Toward a democratic theory of contagion: virality and performativity with Eve Sedgwick, JL Austin, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Williams.

This article examines the concept of refusal as a contagious phenomenon through three distinct models of contagion found in Euripides' *Bacchae*, the 2015 film *The Fits*, and John Rawls' *A Theory of Justice* (1971). Each work presents refusal differently: the *Bacchae* depicts an all-at-once outbreak, *The Fits* shows a sequential, mutating contagion within a community, and Rawls offers an isolable but potentially contagious outlier. The author engages Eve Sedgwick's notion of "deformatives"—Austinian performative utterances that shame and stigmatize gender queerness and themselves spread contagiously—to analyze how these refusals are policed and contained. Countering this containment, the article explores alternative democratic potentials of contagion through J.L. Austin's example of the bull (representing uncontainable desire), Hortense Spillers' viral constitutionalism (a mutating sequence model), and Patricia Williams' alchemy of rights (an all-at-once outbreak), all of which challenge heteronormative and exclusionary frameworks by envisioning contagion as a source of political and legal transformation. The discussion situates contagion as both a site of phobic fear and a possible catalyst for democratic assembly, queer performativity, and social mutation beyond normative reproductive models.