Marking humans for consumption,whilst erasing others: Affective becomings and the workings of (dis)comfort

Abstract

In the becoming of neoliberal cities, consumption can play an important role in the process of marking who is human, that is, fit for consumption, and who is not. This paper explores such processes as affective becomings and focuses on the workings of comfort and discomfort to highlight how some bodies are delegitimized in order for others to become legitimatized. Using an ethnographic approach with affective methodologies, I trace the process of erasing activism collectives that were resisting gentrification in São Paulo and advocating the ‘right to the city’. The contribution of this paper is threefold. Firstly, it highlights how the becoming of the neoliberal city follows a neoliberal normativity in tandem with a colonial one. By exploring how spaces, bodies, and norms are always related to one another in this process, I highlight how ‘the consumer’ has become the body who counts (i.e. the human). Secondly, this paper shows how activism work refracts the dynamics of the neoliberal-colonial normativity, as it (re)acts to its mechanisms for sorting out bodies. Thirdly, this paper highlights the political dimensions of (dis)comfort that mark the splitting of legitimate and illegitimatebodies in a social reproduction for consumption. Consequently, it explores how discomfort has been used as a political-affective tool of delegitimization, subjugation, and oppression.

Introduction

This paper explores how some bodies are delegitimized for others to become legitimatized in the city centre of São Paulo. São Paulo is in the process of becoming a neoliberal city and consumption seems to play an important role in the process of legitimizing who fits in spaces for consumption around the city – the humans for consumption (i.e. consumers) – and who does not (i.e. others). This splitting between legitimate and illegitimate bodies resonates with the idea of a neoliberal ‘right to the city’, which naturalizes consumption rights as human rights (cf., Harvey, 2003). This way, the process of neoliberal becoming marks some bodies as having the right to consume the city, while other bodies as not having that right. It marks who is the human that counts in the process of becoming a neoliberal city whilst erases others who do not.

This paper then assumes “consumption contributes to the consolidation of different forms of embodiment which sustain social and cultural hierarchies” (Sassatelli et al., 2022: 227) and traces embodiment as a continuous process. It focuses on the surfacing processes of bodily–social–spatial becoming to explore how “consumer culture is more than commoditization and affluence (…) consumer culture also produces consumers” (Sassatelli, 2007: 6) as the humans that count. By tracing affective becomings as surfacing processes, it decentres the universalizing notion of ‘the consumer as the subject’ which often covers a particular vision of subjectivity and body (i.e. a Western modern – white, male, rational, individualized – subjectivity and body).

For such decentralization, it combines Sara Ahmed’s theoretical perspective of emotions with Gabriel Tarde’s epistemological take on affective formations. Ahmed’s (2014) cultural-political perspective on emotions highlights what emotions – as affects – do (i.e. the effects of affects) and does not subscribe to the “model of emotion as being subject-centered” (Schmitz and Ahmed, 2014: 98). Rather, her model covers how bodies affect and are affected with particular attention to how is it that certain bodies and things are given value over time – through surfacing processes. In turn, Gabriel Tarde’s (1903) position on affective formations denaturalizes the individual body as the stem of the social form (Blackman, 2012; see also Brennan, 2004). Tarde’s model follows multiplicity formations (i.e. packs and crowds) ‘that are properly speaking neither subjects nor objects’ (Brighenti, 2010: 291). For him, “a multiplicity is neither an individual nor a group, yet it is to be regarded as a social formation” (p. 300). By combining Ahmed and Tarde’s perspectives, it becomes possible to explore bodily-social-spatial formations that escapes the modern vision of (individual) subjectivity and body.

Particularly, this paper focuses on (dis)comfort as an emotion that highlights the relation between body, space and normativity. For Ahmed, the relations of affect, body, space, and normativity are closely interwoven; their dynamics have surfacing effects that legitimize some bodies over others. For her, normativity can be seen as a form of comforting, as “one feels better by the warmth of being faced by a world that one has already taken in. One does not notice this as a world when one has been shaped by that world, and even acquires its shape” (Ahmed, 2014: 148). (Dis)comfort then is not seen as inside-out (conscious) emotion, nor a (preconscious) outside-in affect (Leys, 2011). Rather, (dis)comfort is taken as an affective flow that can be traced through multiple encounters. That is, through (dis)comfort we can trace the alignments and misalignments between bodies, spaces, and normativity.

Using an ethnographic approach with affective methodologies, I traced the process of delegitimising activism collectives that were advocating the ‘right to the city’ and resisting gentrification in São Paulo (Harvey, 2003; Iveson, 2011; Marcuse, 2009). Between 2011 and 2016, these activists were engaged in multiple urban activism initiatives trying to see, propose and develop alternatives to the development of neoliberal policies. These urban activism collectives had a pivotal role in the 2013 Brazilian protests (Magalhães Lopes et al., 2021). However, as the protests evolved, their bodies and voices – together with many other vulnerable residents – were removed through an erasure process (Varman and Vijay, 2018). In its place, the voices of citizens-as-consumers became heard (Fontenelle and Pozzebon, 2018). The emergence of these citizens-as-consumers intertwined with the disappearance of the great majority of activists, following the splitting between legitimate and illegitimate bodies.

