Right from the emergence of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, national governments and international institutions have been relentlessly qualifying it as an “unprecedented” event. We have been told that the virus sees no color or class and that equal sacrifices from each one of us are and continue to be necessary to contain its spread. We have been instructed to look at the virus in scientific, neutral terms as if we had equal chances of being affected by it—as if its routes, that is, did not follow the roots of sedimented histories of oppression, exploitation, dispossession, and structural violence. This forum departs from such narratives to look at how the current COVID-19 pandemic intersects with other pre-existing and enduring pandemics, such as those produced by racism, capitalism, and speciesism. In building on the emerging critiques by Indigenous, feminist, Black, and queer academics, movements, and activists, the contributions it hosts offer multimedia reflections on affects triggered or evoked by the current pandemic, such as rage, fear, despair, restraint, care, and hope. Coming from different parts of the globe and disciplinary approaches, authors convey the “Corona(virus) a(e)ffects” in multisensorial ways, combining written essays, poetry, videos, and photographs. By contextualizing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic within a historical legacy of structural violence within and across species, this forum moves beyond deceitfully single-focus and temporally flat narrations. In so doing, it provides a space for the expression of radical affectivities of dissent and hope that its outburst has arguably made only more visible and pressing.
Articles by Elena Zambelli
Elena Zambelli is an interdisciplinary researcher working on the anthropology of gender and sexuality in Europe, race, migration, and intersecting inequalities. She is a senior research associate at Lancaster University, where she works on post-Brexit migration regimes and experiences. In previous years, she worked at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on a research project exploring interracial couples’ everyday experiences of racism and discrimination in Europe. She has a PhD in Gender Studies obtained with a dissertation, based on ethnographic fieldwork, discussing how Italian and migrant women in Italy negotiate the tension between status and sexuality across a continuum of spaces of sexual consumption and sex work. She has published in several international peer-reviewed journals, including Modern Italy, the Journal of Political Power and Ethnic and Racial Studies. She is currently working on her first book monograph, (provisionally) entitled Sexscapes of Pleasure: Sexuality, Respectability and Work in Italy.