The Visual and Sonic Registers of Neighbourhood Estrangement

ABSTRACT

As COVID-19 ravages the United States, calls to police for COVID-related concerns are proliferating. This article asks what happens when a contagious and novel disease creates a context wherein neighbours recognise each other – by sight and by sound – as strangers. Marking the twentieth anniversary of Strange Encounters, we revisit Sara Ahmed’s claim that recognition in embodied encounters produces strangers as figures who are internal to community formation, but who remain outside of an imagined community. This claim enables us to parse the relational dynamics in pandemic time that produce neighbours as strangers through both visual and sonic registers. Ahmed’s theory helps to identify how disease opens opportunities to fracture and retract familiarity in ways that intensify police power and often racialised feelings of ‘stranger danger,’ in effect reordering neighbourly relations.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• pandemic
• policing
• Sara Ahmed
• stranger danger
• racialisation

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Vince Marotta and Adela Licona for their helpful feedback on this essay.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karma R. Chávez

Karma R. Chávez is chair and associate professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at The University of Texas, Austin. She is author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013) and co-editor (with Eithne Luibhéid) of Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation (University of Illinois Press, 2020).

Annie Hill

Annie Hill is assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing and an affiliate in Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Texas, Austin. Her scholarship focusses on state and sexual violence in the United States and United Kingdom. Currently, she is on research teams for a Sexual Violence Prevention Collaboratory and a Sex Trading, Trafficking, and Community Well-Being Initiative. She also curates the Violence section of The Gender Policy Report, a blog hosted by the University of Minnesota.