Affective diaries of quarantine: Writing as mourning

Abstract

Challenging the bodily-detached logos qualifying as perfect knowledge in academia, I write here to mourn, driven by a visceral need to speak of vulnerabilities and affects, which continuously become overexposed under the COVID-19 pandemic and the corresponding lockdown periods. My diary notes reflect my affective ambivalences, ambiguities, and contradictions during this time, which I interweave with critical feminist theories on affect and mourning as an emancipating process. In so doing, I propose academic writing as a mourning process with heightened relational, ethical, and esthetic possibilities. Mourning the collateral losses and multi-dimensional vulnerabilities experienced during this pandemic provides, I suggest, a relational language to speak of embodied affects to challenge and resist normative structures oppressing difference and otherness, including the affectively disengaged academic logos. I propose that experiencing academic writing as a mourning process enables us to develop the embodied subjectivities necessary to survive the crises surrounding our lives, which the pandemic has left bare. Doing so motivates a kind optimism necessary for driving desired change, collectively, in academia and in broader society.

“There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.”

Sarton (2014: 494)

Preface

Revising. . .

It has been more than 1 month since I received two lovely reviews for this article, but I am still “avoiding” starting work on the revision. The reviewers’ words are every day in my mind and heart, and responses to these appear in random moments as I walk by the water, look at the sky, or read a novel. Still, this happens in a language I am not sure I can utter in an (academically) “intelligible” way. How can I put this into an array of sentences to construct a tight argument, as requested? How can I convince that I mourn and that I care? These are the moments when words fail us . . . when we search for the words to dress the feelings, emotions, and affects experienced deep within, but which reach neither the tongue nor the fingers in utterable form. I know that in academia, this can be problematic, since words are our tools; and they (should) have conceptual weight, which should be theorized. Is the writing about emotions or affect? Is it about psychology or psychoanalysis? How does psychology relate to the body? (How does it not, I wonder?) Is this about thinking or feeling (are the two separate?)? How can this be about “thoughts” if written from the body? (how can it not be, I wonder?) We like dichotomies, sealing ourselves off from the possible fusions and fluidities that embodied writing can offer. As Lauren Berlant says in an interview with Zarranz García and Ledoux-Beaugrand (2017): “Language makes everyone anxious.” I think they ¹ are right. And this is exactly what I wish to overcome in this writing: to engage in an affective experience of writing that does not censure the conceptual weight that the uttered words might carry, but rather one that lets the words appear, connect, and inter-play with each other to produce their own “(un)intelligible” meanings. Sometimes, the “wrong” or not very consistent use of terms might also have to do with English not being the writer’s first language, as is also my case. I am not offering this as an excuse for any evident “mistakes” (I sent the paper for proofreading, as advised), but to explain that certain terms might not be used by a non-native author with the same precision of a native reader, for indeed the very weight of such terms can never quite be sensed or grasped in the same way by these two persons. If this creates a disappointing or “inconsistent” reading experience, I apologize in advance. In writing this, I hope to make space not only for writing and doing things differently, but also, as one of the reviewers so beautifully put it, for “feeling differently.”

If I decided to include this preface for the reader, and not just as a response to the reviewers, it is because although this experience of writing is enacted by one author, myself, it could not have been more relational, shaped by the very affects I experienced while navigating mine and others’ forms of othering mourned here, as well as by my engagement with the reviews afterwards. It was these lines that actually motivated me to start working on this revision, and I consider them an inseparable part of this account. And you, dear reader, are part of this making, if you wish to rewrite this text in your own unique way while reading it.

Luckily, I can still write, I remind myself. . .

July 18th, 2021

Background and introduction

This text was spontaneously born in March 2020, during the first pandemic-related quarantine, in an attempt to use my writing to convey embodied struggles, vulnerabilities, and affects, which I experienced and saw becoming socially overexposed in the wake of the pandemic. Making sense of this new “reality” involved filling my diary with a language echoing often like a mourning cry, which I had not expected and which surely does not follow the linearity of the normative academic pen (Helin, 2020). By interweaving diary notes conveying personal and social experiences of othering with feminist critical perspectives on affect (Ashcraft, 2017; Berlant, 2011; Fotaki and Pullen, 2019; Fotaki et al., 2017; Kolehmainen et al., 2021; McCarthy and Glozer, 2022) and mourning as regenerative forces (Ahmed, 2010; Butler, 2009; Rose, 1996), I discuss the relational, ethical, and esthetic possibilities (Rhodes, 2019; Mandalaki, 2021a) of experiencing academic writing as an affective mourning process.

The reviewers asked me to clarify what exactly is being mourned in this account. I am still not sure whether I answer this question satisfactorily, since the object of mourning here transcends my own experience of personal loss during the quarantine, as we usually associate with mourning; its importance pales beside the magnitude of suffering and loss inflicted on so many others, on a global scale. On a personal level, I mourn in reaction to quarantine-related afflictions and work-from-home requirements, thus apprehending a loss of freedom, which resonates with other constraints I experience as a feminist woman academic living, working, and writing in normative social and epistemic structures. Yet, the mourning I invoke here also relates to deeper and broader pandemic-related collateral losses, and the feeling of helplessness I experienced to do something practical to alleviate forms of suffering that I saw becoming overexposed. This writing thus involves mourning a current state of affairs in a pandemic-stricken world that amplifies social inequalities. As I work on the revision of this article more than a year after the first account was originally written, “most of the planet is still mourning for what has been lost since this pandemic began. At least three and a half million people have died. Many more are suffering from lingering effects of the disease. The financial toll of the pandemic has been estimated at some $20 trillion. Virtually no one has been spared from some grieving or some loss. People are ready for the long nightmare to be over. But in most places, it is not. Huge disparities have led to a Dickensian tale of two worlds, in which some countries are experiencing a respite from the disease while others are still on fire” (Brillant et al., 2021).

In this context, I wonder, what is there not to mourn? As Kivinen (2021: 500) beautifully puts it: “Grief is like the wind. It hits you unexpectedly when you turn a corner. It is in the smile of a stranger you meet in the street, in music you hear in a department store, the smell of coffee in the morning.” Grief is contagious and it is about being human, after all. Leo Tolstoy reminds us that: “if you feel pain, you’re alive, if you feel other people’s pain, you’re a human being.” Writing experienced as mourning is as alive and human as the affective, embodied events that trigger it. Not only does it give us the means to speak of our losses affectively, but it also leads us to recognize the other as human and take an active, affective stance before forms of human (and non-human) suffering, which we otherwise take for granted and often neglect to grieve (Butler, 2009).

