Philippa Nicole Barr

This article examines how powerful and regulatory emotions shaped the emergence and enforcement of new hygienic norms during infectious disease outbreaks in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Sydney. In a period of physical and epistemic transformation, emotionally charged public communication produced both interventionist and internalised forms of action. Such communication made particular behaviours feel appropriate or inappropriate based on learned understandings. Hygienic rules and knowledge were thus underwritten by an emotional regime. Shifting norms around tuberculosis and plague were not only protective but also productive, determining who could access the rights of the state and who was subject to its coercive power. Emotions, mobilised through the regulation of bodily practices such as spitting and grooming, enabled the diffusion of public health governance across bodies and communities, but they also made that power unstable.

When the third global plague pandemic reached Sydney in 1900, theories regarding the ecology and biology of disease transmission were transforming. Changing understandings led to conflicts over the appropriate response. Medical and government authorities employed symbols like dirt to address gaps in knowledge. They used these symbols strategically to compel emotional responses and to advocate for specific political and social interventions, authorising institutional actions to shape social identity and the city in preparation for Australia's 1901 Federation. Through theoretical and historical analysis, this Element argues that disgust and aversion were effectively mobilised to legitimise these actions. As an intervention in contemporary debates about the impact of knowledge on emotion and affect, it presents a case for the plasticity of emotions like disgust, and for how both emotion and affect can change with new medical information.

Elite women seized the public health campaign during the 1900 plague outbreak to assert political influence and advocate for sanitation reform grounded in their domestic experiences. These women advocated for their inclusion in the political sphere by valuing their domestic experiences as knowledge relevant for public health initiatives. This reframing of experience positioned them as viable citizens in the imminent Federation. Applying Laura Zanotti's concept of relational ontology, this analysis frames their actions as not simply a battle against institutional authority but as careful and strategic interactions with their era's political context, exploiting aspects of it that were beneficial to them. Their ambivalent involvement in the public health campaign illustrates a complex chapter in Australian medical history. Women used the opportunity of plague to reevaluate their experience of the home as a form of knowledge relevant to public health. At the same time, they leveraged their growing status as political subjects to oppress others.