone clinic in it. So I've been really interested in how people have been talking about that when I go home to visit and when I, you know, talk to people from the area and how they. They perceive that. So I think that's. Those two things will probably coming in the future. I'm not sure which one will come first, though.
- [69:27]
Tim Thurston
Oh, two fantastic sounding projects. And as an Ohioan myself, the latter in particular, it does speak close to Ohio home. Can't wait to. Can't wait to see the work that you come out with.
- [69:42]
Andrea Kida
Thank you so much.
- [69:44]
Tim Thurston
Well, thank you. Thank you for. For coming on the show, and thank you for taking time to tell us about the kiss of death, contagion, contamination and folklore.
- [69:53]
Andrea Kida
Thanks so much for having me, Sam.