‘Stayhome’ as a YouTube performance: representing and reshaping domestic space under the 2020 covid lockdown in Italy

ABSTRACT

What does ‘staying at home’ mean, and how is it represented online, once it suddenly becomes a legal obligation? This article explores the ways to display and resignify the domestic space through the frames of YouTube during the first nationwide lockdown in Italy in spring 2020. While being enforced at home, and possibly as a way to cope with this, YouTube creators perceive, display and (re)adapt their dwellings in contrasting ways along the continuum between safe shelter and prison; as proper domestic space but also as functional equivalent of extra-domestic ones such as gyms and offices; as the necessary backdrop for their performances or as a setting to be exhibited in its own right. Based on a content analysis of 989 videos using the hashtag #iorestoacasa [‘I’m staying home’] between March and May 2020, this article explores how the domestic space is turned into a stage for public (YouTube-mediated) activities, thereby revealing an increasing permeability between private and public domain. This, in turn, invites to further investigate the complex entanglements of private and public, ‘displayed’ and ‘invisibilized’, as an expression of the constitutive ambivalence of the home.

KEYWORDS:

• Home
• YouTube
• lockdown
• #stayhome
• Covid-19
• Italy

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 ‘Sto per firmare un provvedimento che possiamo sintetizzare con l’espressione “io resto a casa”’. Available on the Italian government’s official YouTube channel: Dichiarazioni del Presidente Conte | 11/3/2020 (uploaded: March 12, 2020).

2 ‘#iorestoacasa: parte la campagna social degli artisti contro il virus’ (I’m staying home: the artists’ social media campaign against the virus: www.salute.gov.it/portale/news/p3_2_1_1_1.jsp?lingua=italiano&menu=notizie&p=dalministero&id=4177, published on March 9, 2020).

3 We counted, overall, 48 videos with #iorestoacasa in the title from May 4 to May 31, and just 5 from June 1 to December 31 2020.

4 These include ‘#andràtuttobene’ (‘it will all end up well’), #quarantena (‘quarantine’) and ‘#distantimauniti’ (‘distant but united’).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by H2020 European Research Council [grant number 678456 ERC-StG HOMInG.].

Notes on contributors

Paolo Boccagni

Paolo Boccagni is professor in Sociology and PI of ERC HOMInG (University of Trento). He has done research into the lived experience of home and the contentious field of views, emotions and practices associated with it, particularly in majority-minority relations and among immigrant and refugee newcomers. Last co-authored publications include Thinking home on the move (Emerald, 2020) and articles like ‘Home in question' (European Jrl of Cultural Studies), ‘Homemaking in the public’ (Sociology Compass), ‘Domestic religion and the migrant home' (Ethnicities).

Alberto Brodesco

Alberto Brodesco, Ph.D in Audiovisual Studies, research assistant at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento. He is author of Una voce nel disastro. L'immagine dello scienziato nel cinema dell'emergenza (Meltemi, 2008), Sguardo, corpo, violenza. Sade e il cinema (Mimesis, 2014; French translation: Sade et le cinéma. Regard, corps, violence, Rouge Profond, 2020) and editor, with Federico Giordano, of Body Images in The Post-Cinematic Scenario. The Digitization of Bodies (Mimesis International, 2018). He has published in Cinergie, Nuncius, Schermi, Public Understanding of Science and Porn Studies.

Federico La Bruna

Federico La Bruna, PhD student in Sociology and Methodology of Social Research, University of Milano. Master degree in Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento.