Affective diaries of quarantine: Writing as mourning

Abstract

Challenging the bodily-detached logos qualifying as perfect knowledge in academia, I write here to mourn, driven by a visceral need to speak of vulnerabilities and affects, which continuously become overexposed under the COVID-19 pandemic and the corresponding lockdown periods. My diary notes reflect my affective ambivalences, ambiguities, and contradictions during this time, which I interweave with critical feminist theories on affect and mourning as an emancipating process. In so doing, I propose academic writing as a mourning process with heightened relational, ethical, and esthetic possibilities. Mourning the collateral losses and multi-dimensional vulnerabilities experienced during this pandemic provides, I suggest, a relational language to speak of embodied affects to challenge and resist normative structures oppressing difference and otherness, including the affectively disengaged academic logos. I propose that experiencing academic writing as a mourning process enables us to develop the embodied subjectivities necessary to survive the crises surrounding our lives, which the pandemic has left bare. Doing so motivates a kind optimism necessary for driving desired change, collectively, in academia and in broader society.