Death and democracy during a pandemic / “Mourning’s work and the work of mourning: Thinking agonism and aporia together” (original) (raw)
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Memento Mori: COVID-19 and the Political Imaginary of Death
Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2020
The paper contrasts two complementary ways of conceptualising death in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, notably death-in-the-plural, which involves death as an objective and collective...
Commentary: Death without Dignity: An Exploration of Dying and Mourning during a Pandemic
Exolorations, e-journal, Indian Sociological Society, 2021
At the time of this writing, the global death toll for COVID-19 has exceeded thirty-five lakhs i with India accounting for several thousands of those deaths. Before moving further, it is useful to acknowledge that the discursive limits of COVID-19 fatalities should be extended to accommodate not just infected individuals but also those who could not make it to the hospitals, death by suicide in fear of disease contraction, domestic abuse victims and a bulk of the migrant population who have succumbed under extraneous conditions. While that may look like an incalculable unit of measure, it is worth noticing how the pandemic has become a springboard for mass suffering and loss of life to dominate everyday language and social order. Consequently, bio-political registers of living and dying bring to fore important dimensions of our existing cultural scripts of grievability, a concept put forward by Butler (2015), along with the extent of bureaucratic control over funerary practices. As the government scrambles to draw up fresh guidelines and videos of dead bodies being tugged, hurled and discarded in multiple Indian districts are circulated on social media (Reuters, 2021), we are obliged to reflect on the deceased as a site of inquiry in contemporary times.
The Politics of Mourning in the Neoliberal State
2017
Recently American scholars have examined the politics of mourning in relation to anti-black racism in the United States. Drawing on the work of queer theo-rist Maggie Nelson, I will illustrate that a political sense of mourning is also relevant to queer theory and life as a way to bear witness to the violence of the sex-gender system even as we fi nd ways of navigating through it. Lastly, I will defend the claim that a sense of mourning-without-end is political for any marginalized population that suffers from social death and from the disavowal of its suffering through the normalization of violence against them. RÉSUMÉ : Récemment, des chercheurs américains ont examiné la politique du deuil dans le contexte du racisme contre les noirs aux États-Unis. En utilisant le travail de la théoricienne d'études «queer» Maggie Nelson, j'illustrerai qu'un sentiment politique de deuil est aussi pertinent pour la manière de vivre et la théorie «queer», comme moyen de témoigner de la violence du système basé sur le sexe et le genre. Enfi n, je défendrai l'affi rmation selon laquelle un sentiment de deuil sans fi n est politique pour n'importe quelle population marginalisée qui souffre de la mort sociale et du désaveu de leur souffrance par la normalisation de la violence à leur égard.
Death and Dying: A reflection on how mourning changed during the pandemic
2021
The pandemic scenario created by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome – Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) brought physical and psychological distress among people who found themselves under a situation which unabled most of them to proceed with their usual routine or rites of passing to cope with losses of lifestyle, relatives, and friends.
Current Sociology , 2021
This article examines the case of COVID-19 deaths and grief in Iran in order to shed light on how the biological, social and political 'risks of contagion' combine to impact mourning and grief. As a contagious biological agent, the novel coronavirus causes people to suffer, die and grieve alone. But this loneliness is deepened due to social stigma and political abandonment. Conceptually guided by Mary Douglas's work on the socio-cultural and political constructions of 'contagion', Judith Butler's notion of 'ungrievable lives' and Kenneth Doka's concept of 'disenfranchised grief', the authors of this article have undertaken a preliminary mixed-methods study that explores the possibility of a transnational, decolonial understanding of grief in a time of contagion.
Living the death of others: the disruption of death in the COVID-19 pandemic
Horizontes Antropológicos, 2021
On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization classified the COVID-19 emergency as a pandemic, a decision that was taken following the perception that the virus was both lethal and rapidly spreading. The role played by mortality and contagion in this pandemic narrative, thus, cannot be ignored. On the one hand, contagion acts as a transgressive category that is a main source of socio-political disruptions and a catalyst for new forms of sociality. On the other hand, the effectiveness and persuasiveness of mortality as a quantifiable reality overshadows death as lived experience, obfuscating a profound reorganisation of the ways death is managed and produced through the work of a whole professional segment. Hence, this article explores how the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping death as lived experience by transgressing categories of existence and reorganising the conditions under which death is managed and produced.