Exposing this account feels important in this context of accelerated crisis, whereby reports increasingly document diverse challenges experienced by different others under this crisis. Primarily, this relates to the loss of human life and the immense grief this causes to those faced with it. It can also relate, among others, to the adverse impact of lockdowns, especially for women in academia and beyond (Boncori, 2020; Einola et al., 2021; Pereira, 2021; Plotnikof et al., 2020), resulting from augmented demands related to balancing work and life; to a lack of institutional support overexposing the most vulnerable populations (Branicki, 2020; Shymko et al., 2022), but also to forms of pandemic-related psychological trauma, anxiety and stress, which often remain invisible (Bridgland et al., 2021). I would parallel this situation—as I experienced it and saw others experiencing it—with what Berlant calls “an impasse”: a sense of accelerated crisis, where life seems to freeze and one feels stuck in time and space; it is experienced differently by individuals standing at different intersections of gender, race, or class, among other identifiers of difference. At this moment, Berlant suggests, one needs to remain alert, with a “wandering absorptive awareness” (Berlant, 2011: 4), to collect any piece of information from the surrounding environment to try to make some sense of the changing reality and maintain a sense of existential continuity. This is about staying attuned to different bodies’ affective experiences with an “impatient patience” (Berlant, 2017, in an interview with Zarranz and Ledoux-Beaugrand). This account has been written with such an “impatient patience,” which is not about doing things fast and urgently. Rather, it is a political stance bearing witness to the surrounding realities to become aware affectively of how vulnerabilities and privileges are unequally distributed in a neoliberal pandemic world. I use my available means here, as an academic, to mourn such inequalities in my writing.

If proposing a new use of academic language became the focus of this text ultimately, this is due first to my interest in novel propositions for what academic writing can look (and feel) like. Second, this is because, the shackles of COVID-19 conjured the shackles constraining my body in a normative academic writing culture. It became clearer to me that academic writing conventions lead us to performatively reproduce affectively disengaged and disembodied subjectivities so poorly suited to surviving the collateral losses of a deadly pandemic. Even though extending a critique to neoliberalism, or neoliberal academia in particular, is not the main focus of this account, such a critique gleams subtly behind this writing, in the context of the critical affect theories I engage with (Ashcraft, 2017; Berlant, 2011; Fotaki et al., 2017). These gave me the means to make sense of how our affective entanglements with normative structures of individualism and excellence overexpose embodied vulnerabilities during the pandemic (Mandalaki and Daou, 2021), both socially and epistemically (Fotaki et al., 2017), and to use my writing to challenge this.

Experiencing writing as mourning is thus both esoteric and collective—both embodied and theoretically stimulated, as well as spatially and temporally situated within the surrounding changing dynamics—shaped inevitably by my own bias and positionality in this social context. I write as an activist and feminist writing of the heart (Ashcraft, 2018; Vachhani, 2019), seeking to affectively expose the “wounds” of normative conventions on affective bodies and challenge how academic logocentrism treats these bodies as objects of scrutiny, covering them with masks (Mandalaki and Perezts, 2022a). In so doing, I wish to contribute to creating alternative spaces for/of speaking out, connecting, sharing, and relating, with and through each other (Beavan et al., 2021; Mandalaki and Perezts, 2021), to enable restorative communities of healing (hooks, 2001). This is about writing with an open end, writing for dialog (Helin, 2019b), for exposing embodied experiences closely related to affective, social processes (Hokkanen, 2017), making space for the socially marginalized and under-expressed, as opposed to theorizing detached, politically correct, and abstract logos. This does not mean that I here disregard the importance of using theory for connecting embodied experiences to broader social and political debates. On the contrary, driven by a feminist autoethnographic curiosity, I recognize the theoretical inspiration necessary for alimenting a reflexive writing process, intermingling embodied narratives and feminist literature in a creative rhythm that speaks about affective bodies. In doing so, I wish to propose writing capable of creating meaningful exchanges between readers, authors, and subjects involved in research that conventional forms of academic writing usually fail to offer. This account not only participates in recent feminist organizational debates calling for a need to write differently through embodied affects and vulnerability (Ahonen et al., 2020; Einola et al., 2021; Fotaki et al., 2014; Gilmore et al., 2019; Pullen et al., 2020; Thanem and Knights, 2019; Mandalaki and Perezts, 2022; Mandalaki, 2021a, 2021b). In addition, and most importantly, this work stresses the need for creating writing spaces for feeling differently by voicing our grief (Boncori and Smith, 2019; Kivinen, 2021) in our struggles for social change (Beavan et al., 2021).

Quarantine day #1

Birthday and day 1 of quarantine, following the rapid expansion of COVID-19! I wake up at 8h00 and stare at my partner, who has just woken up to start his “regular working day.” He asks me what happened:

• -“It is my birthday, don’t you remember”?

• -“Oh, ‘mon chou’ (oh, honey), of course I remember.”

He takes me in his arms but I am emotionally drained. It is not his fault! I am overemotional and over reflexive these days. The rapid expansion of the pandemic as well as the new working/living configuration it has brought about haven’t left me still. . .On top, I am spending this day away from my twin sister. A nostalgic impulse conquers me and my inwardness augments. I don’t have much appetite for work. I spend the day reading corona-articles; it is shocking to see the increasing death tolls and the pandemic’s collateral losses on the different fronts. A need to mourn “infatuates” my pen, which fleshes out ideas on my blank computer screen and the blank pages of my notebook, beyond my control. I exchange with friends and colleagues on social media, each ruminating for their own embodied realities. I sense how different bodies experience this situation, somehow feeling a sense of collective empowerment in these exchanges. Is this solidarity in isolation?

I am reminded of my privileged position, as an academic, which enables me to continue working and engaging in comforting and inspirational exchanges with colleagues without exposing myself at risk. So many others still need to run the risk of contamination by going to work to provide for essential necessities—filling supermarket shelves, making sure wi-fi providers function properly, taking care of sick people, etc. I also think of countries of the Global South, where it is often impossible to distance oneself socially, especially for vulnerable populations lacking institutional support (Wasdani and Prasad, 2020). I think of women, who make up the majority of medical and family caregivers globally, carrying out such meaningful but undervalued, under neoliberalism, work of care (Chatzidakis et al., 2020), that also exposes them to higher contamination risk (Shymko et al., 2022; Wenham et al., 2020). Are there new inequalities emerging? What can I do?

As these thoughts surround my head, I experience a knot in the stomach, a weird tension traverses my spine, my heartbeats reach the throat, oscillating between feelings of gratitude for all my privileges and sadness for all the suffering I sense around [me]. I feel guilty. Can I even speak to complain about the personal discomforts I experience? It might seem ridiculous—human lives are lost, others are continuously exposed to precarity and danger. What can I do to enact how much I care? I feel helpless. I just want to write, to mourn, to channel the empathy I feel for others; to listen to my inner self. I find it hard to concentrate to do any work, apart from joining an online research seminar. I am happy to see that my colleagues look safe and healthy. Some (mainly women!) appear with their kids. Most of us sit still to adjust our faces to the limited screen dimensions. There is very little discussion around the new situation (it is still very fresh) and the seminar starts. It is [on] leadership with a very fancy quantitative model. I am not very interested. All this seems unimportant in this context. I mute myself and write.

Is this just an exceptional virtual research seminar or one signifying the advent of a new social and working life for which the constant tracking of bodies, feelings, affects, expressions, [and] the words that we share, in our digital ways of “belonging” to each other and to our new realities, becomes the new condition? My colleagues look absorbed by the research model. My back aches; I feel numbed, disconnected, and confused. Does life just continue to flow normally, as it appears on my screen? Or, do we just avoid raising topics that remind us of how vulnerable we can all become, of how unequally overexposed underprivileged others become? This is especially so in a life-threatening pandemic, which is also driving unexpected reconfigurations of work-life routines and broader social realities. What a wor(l)d! V u l n e r a b i l i t y! Is there space for it in the neoliberal culture of omnipotence (hooks, 2001) and publishable academic texts?

I feel “guilty” for not being in the same “productivity mode.” But, I feel even more guilty to still think of publications in this context. My body reacts. I just want to feel, to sense, to resist, to reflect, to not work for a while, to “listen” to the numbness I feel on my skin. I feel my intellectual capacity shrinking. At the same time, I have so much to go through to be able to publish. I am young in academia, and publishing is my way of becoming recognized in the community. This is what I have learnt, and the discourse around keeping the business school activity running smoothly doesn’t help mitigate my “guilt,” and at the same time, it feels so shallow. I try to question these established standards, but I am perplexed! Maybe I should forget about the chaos around me, digest my stomach knot, put on my “academic suit,” and continue producing to attain the performance and publication standards set for me. Isn’t this the definition of success for the neoliberal worker/academic? But is this what I am here for?

Luckily, I can still write. . .

Quarantine day #2

08h00! Home office is the new routine for both of us, now. So, we have to re-evaluate our 40 m ² to make it workable for both. I get the kitchen, he gets the living room. I don’t have much appetite for work today, either. Luckily my agenda is not very heavy as we (among colleagues) all seem “lost” trying to figure out our new working routines. I have a paper under conditional acceptance, but it is in my co-author’s camp these days. I hope she doesn’t get back today even though the deadline is approaching. On top of that, I just received the news that academic conferences are cancelled. I feel discouraged! I was so much looking forward to meeting (physically) colleagues with whom I share a passion for “writing differently.” These thoughts, the unlived potential of what I was longing for and the memory of what I would like to go back to, augment my nostalgic, over-emotional state and I am not able to concentrate to produce any “meaningful academic output.” An inner voice resounds in my head that 2 days in a row of little work is “not allowed”. But my body resists. . .

I open my poetry document and throw some verses as they come. . . discursive words trying to make sense of each other reflecting the chaos inside of me. . .

Later in the day, I connect on Facebook, where collective chats and COVID-19 related posts reign. I end up chatting with a friend who sounds stressed about a meeting, for which he has prepared the majority of the material (which will, however, be presented by his boss!). The meeting is about deciding the company’s new working configuration. He sounds concerned that his work be approved by his boss and the other “very important” people, as he calls them. While I hear him talking, and feel a resonant need for recognition in his excited voice, my spine contracts again and thousands of thoughts cross my mind, wondering [about] all these titles! Are there “unimportant people”? I wonder! At the same time, he sounds worried about the possibility of having his working hours and tasks reduced, since many companies decide to go part-time these days. I feel (for) him. . . he doesn’t want to feel “unproductive” or “useless,” as he puts it, often being a bit critical of some of his colleagues (mainly women!), who chose to exercise their right to “temporary work leave” to take care of their children and homeschool. His words brought me back to Federici’s ideas. Federici discusses how, by placing emphasis on waged labour, capitalism undervalues the unpaid work of care, which “is carried out by women in the home,” and which is crucial for sustaining and reproducing community life and capitalism itself (Federici, 2019: 156). “Reproduction of human beings,” Federici says, “is the most labour-intensive work on earth . . . irreducible to mechanization. We cannot mechanize childcare, health care or the psychological work necessary to reintegrate our physical and emotional balance . . . except at the terrible cost of the people involved” (pp. 110–111). Yes, this is a terrible cost for humanity; and under conditions of a worldwide biopolitical crisis, women are disproportionally burdened, juggling across life and work responsibilities to sustain life (Boncori, 2020; Plotnikof et al., 2020; Shymko et al., 2022). I want to tell my friend, but I feel muted, trying to make sense of these contradictions.

Later in the afternoon, he sent a cheerful update saying that he had been congratulated on his work by his boss. He can now keep “producing value” and “feeling useful” for the organization, as he puts it! I also want to feel “useful” and “produce value.” But. For whom is this value produced and under what conditions? In metric-driven organizational contexts seeking excellence with no consideration for embodied vulnerabilities and affects (Boncori et al., 2020; Fleming, 2020)? With bodies “wired” all day long, with head and backaches, while having to take care of all the housework at the same time. Gill (2009) is right: the psychosocial experience that “insistently asserts itself in our aching backs, tired eyes, difficulties in sleeping and in our multiple experiences of stress, anxiety, and overload” is muffled, in disembodied academia (cited in Ashcraft, 2017: 232). This is even more so in the lock-down context. Our homes officially turn to working spaces, such that it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain any work-life balance. I am tired of all this, physically and emotionally, and yet I play the game to meet “the standards.”

Is this not the time to stop for a while and reconsider? I wonder! Can we survive this way? What does this serve? Why do we continue to reproduce careless life/social/economic cycles so destructive for our bodies? I seem to have many questions but very little answers. I try to discuss some of these with my partner, but he is tired of me ruminating these days. He might be right. I am over-irritable, sad, angry, guilty, nostalgic, melancholic, grieving; I am vulnerable and want to grieve, realizing how different bodies, sick bodies, marginalized bodies, become unequally overexposed these days in so many different ways. I feel helpless. The knot in my stomach tightens. How can I hide all of this behind a cheerful mask and an academically-formatted account?

I stop the conversation. It doesn’t lead anywhere. I cannot just rationalize and continue to “produce,” even though it seems that (even under these new conditions), it is the “ideal worker” (McRobbie, 2015) who survives, driven by values of individualism, competition, and excellence (Read, 2009) over relational expressions of affects and vulnerabilities. Am I becoming a better person? I care. I want to care. How can I manifest this?

Luckily, I can still write. . .

Quarantine day # 3

I wake up and see an email from a close friend and colleague expressing her guilt for not being able to meet our paper’s deadline, due to her inability to work from home with two small kids, including an infant. Guilt again, on her side. Guilt for what? I wonder. Have we turned our affective bodies against ourselves? Do we care enough for ourselves and for each other? I remembered Baker and Brewis’s article; they explain how the neoliberal “success story” leads women, in particular, to experience feelings of self-failure, self-insufficiency, guilt, and self-contempt when they are unable to attain the male ideal of work-performance. Yet, we hold on, lost in the maze, hung up on our ambition for success; an ambition which, as Berlant puts it, “is desire in the lifeworld of capitalism” (Berlant, 2017: 315).

It has always been this way. But now that most organizations, including business schools, have transitioned to a fully online working mode to continue their activity “undisturbed,” it just becomes too much to bear, placing severe limitations upon women in particular, given the gendered power relations around which house and care work are traditionally organized (Chatzidakis et al., 2020; Devault, 1991). This is also what a simple view of social media chats shows: while paper submissions have increased significantly since the first lockdown, female academics’ submissions have decreased significantly (Squazzoni et al., 2021).

And at the same time, the whole discourse, in the media, is around the “nuclear family” model and childcare responsibilities, while the experiences of people living alone, whose lives and/or sexual orientations (e.g. LGBTIQ+, disabled and/or single, etc.) do not sit comfortably within societal norms, are silenced (Abdellatif et al., 2021; Lescoat, 2021; Pereira, 2021). I too am one of those: childless. My situation is most likely seen as the most “privileged” of the privileged. I should only work and “produce” during quarantine. But, can I? Is my being childless my privilege? And should this put me under the “category” of the ideal worker who should never stop working and thus [has] no impediments to productivity? What about psychological or mental breakdowns? What about other forms of precarity and social suffering, which go unnoticed in a neoliberal world of pandemic? I agree with Pereira (2021): we need to reframe how we ask questions around productivity in the academy and in broader society. I always tend to question vested practices, but the current situation acts like a “magnifying glass” to this, as I realize how vulnerabilities are overexposed, both in academia and in society more broadly.

