Mediated immobility and fraught domesticity: Zoom fails and interruption videos in the Covid-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Protracted pandemic shut-downs, which began in Spring 2020, rapidly relocated workplaces to domestic spaces. This article explores how “home” as a distinctly gendered space has been recalibrated in the pandemic to accommodate a range of new uses. Detailing the ever-increasing scrutiny of and technological intrusion into the home/private space, we examine the now curtailed mobility of professional class workers and the conspicuous gendering of new work-at-home arrangements made visible in “Zoom fails” and viral videos of interrupted experts. Analysis of these “interruption” videos catalogues the ways male authority is destabilized through domestic chaos and technological failure. Temporal frameworks are employed to explore dominant aesthetics and affective qualities of viral interruption videos highlighting how children tend to provoke anxiety, manifest to different degrees and in differently gendered registers depending on whether an interview subject is male or female. By comparison, pets appear to carry no such connotations and seem to be a uniformly welcomed presence. Conceiving of the interruption as an ambivalent temporal event, we argue that these videos stage the collision of professional and domestic identities in a way that presses on the charged thematics of time-keeping and care-giving.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobility
• temporality
• masculinity
• pandemic
• Zoom

Acknowledgments

We thank the members of the Leicester Media and Gender Research Group who provided thoughtful suggestions as we were developing this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. For an analysis of YouTube travel videos chronicling and assessing the amenities enjoyed by male first class air travel passengers prior to the pandemic, see Allison Page and Diane Negra (2021).

2. As Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild (2002) have observed, in a global care economy “The lifestyles of the First World are made possible by a global transfer of the services associated with a wife’s traditional role.” (4).

3. For a vivid snapshot of unequally gendered domestic and professional labor in several US homes during the pandemic, see Jessica Bennett (2021).

4. The viral videos and television material we analyze are predominantly from the US and UK, countries whose pandemic experience we take to have been broadly similar (although of course their circulation is not nationally confined).

5. Multiple technological “solutions” to the problem of home spaces doubling as places of work quickly emerged as lockdowns came into force, such as the popularization of background filters to mask one’s real working environment, and the development of apps such as Krisp, that uses AI to similarly mask or filter out the sounds of domestic life—a barking dog and a crying baby are just two of the examples demonstrated on the app website.

6. See Elizabeth A. Patton (2020) Easy Living: The Rise of the Home Office for a historicization and theorization of representations of the home office.

7. It is worth noting that many accounts of this widely seen clip mistook Kelly’s Korean wife for a domestic worker.

8. For just one example of press coverage of the rising number of pet adoptions and acquisitions during the pandemic see Zareen Syed (2021).

9. See Melissa Gregg (2011) for a prescient account of the affective impact of homeworking and the “presence bleed” precipitated by communication technologies that blur the distinctions between “home” and “work.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anthony P. McIntyre

Anthony P. McIntyre is a Teaching Fellow in Film and Media Studies at University College Dublin. He is co-editor of The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (Routledge, 2017) and has published chapters and articles widely in scholarly edited collections and journals such as International Journal of Cultural Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies and Television & New Media. He is the author of Contemporary Irish Popular Culture: Transnationalism, Regionality, and Diaspora (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). E-mail: [email protected]

Diane Negra

Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. A member of the Royal Irish Academy she is the author, editor or co-editor of twelve books, the most recent of which are Shadow of a Doubt (2021) and Imagining “We“ in the Age of ”I:” Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (2021). She serves as Chair of the Irish Fulbright Commission. E-mail: [email protected]

Eleanor O’Leary

Eleanor O’Leary is a Lecturer and Programme Director on the BA (Hons) in Media and Public Relations at the Institute of Technology Carlow. She is the author of Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland (Bloomsbury, 2018). Other recent publications include O’Leary, E. (2020). “Social Solidarity and Generational Exchange in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Television”, Television and New Media. Recent awards include the Royal Irish Academy Charlemont Grant (2020). E-mail: [email protected]