Choreographing Affective Solidarity: The Choral Politics of Responding to Loss

Abstract

Loss is a defining condition of the contemporary moment. This essay theorizes grief and rage as co-constitutive emotional responses to loss often staged in tragic plays. Using Sara Ahmed's work to read Euripides' Medea affectively, I demonstrate how their affinity can provoke affective solidarity arising from the circulation of these emotions. This article constructs an account of the feminist choreography of affective solidarity that can sustain political responses to loss. Placing Medea in conversation with Black feminist thinkers such as Audre Lorde and Saidiya Hartman, I emphasize the way grief and rage can help overcome obstacles like division, powerlessness, and marginalization, which link Medea's plight to those addressed by these thinkers, and chart a new political course. While loss is indeed devastating, engaging Medea through the lens of affective solidarity is instructive as to the generative potential and collective configurations in its wake that we can choreograph into being.