My eyes hurt, my head will explode, my heart breaks. . .I feel shackled.

At least I can still write. Writing “holds” me these days.

Is anybody reading?

Engaging critically with affect

Writing (through) affect

The above vignettes are mainly about affect, the reviewers said. Yes, I agree! And yet, I had not engaged with affect theoretically in the paper’s original version; what following some insightful comments I have received, I try to address here. Although I agree with one reviewer that it might seem random to move across autoethnographic narrative and theory sections as a practice of embodied, affective writing, I decided to maintain such a style, without imposing a standard structure on the text, however. I experienced this as the only way in which the above autoethnographic reflections—infused by my and others’ affective entanglements with the social and the political under alarming conditions of biopolitical crisis (Berlant, 2011)—could be deciphered critically in relation to larger academic, social, and political debates (Learmonth and Humphreys, 2012). This text is not about exposing random reflections, thoughts, and affects for their own sake (Choudry, 2020), nor about presenting abstract theories to rigorously analyze my “data.” Rather, this text is driven by a feminist curiosity, which seeks the intellectual and theoretical stimulation necessary for making sense of the embodied realities talked about. I engage in a reflexive and affective writing process, joining a collective effort for meaningful change in the academy and broader society (Beavan et al., 2021; Pullen, 2018, Mandalaki, 2021a).

I urge the reader to not read this account as a random exchange between autoethnographic narratives and abstractly presented theory sections. Instead, this should be read as an account allowing for critical engagement with the above-described affective events, as an embodied, yet academically engaged, writing practice demands. This unavoidably involves ambivalences and contradictions of content and format: “I write emotionally and at times my voice is at a distance,” Jamjoom writes (Jamjoom, 2022). I second her! Reinventing my feminist voice in between two styles of writing to capture my passages embodying affect while navigating the liminal space of the pandemic experience (Jamjoom, 2022) required going against normativity and academic linearity (Cixous, 1993; Helin, 2020). It involved escaping the strict criteria of qualitative rigor and intermingling my personal voice with the theoretical, the social, and the political in unconventional ways. Thus, whether this text appears in regular font or italics, adjusted left, centered, or right, matters little. I engage here, as with feminist forms of writing (Pullen et al., 2020), seeking to reclaim space for embodied expression through encounters with one’s othered vulnerable selves and, hopefully, the vulnerable other (Mandalaki, 2021b). I admit, though, that even if I had to, I would find it hard to develop an abstract theory section and a rigorous academic analysis on affect, an element of lived experience, remaining inherently contextual, situated, embodied, and inter-corporeal in how it shapes our (inter)subjective experiences of the world (Ahmed, 2010).

Based on Karen Lee Ashcraft, the way I engage with my writing practice here could thus be seen as an attempt at inhabited criticism, an approach to research and writing attuned to ordinary affects, which, through a critical, reciprocal interweaving of different forms of criticism, including personal confessions and literature accounts, links personal troubles with public issues to enable one “to sense the trajectories of possibility already evolving” (Ashcraft, 2017: 44). Such an approach recognizes that “the ordinary is the only battleground” from which possibilities for political action can emerge. It “nurtures resistance in organization studies by offering an alternative posture and pathway that grows our critical sense-abilities, and by helping us acknowledge . . . the affective demands and limitations of all critical practices”; eventually bridging the “in here” with the “out there” (Ashcraft, 2017: 53).

So, writing (about/through) affect does not try to define abstractly what remains, by its very nature, an undefined, intersubjective experience flowing across bodies. Rather, it lets affective experiences be felt and made sense of in academic writing to raise awareness of how our small embodied lives are affectively entangled with larger social and political problems that call for urgent transformation (Thanem and Knights, 2019).

(Re)organizing through affect

Critical colleagues discuss affect as an aspect of experience that is “born in in-between-ness,” transpiring “as a gradient of bodily capacity,” a visceral force transfused through human, non-human, or other bodies (Fotaki et al., 2017; Sedgwick and Frank, 1995: 23); it is felt in atmospheres, our (im)material engagements with others and the intensities traversing them. The contagious aspect of affect, which is impossible to capture in words, typologies, or concrete linguistic interpretations (Deleuze, 1997), stresses how we affect the world around us and are affected by it (Ashcraft, 2017; Fotaki and Pullen, 2019; Seigworth and Gregg, 2010) through interdependent processes of co-subjective development (Brennan, 2004; McCarthy and Glozer, 2022). Paying attention to affect—unspoken but deeply impressive—and the ways in which it unsettles and destabilizes us (Probyn, 2010) is crucial to understanding how we inter-subjectively relate with others socially and politically (Butler, 2007).

Critical affect theories not only unsettle normative social constructions repressing affective experiences behind discourses of autonomy, independence, and omnipotence; they also challenge epistemic tendencies that cloak the lived experience in sterile discourse (Guattari, 1995). These ignore how affectual intercorporeal encounters and forms of embodied feeling and pre-reflective inter-becoming, can participate in social, ethical, and political relational action (Fotaki and Daskalaki, 2021; Fotaki and Pullen, 2019; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015, 2022). Thinking with/through/as affect enables us to grasp the affective elements that shape our intimate attachments to others (Kolehmainen et al., 2021) and to understand how our alignments and misalignments with others’ experiences might shape forms of affective embodiment that help replenish our emotional energies in the context of institutional work (McCarthy and Glozer, 2022). It raises awareness of how ordinary affects registered in our everyday experiences create common ground, enabling processes of public feeling with and through others (Stewart, 2007). This has the political potential “to address [affective] co-constitutions and interdependencies as a condition of life” (Alasuutari, 2021; Kolehmainen et al., 2021: 148) to enable a reframing of our ontological positioning as relational (Ashcraft, 2017; Beyes and Steyaert, 2012). It is from these possibilities that driving change and meaningful political action can emerge (Fotaki and Daskalaki, 2021; Probyn, 2010; Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). These foreground forms of affective solidarity through consensus and dissensus, so necessary for collective political action (Hemmings, 2012).

Affect allows for such emancipatory possibilities and highlights how social subjects, experiencing different realities, can be subject to forms of domination and power relations that reproduce problematic social orders (Zengin, 2016). Engaging critically in the above narratives with these potentialities of affect allowed me to make sense of underlying affective events (Hokkanen and Koskinen, 2016) and elucidate how writing as mourning can ultimately enable an affective language with a socially emancipatory potential. In addition to critical organizational debates on affect, I engage below with some of Lauren Berlant’s work, which has managed to articulate the previously elusive and unspoken.