The contribution of this article is threefold. Firstly, it extends Miles’ (2012) critique of consumption studies’ “apparent reluctance to engage with the notion that ‘consumers’ of the neoliberal city bring a degree of agency to th[e] process” of the development of neoliberal cities (p. 217). This paper supports such a critique; it also supports Fontenelle and Pozzebon’s (2018) argument that the notion of the consumer encompasses idealized notions of citizenship. Yet it emphasizes how the consumer is not a neutral body – it is a specific embodiment that follows the neoliberal-colonial normativity. This way, it considers that both ‘the consumer’ and ‘the human’ work in tandem as ideals in the continuous process of becoming (rather than being). Secondly, this paper shows how activism work refracts the dynamics of the neoliberal-colonial normativity, as it (re)acts to its mechanisms for sorting out bodies. It shows how the power dynamic in such mechanisms produces ideal bodies (i.e. consumers) and multiple failing bodies. This paper extends Bauman’s (2007) discussion on failing the ideal of consumer culture. Whereas Bauman focuses on how poor and vulnerable people (i.e. the underclass) are often seen as ‘flawed consumers’ in the pervasive consumer culture, this study shows how activists themselves become failing bodies as they often resist both ‘the consumer’ and ‘the human’ ideals. Thirdly, this paper adds to the emerging literature on consumption studies that connects emotions, cultural presentations, and social relationships (Illouz, 2009) by highlighting the political dimensions of (dis)comfort. I trace how (dis)comfort marks the splitting of legitimate and illegitimate bodies in the social reproduction for consumption and explore how discomfort has been used as a political-affective tool of delegitimization, subjugation, and oppression.

Consumption in the becoming of neoliberal cities

The process of cities becoming neoliberal has been discussed extensively in multiple fields for its potential to reveal how global power structures of capitalism intersect with people’s daily lived experiences (Massey, 2007; Sassen, 2002). For example, Brenner and Theodore (2002) show how neoliberal rationality creates forms of urban inequality (depending on the eligibility of an individual or social group) to fit the criteria of consumer society, as the development of cities is increasingly defined by elites through and by consumption (Miles, 2012). Discussions on cities becoming neoliberal have highlighted sociomaterial processes with an orientation towards the neoliberal social ideal of prosperity, growth, and consumption (e.g. Ilkucan and Sandikci, 2005; Maclaran and Brown, 2005; Visconti et al., 2010).

The roles of consumption and consumers in gentrification processes as manifestations of neoliberal spatial becoming have not been ignored (e.g. Castilhos and Dolbec, 2018; Warde, 1991). For example, Zukin (2008, 2009) has covered how alternative consumption led to the creation of entrepreneurial spaces like restaurants and bars as well as the resurgence of farmers’ markets, offering urban consumers a safe and comfortable place to perform difference from mainstream norms (i.e. authenticity), whereas Anjaria (2009) has shown how activists can perform and reinforce ideals of consumption, rather than resist them.

Nevertheless, neoliberal spaces are “not pre-given but constituted by practical moments in the process of becoming” (Miles, 2012: 224), and we thus need a more complex understanding of the becoming process of neoliberal cities. In response to Miles’ (2012) call for recognition of the emotional impact of consumption experiences as a possible route for researchers to explore the neoliberal city as a complex negotiated entity (p. 223), I argue that a focus on emotions as affects – and affective becomings – can extend this call showing how both spaces and bodies are always in the process of becoming.

The becoming of spaces and bodies: the political potential of affects and emotions

The becoming of neoliberal spaces is yet to be explored through affective political processes in consumption literature. While some studies have explored affective dynamics in the becoming of spaces (e.g. Cheetham et al., 2018), their political dimensions are often omitted. At the same time, the literature on emotions and consumption (e.g. Illouz, 2009; Sandlin and Callahan, 2009) rarely covers the spatial dynamics of the neoliberal city. A few exceptions, such as a study by Jayne and Ferenčuhová (2015), show “personal and collective consumption bound up with comfort and city life as the city goes through transformations” (p. 329). The scholars highlight the material capacities to affect and be affected, focusing on the dynamics between humans and more-than-humans (i.e. material actors and hybrids). By taking this ecological perspective, the cultural–political dimensions of social dynamics are not emphasized (e.g. (de)humanizing processes between humans and less-than-humans as well as their felt experiences).

Although consumption literature has begun uncovering (de)humanizing processes, these studies are only embryonic (e.g. Carrington et al., 2020; Page, 2017). Varman and Vijay (2018) examine how the process of derealization – a process that makes people less human – is linked to the violent dispossession inherent to capitalism, and how the dehumanized are denied the status of subjects, or desubjectified. Although the scholars connect the violence of vulnerable consumers (poor slum dwellers in Bangalore, India) with spatial dynamics and the normativity in place (being displaced to make space for a commercial building complex), they do not elaborate further on the dynamics between violent encounters and affects (as emotions).

To highlight the cultural–political, and sometimes violent, dimensions of affects and their workings (i.e. the capacity to affect and be affected), felt experiences must come to the fore. This paper follows scholars that do not distinguish between affect and emotions (e.g. Ahmed, 2014; Leys, 2011). Affects, as emotions, are seen as forces that mark both spaces and bodies continuously in relation to norms. Bodies, as spaces, take the shape of norms (e.g. racialized bodies, gendered bodies; see Butler, 2011). For Ahmed, the relation between body and space is crucial since the notion of body is a matter of how we inhabit the world (Ahmed, 2006; 2014). The capacity of bodies to extend in space becomes instructive precisely because this capacity is related to the affective potential of the body in relation to the space. By working with affects as emotions, it becomes possible to focus on bodily–social–spatial dynamics and to explore the workings of the affective processes in relation to cultural meanings.

Ahmed’s cultural–political dimensions of emotions

Ahmed’s work, located at the intersection of feminist, queer, and race studies, focuses on the politics of emotions and how white middle-class heteronormativity is reproduced and maintained through the workings of emotions as affects. For Ahmed (2014), emotions move us. Emotions encompass movements and attachments: “What moves us, what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place” (Ahmed, 2014: 27). Being moved by some can be precisely what attaches us to others – bodies are aligned with some and misaligned with others. For her, our orientations matter. What moves us or what makes us tremble is not random; it is culturally and politically oriented. Affective dynamics are related to shared meanings; they are not outside meaning (Leys, 2011; see also Seigworth and Gregg, 2010).

