Bordering the Body: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Anti-Vaccine Movement Through Nationalism Post Covid-19

As the anti-vaccine movement has proliferated amidst the Covid-19 public health crisis, nationalist sentiment and border concerns have similarly expanded. During the Covid-19 crisis, the anti-vaccine movement increasingly appealed to liberty in its arguments. Through discourse analysis that utilizes post-Covid nationalism as an exemplar of bordering processes, I explore how the anti-vaccine movement utilizes borders to justify and actively create their sovereignty beyond appealing to liberty. I identify four major themes of bordering mechanisms in the anti-vaccine movement: sovereignty and the sovereign identity, corruption of the outsider, religion and the construction of the body, and processes of surveillance and testing including subsection affirming surveillance by denying complete rejection. Across these bordering processes, I argue that bordering actively produces the sovereign body by creating the threat of vaccination and declaring separation and sovereignty to manage it. Furthermore, by emphasizing or creating bodily sovereignty as valuable, the threat of vaccination is heightened. I expose bordering as a process both creating and establishing authority over threat. I also argue that the anti-vaccine movement evokes borders around sovereignty itself, abstracting the debate from vaccination and capitalizing on the political value ascribed to individual autonomy. This calls for consideration of what arguments matter and should matter for public health and wellbeing and for the anti-vaccine movement to reconcile with sovereignty as socially constructed instead of an inherent condition of the body susceptible to violation.