Touching Matters: Affective Entanglements in Coronatime

Abstract

This article troubles touch as requiring embodied proximity, through an affective account of virtual touch during coronatime. Interested in doing academia differently, we started an online Barad readingwriting group from different locations. The coronatime void was not a vacuum, but a plenitude of possibilities for intimacy, pedagogy, learning, creativity, and adventure. Although physically apart, we met daily through Zoom, and we touched and were touched by each other and the texts we read. A montage of writing fragments and a collective artwork, based on the Massive_Micro project, highlight virtual touching. Undone, redone, and reconfigured, we became a diffractive human/nonhuman multiplicity.

Doing Academia Differently: Creative Reading/Writing-With Posthuman Philosophers

“…The intensities which result from reading the text aloud together and discussing what comes up in the midst of the text and the participants make it possible to do the sort of sympathetic, Slow and careful reading engagements referred to by Manning and Barad. In these reading groups, a genuine openness and curiosity is the modus operandi in response-ability to the text and the affirmation of the not-yet that emanates from the situatedness of relations of the text and the co-readers (see Bozalek et al, 2020 for another example of a reading group experience pertaining to the Massive Microscopic Sensemaking Project run by Dan Harris and Annette Markham). These reading groups provide conduits for participants to put to work the concepts read from the texts, discussed, and written about, to make sense of them for themselves to be honed for their own projects and practices, and for crafting new modes of living and working on a damaged planet.…”

“…Like the colour in the glass, these images are indelible in the mind. (Combrinck, 2013, p. 115) This piece of writing, where montages of writing (Bozalek et al, 2020) were interspersed with ideas and texts from Manning and Barad, was also developed into an audiovisual presentation and provided a collective means of grieving for those group members left behind in the wake of Theo's death.…”

Reconceptualizing Women's Wellbeing During the Pandemic: Sport, Fitness and More-Than-Human Connection

“…Over the past two years, a growing body of feminist scholarship has shown the potential of new materialist approaches to explore health, wellbeing, embodiment and recovery beyond humanist notions of experience as an individual phenomenon. Emerging in response to concerns that the linguistic and cultural turn were “inadequate for thinking about matter, materiality, and politics” ( Coole & Frost, 2010 , p. 6), new materialisms works to unsettle the prioritizing of the social and discursive in the production of meaning, and to acknowledge the agentic capacities of human and nonhuman matter (e.g., bodies, environments, technologies and objects) ( Alaimo & Hekman, 2008 ; Braidotti, 2022 ; Coole & Frost, 2011). By exploring the material-discursive formation of experience, feminist materialisms orient thinking towards questions concerning how the phenomenon of wellbeing comes to “shape and be shaped by the elements of the world that women are entangled with” (Hickey-Moody & Collin, 2020; Coffey, 2021 ; McLeod, 2017 ; Smith & Reid, 2017 ).…”

“…In so doing, they have explored COVID-19 as more-than-human phenomena, and the agentic capacities of the virus as a nonhuman actant (Lupton, 2022). Of particular relevance here are the important feminist engagements with new materialisms to examine the gendered affects of COVID-19 ( Bozalek et al, 2021 ), and feminist reimaginings of the posthuman condition during the pandemic ( Braidotti, 2020 ). Although not always the case, the feminist scholars whose work we draw upon in this paper (i.e., Barad, 2007 ; Braidotti, 2020 ) acknowledge the important contributions of ancient and contemporary Indigenous and First Nations philosophies, ways of knowing and learning with nonhuman creatures, objects and forces.…”

Wholehearted Participation: Attuning to Affect and Immanence in a Virtual Field

“…Critical/vital/feminist new materialist and new empiricist literature (Bennett 2010; Braidotti 2019; Clough 2009; Stewart 2007) helped me understand how my felt sense of creative flow pointed to subtle affective constellations beyond my self—to the immanent potential of digital materials. My felt senses related to “an ability to affect and be affected,” Brian Massumi’s (1987, xvi) deceptively simple definition of affect , traced to Spinoza through Deleuze (Robinson & Kutner 2019) and so commonly used it often goes unquoted (e.g., Bozalek et al 2021, 850; Gale & Wyatt 2019, 566; Gershon 2013, 258). My experiences resonated with scholars who, drawing on this philosophical lineage, describe affect as a “preconscious … pre‐individual” force, “a capacity for activation” (Clough 2009, 48) not confined to human actors or intentions.…”