The becoming of bodies, spaces, and norms are then intertwined cultural and political processes. Ahmed’s approach to emotions (as affects) does not assume the human body to be neutral, and she elaborates on how emotions work in the ‘surfacing’ processes of individual and collective bodies. She argues that the distinction between the inside and the outside of bodies, whether individual or collective ones, is the result of movements and attachments produced in response to others (Ahmed, 2014). Through emotions, the boundaries of what I, you, we, and they are come to the surface, and consequently the surfacing of ‘the other’ (i.e. you or they) can be seen as the effects of affective dynamics. Through love, for example, bodies can merge together and produce the surfacing of a we. If someone I love gets hurt, I feel it in my skin, marking a shifting on the felt surface. Through love, we can trace such a shifting from me to us. Yet we do not love randomly – our love is oriented towards certain bodies, just as is our hate or disgust (Magalhães Lopes, 2018). The surfacing process of bodies does not happen outside meaning – cultural signs play a fundamental role in how emotions circulate and accumulate, while also playing a role in their surfacing effects.

Following Ahmed’s approach to emotions has the potential to address Illouz’s (2009) critique on desire and emotions in the field of consumption. Illouz points out that consumption literature has often used desire as the emotion driving consumption. She highlights that not only is the notion of desire undifferentiated in consumption studies, but that it has been used in an inconsistent way. For Illouz, it “seems ill-equipped to account for the intricate relationship between the powerful constraints exerted by the market on needs and motivations on the one hand and the real experience of freedom and pleasure consumption procures on the other” (p. 382). By working with desire and/as affect as an undifferentiated category, many scholars have then assumed an undifferentiated–neutral perspective of affect and emotions (Ahmed, 2006). Illouz (2009) indicates that the different trajectories of consumers are linked to different workings of emotions, and this differentiation is important.

In this paper, I focus on comfort and discomfort as affective forces that can highlight the splitting of legitimate bodies from illegitimate bodies in relation to normativities. By exploring the cultural and political dimensions of (dis)comfort, I follow Illouz’s proposition for consumption scholars to cover a broader variety of emotions in our accounts, explicitly rather than implicitly.

The cultural–political dimensions of (dis)comfort

“The word ‘comfort’ suggests well-being and satisfaction, but it also suggests an ease and easiness” (Ahmed, 2014: 146). To feel comfortable is to feel at ease in the world: more precisely, it is “to be at ease in a world that reflects back the form one inhabits as an ideal” (p. 147). Feeling uncomfortable happens when this easiness is absent or removed. Discomfort entails not feeling easy in the world, as this world does not reflect the form one inhabits as an ideal. Whenever in comfort, the body is felt to melt in the space:

To be comfortable is to be at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins. One fits, and by fitting, the surfaces of bodies disappear from view. The disappearance of the surface is instructive: in feelings of comfort, bodies extend into spaces, and spaces extend into bodies. The sinking feeling involves a seamless space, or a space where you can’t see the ‘stitches’ between bodies. (Ahmed 2014, p. 148, p. 148)

Whereas comfort implies a seamless sensation, discomfort evokes sensations of misalignment and hardship. This hardship is felt through bodies “who do not sink into spaces, whose bodies are registered as not fitting, often have to work to make others comfortable” (Ahmed, 2014: 224). Unfitting bodies can feel heavy, as they are constantly working to make others comfortable. Through comfort, there is a bodily–social–spatial mirroring, which is intertwined with the circulation of cultural meanings in place. By focusing on instances of comfort and discomfort, I could explore bodily–social–spatial dynamics in relation to the norms in place. To trace such dynamic process, I followed Tarde’s discussion on multiplicities as well as imitation and contagion.

Tarde’s multiplicities: following affective flows through alignments and misalignments

For Tarde (1903), the social can be seen as a process of both affective alignment and misalignment and bodily formations become seen as effects of such affective reverberations. Tarde’s discussion on imitation and contagion highlights such affective alignments and misalignments in the process of becoming. For him, each interaction is seen as an imitative flow across bodies, whether in alignment or misalignment (i.e. attachments and splittings). His focus then is on the affective forces that flow across (individual and collective) bodies, and which can be traced as/through affective alignments and misalignments.

For Tarde, the embodiment becomes a process through continuous affective alignment and misalignment. For example, “rather than subjects and objects, in multiplicities [e.g., packs as collectives, protests as crowds] we have encounters, and encounters occur in series; they are chains of interlinkages, each of which can be settled or unsettled” (Brighenti, 2010: 300).

Thus, following Tarde’s perspective on affective alignment or misalignment in combination with Ahmed’s discussions on (dis)comfort and normativity, I adopted ‘affective flows’ as unit of analysis to trace affective reverberations and trajectories that become felt as comfort when in alignment and discomfort when in misalignment to ideological patterns. Such position allowed me to explore bodily relations in (dis)connection with norms and spaces. For further discussion on this theoretical position and its methodological implications, I have elaborated them further elsewhere (Magalhães Lopes et al., 2021).

Below, I discuss how I conducted an ethnographic study focused on tracing multiple affective orientations and trajectories with a focus on encounters of (dis)comfort in the becoming of São Paulo as a neoliberal city.

Methodological considerations

This study covered the affective orientations and trajectories of multiple urban activism collectives, including Baixo Centro (BxC), Casa da Cultura Digital (CCD, ‘House of Digital Culture’ in English), Onibus Hacker (OH, ‘Hacker Bus’), Casa do Povo (CP, ‘House of People’), Voodoohop (VDH), Festa Junina no Minhocão (FJM, ‘Folk Parties of June in the Big Worm’), A Batata Precisa de Você (BPV, ‘The Potato Needs You’), and BijaRi. Although BxC can be considered a central collective, the collectives were not treated as representational bounded brand communities (Magalhães Lopes et al., 2021), which would be to follow a neoliberal logic. Many activists were resisting such models of modern organizing and predatory value appropriation of capitalism modernity (Kennedy, 2017), making it impossible to draw a distinct line between them according to branded identities. The collectives were treated as collective bodily becomings themselves (Tarde, 1903); their surfaces were also seen as being in the making – continuously – through multiple affective alignments and misalignments. For example, BxC surfaced from and engulfed other collectives while in turn other collectives themselves surfaced from BxC. Their becomings were traced through (un)stable ‘felt surfaces’ rather than clear and stable representational-cognitive boundaries (Magalhães Lopes et al., 2021).

