Thinking through the Disruptive Effects and Affects of the Coronavirus with Feminist New Materialism

Abstract

The disruptive biocultural force of the coronavirus highlights the value of more-than-human perspectives for examining the gendered effects and affects on our everyday lives and leisure practices. Pursuing this line of thought our article draws upon the insights of feminist new materialism as intellectual resource for considering what the coronavirus "does" as a gendered phenomenon. We turn to this body of feminist scholarship as it enables us to attune to what is happening, what remains unspoken and to pay attention to "the little things" that may be lost in a big crisis. Writing through the complexity of embodied affects (fear, loss, hope), we focus on the challenge to humanist notions of "agency" posed by these shifting timespace relations of home confinement, restricted movement and altered work-leisure routines. We explore the tensions arising from "home" as an historical site of gendered inequality and a new site of enhanced capacity.

Coronavirus, capitalism and a ‘thousand tiny dis/advantages’: a more-than-human analysis

“… 2020 ). Fullagar and Pavlidis (2020, p. 154, 2021 , p. 154) have noted how job precarity, pressures on household budgets, gender-based and domestic violence, racial abuse, anxiety and depression have differentially impacted women during the pandemic.…”

“…However, a number of scholars have offered perspectives on the Covid-19 pandemic that extend beyond this anthropocentric focus, applying variously relational, posthumanist and new materialist perspectives (Braidotti 2020 ; Fullagar and Pavlidis 2021 ; Hayles 2021 ; Klingberg 2020 ; Searle and Turnbull 2020; Vannini 2020 ). In addition, recent work has applied new materialist perspectives to the political economy of health and socio-economic position, replacing essentialist and aggregative models of ‘class’ with an understanding of the ‘tiny dis/advantages’ (Fox and Alldred 2021 ; Fox and Powell 2021a , 2021b ) that are generated during daily interactions with both human and non-human matter.…”

“…The units of analysis in this relational perspective are not individual humans (or individual viral particles) but rather assemblages of human and non-human materialities that occur during interactions, for instance at work, during leisure pursuits and domestically (Fox and Alldred 2017 , p. 17; DeLanda 2016 , pp. 1–2; Fullagar and Pavlidis 2021 , p. 156). What humans can do emerge from these moment-by-moment interactions, but it also follows that what a viral particle can do (typically infect a human cell and thereby reproduce) also depends upon the contexts within which different materialities assemble when virus encounters host.…”

We are what we smell: the smell of dis-ease during lockdown

“…Agential realist theory provides an alternative mode of understanding the global pandemic beyond individualized notions of 'human agency' (Fullagar and Pavlidis 2021). Much official discourse relating to the virus, posits it as a force which can be controlled by humans via physical distancing, mask wearing, handwashing and vaccination.…”

“…This anti-anthropocentric perspective 'explores a new ethics of collaboration and cooperation that might be derived from a worldview that sees agency in all things: stones, litter, memories, air, neural connections, tumours, atoms, desires, hands, almonds, bees, beliefs and sunshine (Nicholls 2018, p. 102). Employing a new materialist paradigm in their analysis of the pandemic, Fullagar and Pavlidis (2021) note, it enables a grasp of the embodied and affective relations that produce this crisis as an assemblage of human-non-human forces. Not only does this offer a more expansive and embodied rendering of life in the pandemic.…”