Lauren Berlant on affect

Berlant (2011) offers a way to understand desire and fantasy as they play out in life in an “impasse,” like the one experienced under the COVID-19 biopolitical crisis. They offer a framework for discussing why, as economically, socially, and politically engaged subjects, we continue to remain attached to neoliberal economic and social cycles that are destructive to our bodies. Berlant specifically discusses how individuals adjust affectively in a capitalist society of ever-increasing precarity, by paying attention to the affective energies directed toward sustenance and existence in everyday life. They describe how these energies are shaped by structural forms and consecutive situations of crisis, referring to a “crisis of ordinariness,” whereby even adjustment itself becomes an accomplishment (Berlant, 2011, see Kenny, 2020 for a review).

They specifically develop the notion of cruel optimism to explain how individuals tend to remain affectively attached to dominant narratives associated with the fantasy of the “good life,” even when lived experience shows that such attachment actually impedes individual and collective flourishing. It all starts with optimism, Berlant says, and turns cruel once the objects of desire are recognized as the very impediments to living a decent life. They explain how individuals continue to hang on and return to their scene of fantasy in the (knowingly unattainable) hope that every next engagement with it will help transform things for the better. According to Berlant (2011), “an optimistic attachment is invested in one’s own or the world’s continuity, but might feel any number of ways, from the romantic to the fatalistic, to the numb to the nothing (p. 13).” As some of the narratives above convey, often enough, such affective entanglements might seem nostalgic, enabling a recognition of what “is lacking in the changed present” (Pickering and Keightley, 2006: 920) and revealing “a desire or longing with a burning pain to journey” (Pickering and Keightley, 2006: 934) toward a desired past or future unknown state (Cassin, 2013). Berlant (2011) points out that the problem is not the object of desire, but how we learn to relate to it, stressing how remaining attached affectively to certain comforts experienced within a broader set of unrealizable promises offers an illusory sense of continuity and existential coherence.

Berlant (1995) analyzes how “the fantasy life-world” is grounded in the development of racializing, heteronormative and paternalizing structures. These are intended to police, relegate, and infantilize social bodies—namely women’s and marginalized bodies not abiding by heterosexual standards—to control their desires and distance them from their true potential to exist, love, relate, and choose freely. This creates the conditions for what Berlant (1995) calls “dead citizenship”: citizenship reproduced by dead social identities, whose imagination is dominated from envisaging alternative political futures; identities “dead to history; not in any play or danger of representation, anxiety, improvisation, desire, or panic” (Berlant, 1995: 11), “but dead, frozen, fixed, or at rest” (Berlant, 1995: 3). These are either deprived of the agency to perform their embodied desires in public, or they are seen as obscene, threatening the heteronormative contract on which social norms are based.

Reading through this brings me back to my own reflections. Specifically, I realize how we become affectively entangled with our fantasies of a good life, even if the “success” of it appears to be all the more unattainable, especially in the current pandemic. I think, for instance, of my colleague who continues to work as usual, with two small kids at home, pushing herself to the extreme and even feeling guilty for her “insufficiency” to meet “the standards.” I also see how I personally experience great ambivalence. On the one hand, I question dominant discourses, recognize my privilege, and feel bad about it and on the other, I feel “trapped” in the framework of excellence and its promises, which I struggle to attain. I think of my friend, who aspires to recognition ensuring a sense of continuity and comfort, while he knows that he is unlikely to acquire it. Notably, a year after grueling work schedules, as I am working on this revision, he did not receive his promised promotion. Still, he continues to over work to (hopefully) satisfy his aspiration. But, I also think of so many others: women, vulnerable, and low-wage workers globally, who, in the pandemic, are overexposed economically, socially, and health-wise, finding themselves dependent on precarious jobs and often lacking the choice to change orientation (Berlant, 2011; Wasdani and Prasad, 2020). And I recognize the need to recenter our lives around our potential to care for ourselves and each other.

As Berlant explains, paying close attention to how we are affectively entangled with dominant social and political discourses, often manifest in cruel workplaces, enables us to grasp how we navigate between the uncertainty, insecurity, and all forms of injustice under the asymmetrical distribution of privilege and vulnerability in neoliberal society. We realize that life becomes all about survival, an everyday struggle of treading water just to stay afloat, attuned as we are to pursue “an optimistic desire for a malevolent set of promises” (Kenny, 2020: 6). Butler (2007) also explains something similar in her theorization of passionate attachments, a term she coined to describe how we tend to be attached to certain flows of power, which reproduce our marginalization, because this ensures our recognition and identity development process in a social setting. Yet, even though Butler’s idea is mainly oriented toward past losses, Berlant focuses on future losses, stressing how we are affectively involved in reproducing economic cycles that impede personal and collective flourishing.

Mourning such losses, as experienced in this affective exercise of writing, becomes, I suggest, a way to speak of such affective entanglements, to realize how this accelerated crisis, in different ways, continuously overexposes others’ vulnerabilities. As I develop next, writing experienced as mourning affords us the means to lament the “cruelty” surrounding our lives, as well as our “dead” social identities therein, and to resuscitate them to collectively overturn the disqualifying normative patterns that exacerbate social inequalities. It is up to us, I suggest, as academics, to exercise our reflexive and affective writing capacities to raise awareness of various forms of injustice and suffering, traditionally unmourned, in our struggles for social change.

Quarantine day #4

“Suspended in unsparing light

The sloping gull arrests its curl

The glassy sea is hardened waves

[. . .] All that

Should flow is sealed, is poised

In implacable stillness. Joined in

Non-time and halted in free fall.” (Riley, 2012: xvii)

These lines mirror this state of inaction involved in mourning. This is how I feel. Which direction to look at? Where to go? Alone or with others to survive and resist? Is there energy to resist really? Wherever I look, I see depleted bodies: physically, psychologically, emotionally . . . Everything happens so fast and yet, so much stillness. I care. How can I manifest it? Luckily, I can still write to push this stillness forward, to let these words become the tools that can enable some kind of action. I don’t write just (for/of) me. I write both as an act of self-care and to manifest the care I hold for others. Can I claim this? And yet, this is my truth. I remember Altan’s (2019: 157) words of his days in prison: “I had to use all my strength to survive, and for that I had to focus not on the storm but on what was within my capacity. I had to write my own Odyssey.”

Isn’t writing what we also have in our capacity in academia? A tool to make sense [of] and speak up? Can’t we use it to write our own Odysseys, with all the affects that this involves, to find ways to hopefully survive the collateral consequences of this pandemic and pave the way towards brighter futures? I recently received an email from a dear colleague with the title “Lifting Spirits” in the subject line, initiated among women to share written exchanges of support. It seems that writing connects us all these days. I was particularly touched and followed the instructions to spread the voice even further. To recount a verse by a Persian poet, Rumi, which I received through this exchange: “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

I know. I might not change the world by writing all of this. I know also that I am not wise. But, I can start by changing myself, my vested habits, and the bases upon which I develop my academic and broader subjectivities, in normative contexts that strive for excellence at all costs. This is where feminism comes and finds me, and where it starts from; in my room writing embodied affects, thoughts, and reflections and conversing with other bodies, to inspire a need for changing all forms of social injustice that have not ended. Now this need for change seems urgent, and writing about this, with feminist inspiration, seems urgent too; not just as a means of bearing witness but also as a means of connecting with vulnerable others affectively to join efforts to subvert dominant orders, which sustain social inequalities, including the way we write in the academy.