In order to highlight the dynamic processes between bodies, spaces, norms, and meanings through felt experiences, I followed an affective ethnographic approach (Gherardi, 2019) and each ethnographic interaction was seen as an affective (re)action that links bodies, spaces, meanings, and norms. Thus, in addition to following conventional ethnographic methodologies, I adopted complementary approaches for affective sensitivity and attuning in the data production and analysis (Knudsen and Stage, 2015). Guided by autoethnographic sensibilities (Ferdinand, 2015), as well as affective data production and analysis (Blackman, 2015; Trivelli, 2015), I immersed myself in both online (Murthy, 2008) and offline encounters and interactions (Van Maanen, 2011).

Through 4 years of fieldwork (2013–2017), I followed activists’ conversations (online and offline), media, events, audiovisual materials, and social networks. I read and analyzed the emails they exchanged during these years (covering 3560 topics, with 1–150 emails per topic) ¹ and covered their social media accounts. I also complemented the data corpus with interviews, shared documents, videos, media coverage, data participation, and data recollection. I conducted 20 ethnographic interviews with 16 participants. I produced data formally in São Paulo between 2014 and 2016 for short periods, and continuously for 4 months in late 2016. Besides this, I had a prolonged prior engagement with the context since 2000. In mid-2013 and late 2016, I also attended several political protests that took place in São Paulo, attended by many urban activists. In both periods, I was living near Paulista Avenue, one of the main places for protests in São Paulo. Tracing their activism was instructive precisely because they could be seen as zones of dynamic friction where the affective alignment and misalignment – producing surfacing effects – become more potent and salient. The dynamism and potency of such a context can highlight the continuous and multiple affective splittings and attachments in place.

Below, I present how São Paulo is in a process of becoming a neoliberal city through ‘requalification’ programs and how these activism collectives were resisting the gentrification process.

The ‘requalification’ of São Paulo and its becoming as a neoliberal city

São Paulo is a heterogeneous city, with fairly homogeneous neighbourhoods. It is the world’s fourth largest city by population, with almost 13 million residents. It condenses many of the country’s social, economic and political incongruences, such as being the eighth largest economy in the world (OECD, 2020) and having been, since 1970, one of the most unequal countries in the world (Neri, 2019). It condenses multiple elements of the Brazilian context, interweaving features of neoliberal and colonial normativities.

The economic inequality and social segregation of its population can be seen through clear divisions between prosperity and misery in different neighbourhoods. Whereas some neighbourhoods are marked by wealth and a white demographic, others are marked by poverty and a black demographic, following the colonial division that splits humans from less-than-humans. The urbanization process in Brazil still follows the colonial division between the Casa Grande (the house of the slave owner and his family) and the Senzala (the house of the slaves). While the city’s different neighbourhoods can be worlds apart, the city centre is still a disputed exception of such colonial social division. It is a heterogeneous space with multiple overlapping and uneven normativities.

Visiting the city centre of São Paulo and especially Cracolândia (Crackland) ² can be an intense experience. Some areas are extremely dirty, with trash in many places and a smell of urine and faeces. Homelessness is ubiquitous. Some homeless people build small shelters, while others sleep on the ground without any ‘house decoration’. Even though these situations are common in many places of the city, they are predominant in the city centre, Crackland included, which concentrates such ‘signs of badness’ (Ahmed, 2014). Yet the city centre is a lively area, with many parties, bars, and meeting places. It has become a place of affordable leisure for the lower and middle class on the one hand, and for many types of indulgences on the other, from prostitution to drugs. Permeated by multiple indulgent consumption practices, the city centre encompasses multiple signs of badness (Ahmed, 2014). At the same time, due to the attractiveness of its central location, the area has become a target for real estate speculation.

The city centre has become a space where opposing worlds – the prosperous and the wretched, the Casa-Grande and the Senzala – clash as they dispute the territory. Yet, this dispute is not balanced. With the underlying claim of cleaning and improving the city centre, the becoming process in the area marks an unbalanced dispute, which is manifested through consumption rights – that is, who has the (human) right to occupy and consume that space. With the promotion of multiple neoliberal public policies, the city centre is becoming a space for consumption.

The ‘requalification’ policies and projects are not new, as there have been intermittent, similar projects from different governments. For example, former mayor Gilberto Kassab (2006–2013) ran a ‘revitalization program’ called ‘Operation Crackland,’ based on which João Dória (2017–2019) developed a similar ‘requalification program’. In a TV interview given 2 days after Dória won the municipal elections of 2016 (Brasil Urgente, 2016), he underlined that he would ‘requalify’ the city centre and Crackland by cleaning it. The overlapping of Crackland with the city centre is often a discursive resource, spreading the signs of badness that are already attached to Crackland (which covers a small area of the city centre) to the entire central area. In this interview, he justified his urge to clean the place by using Crackland as a sign of badness that contaminates and designates the whole city centre area as unacceptable, shameful, and disgusting (Lawler, 2005) as it does not mirror ‘major [Western] world cities’.

TV Anchor: Around the world in major world cities, usually the centre of the city, the downtown [said in English, rather than Portuguese], is a beautiful place: protected, preserved.

Elected Mayor: A historical place

TV Anchor: Everyone who is elected as mayor of the city of São Paulo says that they will make the city centre a beautiful place. It does not even need to be beautiful: just clean and safe would be good enough.

Elected Mayor: Something that it is not today, right?

TV Anchor: It is not, and it has never been.

