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.