As utopian as it might sound, I hope that bringing embodied, affective confessions to the text might place a brick of hope in the edifice overturning the normative conventions that overexpose vulnerabilities in academia and society. It might be a way to challenge the normativity of academic writing—which expects us to hide our bodies from our academic accounts. Rather, we might develop a writing for/of/from the heart, which captures closely intertwined somatic, affective, and social experiences and translates them into language (Hokkanen, 2017; Willis, 2000). We might use this to make sense of the affective contradictions and paradoxes surrounding our embodied existences in this impasse. Having exposed such embodied affects though a conflation of personal narratives—seen as useful in the reflexive study of affect both in terms of analysis and reporting (Hokkanen and Koskinen, 2016)—and critical literature accounts on affect, I discuss the potential of mourning below as an affective writing practice for collective political action.

The potential of mourning

Riley (2012) talks of mourning as a response to devastating loss that arrests one in time, leaving people, as well as every nuance of life around them, paralyzed, so that they “stop hearing and observing the world around” (Kivinen, 2021: 499). Like many esoteric, affective processes, mourning requires silence and time, as well as journeys of downward ascent to the depths of one’s body and psyche (Cixous, 1993), lingering on the painful experiences before resurfacing again.

Beyond stillness, which manifests differently in form and duration, depending on the magnitude of the loss(es) mourned, the literature discusses how mourning motivates “a desire to interrupt arrested time . . .[and] to be recast into life after loss” (Hirsch, 2021). In her related discussion on mourning, Segal (1952: 199) mentions:

It is when the world within us is destroyed, when it is dead and loveless, when our loved ones are in fragments, and we ourselves in helpless despair – it is then that we must recreate our world anew, reassemble the pieces, infuse life into dead fragments, recreate life.

When it feels like life is not moving, mourning motivates us to seek more life by unlocking the present to enlarge the realm of the possible (Hirsch, 2021). It “invites us to dream of living again . . . but this doesn’t guarantee a future without vulnerability. Mourning might be a leap in the dark, but it is not a leap into darkness. It is a leap to freedom” (Hirsch, 2021).

In her critical discussion on the emancipatory potentials of mourning, Butler (1990) criticizes neoliberalism for viewing mourning, as a psychic reaction that pollutes the phallocentric order of society, and for repressing it in the form of mere melancholic response. Such repression, Butler argues, directs the subject inwards, inhibiting reconnection with the self and others and thus, possibilities of social transformation. Eng and Han (2000) discuss the Freudian distinction between mourning and melancholia to explain how, in contrast to melancholia, whose orientation toward past losses leads the subject to fight against itself, promoting egocentric destructive states of self-contempt and guilt (Baker and Brewis, 2020), mourning allows the subject to detach itself from the sensations associated with the experienced loss(es) and declare the subject lost or dead. In so doing, mourning offers a resolution to the loss, enabling the subject to welcome new objects of love (Eng and Han, 2000), to reconnect with itself and its intrinsic drives (Butler, 2009).

By allowing for acknowledgment of suffering, mourning enables the subject to recognize the vulnerability of the body as a common social condition; how we are all susceptible to violence and haunted by annihilation (Butler, 2009). Mourning might thus lead to a recognition of bodies’ ontological interdependence; that the “I” is not independent from the other, but inextricably connected to others relationally for the development of one’s subjectivity (Butler, 2004). In bringing forward the relational ties that bind different bodies together, mourning has the potential to dismiss neoliberal ideals of the invulnerable, omnipotent subject to call instead for a reframing of embodied subjectivities as relational (Fotaki and Harding, 2018). It leads us to question the dominant discourses that (in)validate certain lives as loveable and others as “ungrievable,” pushing us to recognize the other as human and such suffering as a form of loss that deserves to be mourned. This enlivens our “deadened” identities (Berlant, 1995) and responses toward these “shadowy others,” whose losses remain traditionally silenced and unmourned (Butler, 2009; Kenny, 2010: 2), leading us to eventually reframe how we ethically relate with each other in pain and suffering (Butler, 2009).

In Mourning becomes the Law, Rose (1996) more specifically argues that in confronting violence, mourning suggests that social subjects fight for justice and political action “renewed and reinvigorated for participation, ready to take on the difficulties and injustices” (p. 36) caused by such violence. This counters the opposing dynamics between oppressors and oppressed recognizing the other as “agent, enraged and invested” (Rose, 1996: 62). This grief is not just about the personal experiences of violence and loss manifest in defending one’s own particular interests with a disregard for the universal. Rose (1996: 54) argues that this grief is rather about adopting the “identity of the voyeur,” who is able to feel “infinite pity” for the other’s suffering. It awakens our collective potential for care and compassion which emerges in the awareness of our existential vulnerability and the embodied affects that we share (Butler, 2009).

Being attentive to others’ suffering and reuniting in mourning is being attentive, as ethically responsible subjects, to embodied truths which must be spoken. It is ultimately about deciding what kind of humans we choose to be, not only for us, but also for others, in a world afflicted by continuous challenges (West, 2018). This is because, as Rose (1996) reminds us, politics does not happen when we act on behalf of our own damaged good, but when we act, without guarantee, for the common good to defend the universal interest. Understanding mourning this way, and exposing this in our writing promises, I suggest, to enable collective, political action against the forms of social violence inflicted on different bodies by normative structures, to join forces and drive together long desired transformation in society. Exploring alternative spaces for political action at times, when gathering in public spaces becomes prohibited, is important. As one of the reviewers said, “for us as academics, that space can be found in our writing, but it needs to be a [form of] writing that does not throw the academic gaze ‘outside’ but ‘inside’ in our own communities.” I agree. This is the kind of political space which, I suggest, a reflexive, embodied, and affective experience of academic writing as mourning can offer, as developed next.

Academic writing as mourning

In my diary confessions, I keep reminding myself that, luckily, I can still write to enable a space to enact my need to mourn the losses and vulnerabilities overexposed by the current conditions of enhanced biopolitical crisis. Experiencing writing as a mourning practice enables me to pour out my darkest, deepest thoughts and affects, to react to afflictions experienced under pandemic-related constraints. This involves questioning the rigidity of academic writing, which constrains our ability to speak of our embodied truths and vulnerabilities in empowering ways. This writing is about sharing concerns, affects, sensations, and feelings. It is about exposing embodied vulnerabilities, fragility, suffering, disappointment, despair, and indignation for personally and socially experienced losses; it is about learning to live through grief, to recognize its transformative potential for change, rather than push it away (Kivinen, 2021: 498). It is a feminist affective writing, allowing us to make sense of moments of solitude, melancholia and helplessness; of moments of reflection, nostalgia, and the quest for a better world (Cixous, 1993; Kivinen, 2021). It allows for self-contradictions, unveiling the polyphonic multiplicities that different experiences of othering might embody; it seeks to create a space of/for affective sharing and connection with others by recognizing forms of injustice, which it strives to voice and overturn (Ahmed, 2016).

