2. “Making Gold Out of It”: rupi kaur’s Poem, Pain, and Phantasmagoria

Abstract

This chapter examines rupi kaur’s Instagram account and details the layers of production of the neoliberal self(ie) in her phantasmagoric world. It argues that neoliberalism, which governs the workings of the digital platform that kaur uses, functions as an alchemy that turns pain into gold—which in this capitalistic society means capital, currency, money—and turns her, a decolonial feminist, into an entrepreneur who projects a neoliberal self(ie) gaze. The chapter further demonstrates that racial oscillation is an integral part of her phantasmagoria. That is, when the neoliberal self(ie) has to be projected as entertaining, appealing, and inspiring, one’s race must also be represented and positioned as such. Racial oscillation describes the process whereby race can be turned into a spectacle that fits a specific audience’s taste and transformed into another spectacle for a different audience. Lastly, the chapter illustrates the problem with social media as phantasmagoria and the ways in which it reproduces affect alienation—how people are alienated from their own feelings—because of phantasmagoria’s ability to produce sensory distraction. Affect alienation, functioning as an anesthetic, merely soothes and then paralyzes people from doing activism work outside of phantasmagoria—actions that can eventually move them toward social justice.