While an array of newspaper articles have focused on the disasters that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought on women and feminism, very few have considered how this unprecedented global confinement may bring about alternatives to the gendering of the domestic sphere. This issue of Commentary and Criticism has taken up the task of doing just that, through, for example, Jilly Boyce Kay's suggestion of a communal organisation of life (2020), and The Care Collective's arguing for a collective responsibility for all aspects of social reproduction, and thus hands-on care, including "community, health and educational infrastructures" (2020). If the importance of domestic labour for the functioning of capitalism has remained invisible to those who wished not to see it in spite of decades of feminism, it has now become impossible to ignore. The 2020 coronavirus pandemic has not only been a health crisis but also a crisis of capitalism and patriarchy.Around the world, educational and commercial sectors stopped or slowed down their on-site activities and instructed their employees to work from home (where possible) and set up home offices. The closure of schools has direct consequences on families with children; for many, working from home becomes a challenge alongside home-schooling. The realisation of this incompatibility forces the consideration of education and the caring of children to become public matters and interests for society as a whole, in line with the way in which the collapse of the increasingly neoliberalised hospitals in many Western countries has brought discussions of local production and state-run social services back to the table . The binary separation of domestic and professional spheres is an issue of gender and power relations that needs to be tackled, and the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly increased the urgency with which this needs to happen. This essay argues that feminist geography and the concept of affirmative politics allow us to show that these power relations are not immutable, but rather in constant transformation; they can thus be resisted and thrown off balance. Rather than endlessly lamenting the status quo, much of the coronavirus media debate could-or indeed should-be re-oriented towards an "affirmative politics" (as per Rosi Braidotti's concept). In her work on affirmative ethics and politics, Braidotti advocates recognising our multiple limitations while liberating ourselves from the "burden of negativity," so as to create the conditions for a sustainable, embodied, networked, and non-binary future (2011a, 270). As I have developed in earlier work, Braidotti's affirmative politics works as "micro-political CONTACT Maud Ceuterick
Virtual reality (VR) storytelling, particularly in its nonfictional modes, promises a sensory immersion among others whose lives and ways of being a privileged viewer might not otherwise experience. In this essay, by focusing on the Emmy-nominated 2018 VR film Traveling While Black, we explore how the immersive power of VR storytelling can enact ethnographic encounters premised less on the impulse to extract meaning from other people and their ways of life than on the sensory and affective force of being with others in an unfolding experience of both similitude and difference. Without wishing to overstate VR's empathy-inducing potential, we suggest that by situating viewers at a paradoxical threshold between proximity and distance, the affective power of VR derives in part from a narrative form capable of fostering nonappropriative relations.
While cinema boasts of a long history that has placed the representation and aesthetics of memory at its centre, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are only starting to shape their own aesthetic and narrative engagement with memory. Through the analysis of Chez Moi (Caitlin Fisher and Tony Vieira, 2014), Queerskins: Ark (Illja Szilak, 2020), and Homestay (Paisley Smith, 2018), this essay shows how cinematic AR and VR involve the viewers’ movement to produce and transform collective memory and spatial habitation. Feminist digital geographies, film and media theory, and the concept of orientation developed by Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology (2006) give sense to how sound, images and viewers’ movement participate to rewrite collective memory and cultural symbols. As these artworks present personal memories of struggles to find a home within present spaces, they queer hegemonic orientations of the subject, and invite viewers to re-align body and space within ever-changing virtual and digital spaces.
Walking and ‘haunting space’ have become means of political and aesthetic resistance to the invisibility or inhospitality that women face in the public sphere. Power imbalance in spatial habitation—‘power-geometry’ in Doreen Massey’s terms— negatively affects women, just as shown in an Iranian context in Shirin Neshat’s film Women without Men (2009) and through feminist social movements such as #mystealthyfreedom. As these women wilfully assert themselves against their exclusion from certain places, they challenge the binaries public/private, men/women, and mobility/stasis both politically and aesthetically. Ghost characters and haunting narratives disrupt the linearity between dead and alive, virtual and actual (following the works of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze respectively), and open up possibilities that challenge the status quo. Through a micro-analysis of Women without Men, this article reveals that shapes, structures and lights participate to dismantling gendered norms, expectations, and power-geometries. Both the magical realism of the film and an affirmative analytical approach invite to seeing beyond the negativity of narratives and unveilalternative conceptions of space, gender and power.
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