As much as exposing embodied affects and as their emerging realizations might be experienced “as a[n unsettling] journey through the wilderness” (hooks, 2001: 227), hooks reminds us that embracing our wounds is necessary for healing. Writing vulnerability brings grief along with the transformative potential of ordinary affects (Stewart, 2007), exchanged through bodies, to be viewed publicly, instead of being hidden away (Boncori and Smith, 2019; Kivinen, 2021). As Rozmarin (2021) argues, acknowledging vulnerability provides a relational affective recourse for feminist, political subjects: it enables us to recognize our dependence on the systemic conditions that hinder our lives and reposition our subjectivities transformatively through our affective inter-becoming. Writing vulnerability enables us to open our hearts to love and be loved, to receive support and care from those who care (hooks, 2001: 233), and to recognize strength in our weakness (Kiriakos and Tienari, 2018). Such relational love guides grief (hooks, 2001) as a restorative force, which we can use to create collective spaces of/for affective resonance to nurture an ethics of care for healing together (hooks, 2001). This promises to enable a transition from the melancholy experience of the unattainable love-object (Baker and Brewis, 2020) toward love understood as longing for academic knowledge, research, and writing (Kiriakos and Tienari, 2018; Mandalaki and Perezts, 2022), providing an affective relational language to speak with/through one another. Putting such a conception of love at the center of our writing and socialization practices, in life and in academia, might then allow us to develop loving communities of healing, so necessary for emotional growth, wherein bodies might speak their pain, grief, shame, anger, and love courageously. They can open both mind and heart and mourn their losses in empowering ways that enable recovery (hooks, 2001).

As Kivinen (2021) writes, experiencing loss and mourning is an inevitable, critical, and shared part of human existence; the grief in question does not necessarily disappear. However, finding ways to mourn our losses in our writing creates embodied writing spaces where we can learn to live with our grief and recognize another’s pain as grievable (Butler, 2009; Kivinen, 2021). These are spaces of/for survival and resistance (Silva, 2021), where expressions of mourning often considered socially unacceptable or unprofessional are brought to light (Boncori and Smith, 2019): where “people with scars recognize each other (. . .) [and] sometimes magic happens in that space between bodies. New ideas emerge, different pathways become possible, other doors can be closed” (Kivinen, 2021: 500). In these writing spaces, we can keep our affective intimacies with others alive and exchange stories of loss and love, transcending normativity. For, these spaces cross the boundary between life and death (Alasuutari, 2021) and that determining whose losses are worth mourning and whose are not (Butler, 2009); they lead us to reframe our writing and socialization practices through the aperture of affect, reminding us even in the darkest periods that there is a “flicker of hope” where alternative endings are possible (Altan, 2019: 155). This is the power of words; they unearth our grief and share it (Kivinen, 2021). We can then remove the masks of bravery, which we are often required to maintain in our daily lives, to recognize each other as human.

Writing this way puts an end to the unfeeling culture of academia that cloaks the vulnerabilities of researcher and researched behind academically-formatted discourse, enabling instead a meaningful engagement with the affective intensities of situated, embodied experience (Hokkanen, 2017). By exposing the multifaceted “pulsing refrains of affect that illuminate scenes of living amid [the] crisis [of] ordinariness” (Berlant, 2011; Kenny, 2020: 9), this writing reveals how the affective intimacies that connect us to others (Kolehmainen et al., 2021) can sustain or overturn forms of social injustice that remain invisible. Such revelations push us to reclaim the activist potential of thinking, feeling, and writing out of a feminist, vulnerable, affective space to question established, normative patterns overexposing vulnerabilities, including how academic writing conventions alienate the writer from the affective writing necessary to survive a pandemic (Mandalaki, 2021b). Making sense of this reality leads us to resist embodying the ideal of the perfect academic, inattentive to embodied needs and experiences in crises, emancipating different, marginalized bodies to question normative motivations, expectations, and drives. Most importantly, it enables us to recognize how asymmetrical distributions of privilege under normative systems fail some more than others and to enact our potential to care for the grief and suffering of others (Butler, 2009) to reinvent ways of living and writing ethically and relationally, for, through, and with one another.

It is perhaps worth noting that mourning, as a survival writing mechanism, need not pertain only to past losses relating, according to Freudian thought, to inward and egocentric melancholy responses, which limit possibilities for relational action. Rather, mourning can also pertain to future losses emerging from our affective entanglements with objects of desire, fantasies and images of the good life, what we already know we cannot attain yet remain destructively attached to (Berlant, 2011). I suggest that engaging with an affective writing practice to mourn past and future losses raises awareness of the multifaceted ways in which we are affectively entangled in the social and the political, in the context of an “impasse.” It confronts us with our lost, “dead” citizenship and the cruel structures that construct it, making space for mourning this together, on a broader social and national level. In this process, we realize how heteronormative structures deploy couplings of reason and violence (Taussig, 1992) to police our subjectivities, and we are pushed to resist reproducing the battle between “crassness and sentimental sublimity that defines all of our bodies” to enliven instead our relations to power, nature, society, desire, sensation, and history (Berlant, 1995: 15). We can then develop the agency needed to reverse the destructive patterns that unmake our bodies to envisage alternative futures.

As Ahmed reminds us, “to recognize loss can mean to be willing to experience an intensification of the sadness that hopefulness postpones” (Ahmed, 2010: 65), to acknowledge that what we need to survive a deadly pandemic and its collateral consequences goes beyond hope, as one of the reviewers put it appositely. It requires tuning to our feelings and emotions, no matter how negative they might be and refusing to accommodate maladjusted ways of living and writing for survival. For as Ahmed reminds us, “what lies behind this adjustment is the loss of other possible ways of living, a loss that must remain unmourned if you are to stay well-adjusted.” But, “feminist subjects in refusing to be well adjusted not only mourn the losses, but in mourning open up other possibilities for living, as openings that we inherit over generations” (Ahmed, 2010: 79).

In this process, we no longer understand negative emotions as impediments to political action or as experiences needing to be transformed into the political. Becoming attuned to our negative emotions positions these already as political (Ahmed, 2014). It is “an opening of the wound to air,” necessary for redefining the conditions of our lives (Berlant, 1995: 15), embracing these moments of affective dissonance and dissensus, inseparable from collective, solidary political action and constitutive of it (Hemmings, 2012). As Berlant argues, we cannot escape the negativity that informs our encounters with the other (Harding, 2016). But such negativity is not just a necessary evil. It is these unseen stories that connect us through negative affects, vulnerability, sadness, anger, despair, or disagreement, which provide points of attachment to others, as well as information and energy, enabling us to share and survive through others in our writing and to dignify our losses (Ahmed, 2010: 72). In such recognition of our (mis)alignments with others’ experiences, we connect in body, heart and mind, to develop forms of affective embodiment that fuel our abilities to stand in affective solidarity with one another (McCarthy and Glozer, 2022).

However sad or pessimistic writing as mourning might seem, I suggest that it is necessary. It allows us to bear witness to “the survival strategies we attach to affects” (Berlant, 2011: 49), pushing us to “organize our exhaustion into a refusal to reproduce normativity” (Berlant, 2017, in an interview with Zarranz and Ledoux-Beaugrand); this is especially so, given that going “back to normal” does not hold the promise of individual and collective flourishing. This writing recognizes engagement with shared ordinary affects “as the crusader against biopolitical violence” (Berlant, 2017), and as the only battleground for political action (Ashcraft, 2017) as we reunite in our struggles for driving change (Beavan et al., 2021) in the academy and in broader society. To recount the Iranian activist, Turan Mirhadi, ² it is about “turn[ing] great grief into great work” to meaningfully transform our lives. It might enable a transition from cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011) toward another kind of optimism, which has the potential to open a whole new horizon to the unknown, without anticipation (Ahmed, 2016); and an awakening of our “dead” identities for living life fully and relationally.