The designation of Crackland as a place to be cleaned is critical. Although the area is very small, the exemplification of the city centre as a land of crack and crack users often frames the whole city centre as unacceptable. The body-space of the entire area is designated as a failing ideal (‘it is not, and it has never been’): the city centre needs to become clean and safe, a ‘historical’ place. “Ideals can be binding, even when we feel we have failed them; indeed, the emotions that register this failure might confirm the ideals in the first place” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 109). Thus, there is a refusal to recognize the city centre’s current spaces, bodies, and history as legitimate. The speech acts above deny the history of the place, as well as the social dynamics in place. By calling for a historical rewriting of the area, the ‘old’ history can be erased whilst a new history can unfold into the city centre with ‘legitimate’ spaces and bodies.

The ideal and the failure of such an ideal: the workings of (dis)comfort

Both designations – the ideal and the failure of such an ideal – were contested by many residents and activists who did not subscribe to the neoliberal normativity being reinforced in the area through the ‘revitalization programs’. As one participant explains,

Last year, real estate speculation, the irresponsible urban projects (such as ‘Nova Luz’) and catastrophic public policies for dealing with crack problems caused civil society to enter the dispute over the streets. The [BxC] Festival was a shout to draw attention to this unpleasant situation. It was for this reason, for this common desire, that people organized themselves in the movement - with the Festival as one of their activities. [Participant’s email, June 27, 2013]

The participants have then felt the urge to react against the urban ‘situation’ which was felt as unpleasant and entered the dispute with part of civil society over the streets. In another email exchange, a participant recalls:

The public administration was increasingly oppressive. You couldn’t serve soup to homeless people, artists couldn’t perform on the street, you couldn’t eat soft boiled eggs in bars, and you couldn’t do any kind of graffiti on the Minhocão (big worm, in English) viaduct columns because everything was turning into a disgusting grey. [Participant’s email, March 31, 2015].

The participants of the urban collectives then started to react against the many urban restrictions by trying to realign their bodies with the city space. Through different activities, causes, and arguments, they kept making multiple efforts to resist such orientations and accommodate their bodies into the city space – whether by promoting cultural activities for free in the streets of the city centre, promoting bike lanes, or advocating for urban hackerism. Their propositions were often focused on the different ways in which to consume that space; their activities were frequently related to how to occupy the city-space.

For example, the BxC participants described themselves as “an open network of producers, a movement, a network in movement, with clear objectives: take to the streets and rescue them as a common space, a place for gathering, interaction, public art, and other manifestations” [Email, 14 February 2012]. With the slogan ‘the streets are for dancing’ as a reference, they were calling people to “literally, to really dance with your own bodies” and also “in the sense of dancing in other dimensions of existence itself” (...)

As this dance is not personal, but at the same time collective, this effect is stronger, because this re-signification does not occur only in relation to a material piece of urban equipment, it occurs together with and through a relationship with other people. [Participant’s e-mail, Feb 27, 2013]

Like a dance, their relation with (dis)comfort was one of movement rather than stasis. The participants were constantly questioning and trying to negotiate their bodily–social–spatial formations as affective becomings – whether in the making of their ‘internal’ relations (i.e. us as activists in collectives) or their relation to the city-space and others (i.e. us as urban dwellers). They were constantly refusing to stabilize themselves as one fixed collective body (Magalhães Lopes et al., 2021) or turning the public space more comfortable to a stable us or them. They were continuously questioning the dynamics between their comfort and the comfort of others. In an e-mail exchange, a participant forwards a call for ideas from two international initiatives that were “launching a worldwide, online call for ideas to ‘make’ urban comfort, asking: How would you transform a public space in your city to make it more comfortable?”. Although two participants believe the call resonates well with what they are doing, one reflects

But it is crazy this idea of transforming the public space into ‘more comfortable’. I even wanted to see if there isn’t another meaning for comfortable... our dear ‘big worm’ [viaduct] and surroundings more comfortable? yes, it might also be the case, the hanging gardens have already done that. But it seems that here in São Paulo, the hole is deeper and working in these spaces is about precisely to get out of our comfort zone. [Participant’s e-mail, Jun 21, 2012]

Their constant movement – through ‘working in these spaces’ – was a latent mirroring in opposition to the pressing and stabilization of an ideal for the city-centre which is seen as a deeply problematic. This urge to react, to align and reach the city-space was not only felt by the participants of the activism collectives, but also many passers-by of their events. After a folk party event promoted by FJM, their Facebook page have received multiple reactions and comments. Whereas some people were unhappy with the crowds and noise in the streets, others have ‘finally’ started to feel connected with the city space and others:

I have no intimacy with São Paulo, I was born and raised here, but always on the way to withdrawal. Yesterday I understood (at the edge of the skin, because in theory it is easy). The city was taken over by those who wanted to live in the citv (…) between the buildings and our immediate access to all that intimacy, a sign: ALWAYS COME BACK! A nice gentleman dancing in the window of his house, opening his door and his Sundays to us the neighbours! Unforgettable, emblematic, enlightening! Let's take over the streets! Let's go for encounters! [Facebook post, July 2, 2012, highlights by the author]

This post was also shared and celebrated in the BxC e-mail list as it resonated with their efforts of ‘taking the streets and rescuing’ and reaching ‘immediate access to all that intimacy’. Intimacy evokes a sensation of closeness between people in personal relationships, a sensation of extension through physical and emotional closeness. It also evokes a homeyness, which was felt through the breaking of surfacing often experienced between urban/domestic space (Jayne and Ferenčuhová, 2015). In the event, a shift on ‘the edge of the skin’ was felt not only with the materiality of the city (‘between the buildings’), but to those who wanted to live in the city – including a dancing neighbour inside the house. This way, through the intensity of such reamalgamation of urban/domestic space, an affective becoming is felt as ‘access to all that intimacy’.

Rather than a place of constant ‘withdrawal’, the city centre became a place you can ‘always come back’. There was disruption of pattern; ‘an opening’ in bodily–social–spatial mirroring that deviates from the normativity in place. In such moments, the activist activities were able to shift the ideological circulation of cultural meanings in place. This ideological re-signification in the bodily–social–spatial amalgamation was also a shift on the reiteration of bodily–social–spatial patterns of (neoliberal) affective becoming.

