Dead Goat on the runway. Disruptive fusion, affective citizenship and gender.

Abstract

This article examines an episode of goat sacrifice performed on an airline tarmac in Pakistan and the feelings and interpretations various audiences expressed in response to it, to make two specific contributions to the literature on cultural performance. First, by focusing on the ways that affective responses to the performance were socially structured, it describes how cultural performances, like the goat sacrifice, shape affective citizenship by way of feeling rules. Second, this article focuses on the affective dimensions of the goat sacrifice to theorize a novel form of fusion, I call “disruptive fusion.” Disruptive fusion turns in the goat sacrifice case on jugaar, a strategy of subversive improvisation associated with subalterns in South Asian settings. Despite its association with subversive ingenuity, jugaar, I show in this paper, can work also as a mechanism of stratification. It amplifies exclusions, I argue, because even ostensibly subversive cultural performances, like goat sacrifice on an airline tarmac, activate feeling rules. These rules proscribe certain affective expressions while highlighting others. Since emotions activate cognitive schema, feeling rules can shape the extent to which certain interpretations gain traction in the public sphere. This paper demonstrates how the feeling rules embedded within cultural performance can work to amplify certain interpretations of a news story, and therefore heighten some people's claims to affective citizenship while squashing others.