Identity in the disrupted time of COVID-19: Performativity, crisis, mobility and ethics.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a global cultural crisis, experienced through various losses of everydayness, including particularly restrictions on mobility and the sudden emergence of new fears and anxieties over infection. This paper theorises some of the ways in which that crisis can be understood in cultural and discursive terms, as a rupture in normativity, a disturbance in social relationality and as a state of exception. Drawing on Judith Butler's theories of performativity, the paper investigates how such a cultural rupture can be understood to affect performative subjectivity, identity and selfhood, whereby a breach in normative everydayness prompts the re-constitution of subjectivity itself. The paper explores how the reconfiguration of identity is experienced as corporeal and as a site of anxiety and lost dignity. The final section of the paper draws some initial conclusions about the potency of cultural and identity transformation for new ethics of non-violence, arguing that the obligation to resist norms of mobility and contact is an ethical obligation of necessary cohabitation.