Resisting ideological patterns of affective becoming: spaces (of comfort) for whom?

Rather than becoming complicit with the gentrification process in the area (Anjaria, 2009), their activism initiatives kept adding tension to the becoming of the neoliberal city, and they found themselves in conflict with other residents about how the area should be occupied (Chaskin and Joseph, 2013):

Although they have very good intensions, these boys can bring even more problems with their “occupation” that foresees picnics and music. [Participant’s email, forwarded message from a discussion of a neighbourhood association of the area, December 11, 2011]

Their forms of occupying the city-space were often contested by the municipality and residents of the area. For example, they would often take Crackland as a legitimate space and crackers as legitimate bodies to occupy that space. Through multiple and accumulative neoliberal policies (e.g. privatization of street spaces through corporate sponsorships), the participants were constantly feeling in misalignment to the city-space and who counts in the city-space. The sensation of unfitting (i.e. discomfort) kept increasing. They kept feeling their bodies did not extend to the space – they felt they could not do anything in the city centre (e.g. have picnics and music, serve soup to homeless people, artists couldn’t perform on the street). The ‘requalified’ city space was projected for others to consume in, not them. In the email below, the city space is seen as becoming a place where families are removed from their housing, which would be replaced by parking lots:

The case of Parque Dom Pedro is an example of how a “requalification” project (of the municipality) managed to promote the removal of hundreds of families and transform a ZEIS (Special Zones of Social Interest ³ ) into a parking lot—justified because it is a public space? (I do) not (want) to go on and on: after all, public spaces need to be functional. But for whom? [Participant’s email, March 11, 2015].

When the participant above asks for whom the function of the public space was directed, she questions not only the proposed change from social housing to parking lots as one of ‘public’, but also who is covered in ‘public’: people with cars, rather than people without housing, privileging cars and their drivers over families in need of social housing. Such transformations cover the becoming of the city space into a place for a specific kind of body to ‘fit in’: the consumer. The transformations in the city centre were felt to push away the current inhabitants and activists from that space. For them, such processes legitimized spaces for consumption for humans for consumption.

In spaces for consumption (Miles, 2012), the consumer is the ideal human body. The inhabitants, activists, and their supporters not only fail as ideals for the consumption to be performed, but some of them also contested such ideals. By failing to reproduce the market norms and ideals, they fail to contribute to the (re)production of life in the neoliberal city: a life for consumption. They become bodies out of place (Douglas, 2003), bodies going in the wrong direction to the prevalent wider consumption ideology (Ilkucan and Sandikci, 2005).

Bodily failure as a misalignment of body-space: normativities and out-of-placeness

The activists’ bodily failure, felt through a misalignment of body–social–space, was also related to the colonial normativity in place (the hole seemed deeper in São Paulo, as one activist above argues). For example, an event I followed aimed to bring together people of different backgrounds and discuss the relation of “bodies that are non-binary, transsexual, black, the female body, the body of the black woman, bodies that live at the peripheries of the city of São Paulo, bodies that dance, the multiplicity of bodies,” as explained by one of its organizers. During this event, one participant mentioned:

We have an endemic segregation. Each time we are stopped by the police, each time that we look for a job, we feel the weight of having an inadequate body.

The weight – as well as the surfacing effect – of ‘having an inadequate body’ was felt continuously. The ‘unfitting body’ was never able to extend itself in space; the surfacing effect in relation to space was continuously maintained. They were continuously bodies “who do not sink into spaces, whose bodies are registered as not fitting, who often have to work to make others comfortable” (Ahmed, 2014: 224). Such unfitting becoming, felt as an ‘out-of-placeness’, can be seen as a continuous surfacing process in misalignment to the normativity. The activists often shared the hardship of not ‘fitting in’. Such misalignment in relation to the colonial normativity that marks bodies as deviants (e.g. racialized, sexualized bodies) kept marking them too as bodies ‘out of place’.

The activists’ resistance can be seen as affective labour for accommodating bodies in the space; a labour of (dis)comfort. Through comfort, the body feels easy, the space too. This was not the predominant feeling of the many inhabitants, activist collectives, participants, and supporters. The accommodation of their bodies in the city was increasingly hard. Through (dis)comfort, they kept refusing to accept and align themselves to colonial and neoliberal ideals (Anjaria, 2009; see also Puar, 2007). As they kept failing to align themselves to the predominant normativities, their becomings kept being marked as failing and were definitively marked as illegitimate. Their illegitimate becomings were felt through (dis)comfort.

Discomfort as a sorting force: splitting legitimate from illegitimate lives through norms

The activists saw the ‘revitalization’ processes in São Paulo not as progress but as a violent regression. Rather than bringing life back to the space, it sustained the violent colonial hierarchization of being. The split between rich and poor echoed the spatial injustices of the colonial split of the Casa Grande and Senzala. The spatial injustices were felt as colonial present occurrences rather than inheritances from the past. They were felt as forces that continuously legitimize certain bodies and delegitimize others, as the “division of humanity into ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ forms is the trace of the violence that forces apart established social bonds and enforces new conditions for expropriative accumulation” (Melamed, 2015: 80).

In the interview above, the former mayor João Dória designates the city centre as a ‘no man’s land’ refusing to recognize that that space was occupied by legitimate bodies. In another 2017 interview, he also opined that the city of São Paulo was garbage and associated people in the city centre with ‘human garbage’ (Sakamoto, 2016). By associating the city with garbage, and its residents (especially crack users) with ‘human garbage’, once again the bodies of the residents of the city centre were not seen as human bodies; they were seen as less-than-human, failing to follow the social ideal of being human. They were “the waste-product of the game” (Bauman, 2007: 38). Like dirt, they were to become bodies out of place that contaminate and need to be avoided (Douglas, 2003).

