Title Neoliberal and pandemic subjectivation processes: Clapping and singing as affective (re)actions during the Covid-19 home confinement
Authors GEMIGNANI, MARCO, HERNÁNDEZ ALBUJAR, YOLANDA
External publication No
Means EMOTION SPACE AND SOCIETY
Scope Article
Nature Científica
JCR Quartile 3
SJR Quartile 2
JCR Impact 1.8
SJR Impact 0.629
Web https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85128418027&doi=10.1016%2fj.emospa.2022.100882&partnerID=40&md5=a7ede407fa1f562ed8731e952ce520bc
Publication date 01/05/2022
ISI 000793753400003
Scopus Id 2-s2.0-85128418027
DOI 10.1016/j.emospa.2022.100882
Abstract During the Covid-19 pandemic, the restriction of free movement and the sheltering-in-place became worldwide strategies to manage the virus spread. Especially at the beginning of the pandemic, community-based affective events helped people feel less isolated and support each other. In this manuscript, we explore how two of these social practices—clapping and singing—were useful to counter the emotions entailed in the subjectivation processes that accompanied the pandemic. We then argue that, seen as affective happenings, singing and clapping heightened emotions and affects that were already implicit in neoliberalism, mainly anxiety, loneliness, and a sense of precariousness, disposability, and inadequacy. On one hand, singing and clapping were liberatory practices of solidarity and resistance against the changes induced by the pandemic and its biopolitics. On the other hand, they contributed to the primary narratives on social resilience, docile bodies, and biopolitics that informed the crisis management. Singing and clapping also operated as neoliberal technologies of the self by bringing the focus on individual agency, behavioral control, and the sacrifice of specific subjects (e.g., the healthcare workers described as heroes). In short, singing and clapping were affective happenings that instantiated an entanglement of subjectivation practices in which the power to affect and the power to resist coincided. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd
Keywords Affect theory; Biopolitics; Neoliberalism; Pandemic; Subjectivation
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