Concluding with an open end. . .

Inspired by a feminist, activist curiosity, which does not sit comfortably within normative structures, I propose academic writing as a mourning practice, enabling the tracking of forms of unwarranted harm and suffering overexposed by the current pandemic. Experiencing writing as mourning derives from a visceral need to question vested normative practices which underlie this overexposure, including academic writing conventions, which seal off possibilities for writing affectively (about) the crises surrounding our lives. I suggest that the mourning of vulnerabilities and losses can enable an affective writing experience, which has the collective potential to act as a remedial catharsis to embodied affects and “wounds.”

Specifically, I write (about) affect through autoethnographic composition, which captures the everyday, situated, embodied, and affective experience (Hokkanen and Koskinen, 2016) and draw on affect theory, seeking to make sense of how my body and those of others, with whom I have exchanged, are affectively involved in the intensity of our engagement with normative structures, workplaces, and discourses in this extreme situation of biopolitical crisis (Berlant, 2011). As Berlant posits, engaging with affect theory through autobiographical and embodied forms of writing, in particular, attunes us to visceral epistemologies, which “help us see the contradictions and ambivalences in our projects and attachments” (. . .) “It is a training in paying attention (. . .) a way of describing the overdetermining forces that make a scene (like the historical present) complicated, overwhelming, and in movement” (Berlant, 2017, in an interview with Zarranz and Ledoux-Beaugrand). However personal such an autoethnographic engagement might sound, this affective text has thus neither been written by me exclusively, nor concerns me exclusively. Rather, it carries the affective traces of bodies that have affected me, even if these do not conspicuously appear here (Bell and Vachhani, 2020). As Ahmed (2014: 128) reminds us, “it is the very failure of affect to be located in a subject or object that allows it to generate the surfaces of collective bodies” in social life and academic writing. The autoethnographic “I” here thus does not denote an isolated writing practice, but one that seeks to enable resonance both in our differences and similarities to speak (about) vulnerability in ways that enable us to touch each other in our writing (Mandalaki, 2021a; Pullen and Rhodes, 2008). This acknowledges that writing remains a relational practice, even when it starts from an autoethnographic position, a relational activist practice with social, ethical, and political bearing, promising to join forces for desired transformation (Beavan et al., 2021).

Experiencing writing as a mourning practice becomes even more relevant at this particular moment when I came to touch this paper again, 6 months after I had developed its first draft and later during the revision process. France was going into its second and third waves of confinement, which found me sharing the same apartment with my partner while being in the process of breaking up, after a long relationship, and before moving to a new place amid a temporary disability. These experiences “(im)mobilized” me physically, psychologically, and emotionally for some time. Though perhaps beyond this paper’s focus or the reader’s interest, this contextualization offers a glimpse into my own positionality as a writer and is significant for an autoethnographic account. Putting this down on paper is an effort to do justice to the very feelings and sensations that push me to flesh out these lines at this particular moment and make me experience writing as a cathartic practice of mourning in all its multiplicities, whether personal, professional, or social. It is an effort to resist that which has been suppressing my (female) embodied academic and social subjectivities for so long, but also to become aware of my privileges and to demonstrate the care that I hold for others, whose losses are rarely talked about.

Educated in masculine academia, I am aware that the embodied, feminist tone that (un)dresses this embodied text and its “naked” esthetics surely does not resonate with the masculine academic pen (Mandalaki and Perezts, 2022). Yet, triggered by embodied affects—experiences of othering and vulnerability (Helin, 2019a; Pullen, 2018)—calling out for expression and urgent transformation, this text could not have followed conventional form. In this way, it actively resists and challenges academic normativity and its status quo (Pullen et al., 2020). Doing justice to these affective experiences meant submitting to the contamination and poetics of embodied and affective knowledge creation, letting slip words from my fingers in ways that the intellect alone cannot order (Mandalaki, 2021a) to capture the “sticky [affective] pragmatics of right now, right here” (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010: 14).

In so doing, I wish to contribute to burgeoning feminist voices calling for the need to reinvent the potential of embodied, affective forms of writing, and exposures of grief in particular (Boncori and Smith, 2019; Kivinen, 2021), to develop knowledge that can meaningfully transform our societies (e.g. Ahonen et al., 2020; Beavan et al., 2021; Helin, 2019a; Mandalaki, 2021a, 2021b; Pullen, 2018; Pullen et al., 2020; Thanem and Knights, 2019). Through engagement with critical affect theory, and namely Berlant’s (Berlant, 2011, 2015; Edelman and Berlant, 2014) critical ideas on affect, largely understudied in organization studies with few exceptions (Harding, 2016; Kenny, 2020), I also wish to join the burgeoning organizational studies literature discussing the emancipatory potential of affect for political and relational action (Alasuutari, 2021; Ashcraft, 2017; Fotaki and Daskalaki, 2021; Fotaki and Harding, 2018; Fotaki and Pullen, 2019; Kolehmainen et al., 2021; McCarthy and Glozer, 2022). In so doing, I embrace a collective struggle to push the boundaries of conventional academic practices to explore the empowering potential of doing and writing research through critical engagement with embodied and affective experiences. The aim is to reinvent the basis for developing new, “healthy” and “alive” social identities and academic subjectivities, as well as meaningful knowledge.

Writing this way is about speaking freely, both about what we think and what we feel (Rhodes, 2019), to create democratic spaces to relate, in/through our differences, as humans. Recognizing the politics of representation as entrenched in often asymmetrical structures of power and privilege between researcher and researched (Rhodes and Westwood, 2007), I do not mean to imply that this writing can “represent” the different other ethically. Instead, it is relational writing from the heart, about the heart, a form of “ethical noticing” seeking to inhabit the present by bearing witness to how life is affectively entangled in the surrounding world (Berlant, 2011). It opens up space not only for writing and doing things differently (Meriläinen et al., 2022; Pullen et al., 2020) but also, and most importantly, for feeling differently by rewriting affect politically. This is not about representing absolute truths. Rather, it is about recognizing that we often need to give up some knowledge to make space for an affective, relational, situated, and embodied ethics (Kaasila-Pakanen, 2021; Pullen and Rhodes, 2022; Rhodes and Westwood, 2007). It is an exercise in speaking and listening where “we can, in some ways, give up the self and absorb the other’s subjectivity” (Edelman and Berlant, 2014; Harding, 2016: 9) in the context of a relationality beset with “valences of social intensities and fantasies, our disagreements and failures to agree.” These last are necessary for thinking, acting, feeling and healing relationally in/through the pages we write (Edelman and Berlant, 2014: ix).

Reinventing our ability to embrace the self and others in all their affective multiplicities might enable researching, writing, learning, and knowing our bodies and those of others in respectful ways. We might create and sustain these affective writing spaces (both generally and particularly when doing so in public is restricted) relationally, through caring. In this way, we resist the disembodied conventions and hierarchical boundaries promoting individualism in academia and broader society to establish the social and academic futures we desire together. With care, in solidarity.

Luckily, we can still write, let’s remind ourselves. . .