In the production of neoliberal cities, capitalism operates not only through predatory exploration (Kennedy, 2017) but also by extending patriarchal and colonial social ordering into the larger tapestry of modernity’s political and economic relations. The split of legitimate and illegitimate lives in São Paulo has often been based on consumption patterns to the point that, at the intersectionality of potential for consumption and othering orientations, the potential for consumption looms in the making and unmaking of a split between humans and less-than-humans. For example, gay lives were legitimized when gay people acquired the capital to consume. In one of the events, participants discussed such a split. They pointed out how gay lives in São Paulo, although failing to comply with heterosexuality, became legitimized once they become complicit with the normativity of consumption and consumerism (Kates, 2002), following white-heteronormativity ideals (see also Puar, 2007, for further discussion on the alignment of neoliberal-heteronormative ideologies and pro-imperialist agendas that shift ideal queers from their construction as figures of death to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity).

The case of the activists went in the opposite direction: their resistance delegitimized them. The activists became failing bodies themselves by failing to perform and reproduce the ideal human – the human for consumption – as they were not complicit with the multiple neoliberal-colonial processes in place. They were not complicit with making the space more suitable and comfortable for some and less suitable and comfortable for others. Their resistance then shows how “the particular cultural politics of value which underpins the development [and maintenance] of ‘consumer society’ is thus not a natural one, it is one which requires a process of learning whereby social actors are practically trained to perform (and enjoy) their roles as consumers” (Sassatelli, 2007: 11).

The violence of discomfort as an illegitimate violence

The precarious living conditions of the most vulnerable people and the increasing sensation of economic suffocation for lower-middle-class inhabitants remained invisible and silent. The weight was felt to be heavy and hard, yet there was no legitimization of this continuous suffocation as a violent manifestation. The dehumanizing processes in place were kept invisible and inaudible with the prevailing of neoliberal-colonial normativities though consumption performativity (Carrington et al., 2020). Whereas the suffering and the voices of the vulnerable inhabitants, activists, and their supporters were kept illegitimate, the process of pushing them away from the city centre was presented as legitimate and natural (one that brings life to the space). Although violent, the pressure against them – as illegitimate bodies – remained illegitimate.

However, there were also instances of potential change. For example, by late 2012 and early 2013, the collectives were gaining momentum. Their resistance was starting to reverberate. A supportive dynamic was already in place among the multiple activism collectives (Magalhães Lopes et al., 2021) when, in the first days of June 2013, one activist group – MPL (Movimento Passe Livre, Free Tariff Movement) – organized a protest against a rise in public transport costs. Although the price hike was ‘only 10 cents’, the increase was felt as unbearable as the weight was already hard to be carrying. This first protest was marked by violent encounters with the police, and other activists and supporters quickly joined subsequent MPL protests in support.

The violent encounters between activists and policemen escalated. For example, when one BxC activist supporting the protests on June 11 was arrested and was featured on the cover of an important newspaper, the other activists mobilized help for him. He described what happened before he was taken to the police station:

I was following the crowd [on a bike] at the same speed [as the crowd] till I suddenly saw policemen coming at me, and I stopped riding. […] I tried to run. I couldn’t, and I only saw the policemen climbing over me. I started shouting for help, thinking that they were going to let go. On the contrary, they got tougher. I tried to get rid of them. I did not know why, or where to [go]. Shouting, armlock, boots on my neck, shortness of breath.

Still, media portrayal of the protests was mostly negative, assigning violence to the bodies of the activists rather than the policemen (e.g. Estado de São Paulo; Folha de São Paulo). However, with the progression of both the protests and police violence, there was a shift: the violence against the protesters was recognized as disproportionate, especially on social media where posts portraying the violence went viral. The protests garnered more popular support. The activists and protesters became victims of legitimate forms of violence (e.g. violent police enforcement), in addition to illegitimate forms of violence (e.g. forced immobility, housing insecurity). The continuous, invisible, and inaudible violence against the activists became acute, visible, and loud.

Discomfortable echoes: the voices of others as ‘unrecognizable’ noise

Although the violence started becoming legitimized as visible and audible, the activists’ demands were still delegitimized as ‘irrational’ for not following the neoliberal rationality. At first, the MPL activists’ complaints against the rise in tariffs and the demand for free public transport were considered unrealistic. Then, when other activists joined, other activist causes were promoted. At this point, the protests were ‘not about 10 cents’ anymore; they were about multiple struggles that resonated among the activist collectives. The multiple social demands of protesters were then portrayed in the media as an ‘unrecognizable’ cacophony. Without one rationalized goal, the resistant demands were once again delegitimized as ‘unrecognizable’ noise. This denial in recognizing the voices of the multiple activists can be seen as a crash in the mirroring of their voices and normativities at the first stage of the 2013 Brazilian Protests.

During the following stage, the protests and protesters changed considerably. As the protests grew, the ‘public’ of the protests shifted from an activist-resistance type to a ‘citizen-as-consumer’ type, following the neoliberal rationality (Fontenelle and Pozzebon, 2018). The shift was instructive: the voices of protesters became heard when they resonated with ideals of the neoliberal-colonial normativity in place. Whereas the early protests were criticized for being a cacophony, the following stages of protests became legitimized as ‘reasonable’, with the emergence and adherence of the citizen-as-consumer (Fontenelle and Pozzebon, 2018).

In an interview, a supporter of BxC activities describes this transmutation of the protests as moving towards a neoliberal-colonial orientation. In the interview, she recounts joining the first protests in June 2013. She also describes the following protests, which she participated in despite the intensification of police violence. She recounts the moment she decided to quit the protests, which resonates with the emergence of the citizen-as-consumer, characterizing the protests as bourgeois. ⁴

At that time, in 2013, we were protesting, right? At the beginning, but not later when it became bourgeois. […] I went to the second protest with my brother and his colleagues from the art school. [First] we went to the one at the downtown area, and later we went up to the one at Paulista Avenue. Well, it was the penultimate one before it turned bourgeois. […] Then the giant protest happened. That was the one that they [the policemen] hit really hard. My niece went, she was engaged with the Popular Youth Front at that time. She fell and sprained her ankle there. A policeman touched her [sexually]. It was horrible. My brother had to get her out of the police station. We heard several stories like that. Then, I took a break. […] Well, [I realized] it would not work for me anymore: ‘I have a daughter. I’m really afraid of dying’.

