Waking with Strange Encounters (in) a Pandemic Lockdown

ABSTRACT

In the context of a deadly pandemic, we are scrambling to learn how to mourn mass death, how to fulfil our collective responsibility to the dead, responsibility of remembrance. A sense of urgency is demanding me to connect my grief to the grief of others (my grief over the death of people I didn’t know, people who were strangers to me), to connect my desiderium to that of others. It is within this context that I engage with Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters and composed this piece which is all over the place like myself. As a result, the aspects of the book that retained my attention and on which I dwell bear the imprint and bias of my on-going grieving, exhaustion, and dislocation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Feelings of strong longing for something we no longer have, and wish very much that we did. An ardent desire or longing, especially a feeling of loss or grief for something lost (Merriam-Webster).

2 Chapter 1 (Recognising strangers) dwells on the relationship between the making of the stranger and the conception of space as familiar or not. One of the central concepts of the book, stranger danger, is developed here. A central question asked is: How does the discourse of stranger danger produce some spaces as familiar and constitute some people as strangers threatening that space? Chapter 2 (Embodying strangers) develops how some bodies are read as strange bodies in encounters and how these encounters define the contours of the body-at-home and the body-out-of-place? How do they contribute to the formation of social space? Some of the central concepts of this chapter are the economics of touch (relations of touch that constitute bodies) and skin as sentient border.

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Notes on contributors

Sirma Bilge

Sirma Bilge (PhD, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III) is Full Professor of Sociology at Université de Montréal. She founded in 2005 Intersectionnalité Research Unit within the Ethnic Studies Centre of Montreal Universities (CEETUM) at a time intersectionality was barely heard of in French-speaking academia. Bilge published two books and more than 50 scholarly articles and chapters in English and French. Her most recent peer-reviewed publication is: The fungibility of intersectionality: An Afropessimist reading, Ethnic and Racial Studies. 43 (13): 2298–2326. Her most widely engaged articles include ‘Intersectionality Undone’ (Dubois Review, 2013) and ‘Beyond subordination and resistance: An intersectional approach to the agency of veiled Muslim women’ (Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2010). Her recent book, Intersectionality, (2020, revised 2nd ed, Polity Press), co-authored with Patricia Hill Collins, revisits the potential of intersectionality as a social justice-oriented knowledge project and praxis for studying and transforming intersecting power relations and social inequalities. She is currently working on a book project based on her ongoing SSHRC-funded research that tackles incorporation of minoritized knowledges in neoliberal academe with specific focus on intersectionality.