[…] The next one left from Largo da Batata – the gigantic one. The one with that [emblematic] photo, super beautiful. I [went and] left along with the left [party] people. On the way, we mixed in with right-wing people. They kept shouting ‘no party, no party.’ Some people were pulling down flags and breaking them. From that moment on, the protests had already been contaminated by the right and became really bourgeois. I went to the last one, with [my husband]. We saw [neo-Nazi] skinheads singing the national anthem. […] I looked at [my husband] and said this was not cool: ‘This is strange, we should leave’. […] But a lot of young people were there, thinking they were protesting for a better world.

– Interview, November 2015

The participant highlights what the protests were like at the beginning and how they changed. She described how the protests shifted from a smaller popular resistant movement led by activists to a gigantic popular neoliberal movement led by citizen-consumers (Fontenelle and Pozzebon, 2018). However, this shift was not ‘automatic’ or random. As the middle-class joined, it started to mirror their own demands rather than the original activists’ ones: from the increase of public transport costs to the Dollar–Real currency rate. An emblematic picture of this new phase of protests shows a child carrying a poster defending her consumer-citizen ‘right’ to travel to Disney. By the end, the protests mirrored the neoliberal-colonial normativity in place. Once again, the activists’ discomfort became unbearable, with the reproduction of the neoliberal rationality in the media giving voice to citizen-as-consumers rather than the multiple resistant voices, making them disconnect from the protests. The protests became ‘contaminated’ and it was time to leave; in the participant’s realization, there was an implicit recognition of failure and disconnection. She implies that the better world the young people were projecting was not the same as hers. Her exit occurred when there was no more mirroring between her projected ‘better world’ and the direction the protests were taking. The protests were co-opted by the neoliberal-colonial normativity. The activists’ bodies once again became unseen bodies, unheard voices.

Concluding remarks

This paper focused on exploring bodily relations through the workings of (dis)comfort in the gentrification process of São Paulo. It covered the process of gentrification as a manifestation of the becoming of the neoliberal city. The paper embraces both bodies and spaces as emergent rather than pre-given categories, thus showing the becoming of neoliberal cities through affective processes that cover intertwined bodily–social–spatial dynamics. The becoming of both bodies and spaces are seen as intertwined processes, political-affective processes of multiple affects and effects that happen in relation to shared meanings and norms (Ahmed, 2014). They are seen in a dynamic relation with shared meanings and norms; they are aligned or misaligned to ideological orientations in place. In the case of the activists covered in this study, ‘their’ becomings were continuously taking shape in affective (re)action to the predominant neoliberal-colonial normativities in place. ‘Their’ becomings, though multiple, continuously (re)actions took shape in misalignment with the becoming of São Paulo as a neoliberal city.

With the proliferation of spaces for consumption, the activists felt an increasing misalignment with the city space. They continuously and increasingly felt a force pushing against them rather than pulling them in; they were being pushed away from the city centre as they failed to ‘fit in’ to such spaces for consumption. They kept feeling other bodies were projected as ideal bodies. The bodies of ‘consumers’, who follow a colonial-neoliberal normativity (Anjaria, 2009; Zukin, 2008), were often designated as bodies ‘who fit in’. Consumers become bodies – human bodies – who count under this normativity; they are the ones felt natural in spaces for consumption (Miles, 2012). They are projected to feel comfort in such spaces.

By following the affective trajectories of multiple activists, I covered their bodily ‘surfacing’ processes in relation to signs that were already in circulation and accumulation (Ahmed, 2014). In this way, I discussed (de)legitimizing processes through emotions. I discussed not only how, through (dis)comfort, some bodies became legitimized, seen, and heard, but also how other bodies became delegitimized, unseen, and unheard. The hearing and silencing processes are intertwined and are cultural-political affective processes. They are not neutral or random; they are related to a process of erasure of some illegitimate bodies over other legitimate bodies.

This paper’s contribution to the literature is threefold. Firstly, it proposes another way of seeing the cultural-political dynamics in the becoming of a neoliberal city and the role consumption plays in such a process. This study focuses on how the continuous affective (re)actions shape spaces, bodies, and norms. By not assuming human bodies as a fixed category, this study shows how the becoming of the neoliberal city follows a neoliberal normativity, in tandem with a colonial one. It explores how bodies, spaces, and norms are always in the making in relation to one another, and highlights how ‘the consumer’ becomes the body that counts (i.e. the body presented and seen as human) in such a neoliberal-colonial normativity. It then shows how consumer culture and capitalism has been sustained through the making of the consumer as a modern ideal coupled with colonial oppression and dispossession (Sassatelli, 2007).

Secondly, this paper shows how activist resistance work refracts the dynamics of the neoliberal-colonial normativity as it (re)acts to its mechanisms for sorting out bodies (c.f. Anjaria, 2009). However, the power in such affective dynamics is unbalanced, and power tides can offer endurance and reinforce its neoliberal-colonial orientation despite resistance potential. Power shifts are then problematized in relation to the norms. Although forces are uneven, it is important not to think of the becoming as deterministic (Tarde, 1903), as bodies are not neutral or static. By focusing on the struggles of activists, this study shows how consumer culture is forceful and produces multiple failing bodies (Bauman, 2007) in contrast to one single ideal – the human for consumption.

Thirdly, this paper highlights the political dimensions of (dis)comfort. It explores (dis)comfort as an emotion that can be instructive in exploring the splitting of legitimate and illegitimate bodies in the social reproduction for consumption. It brings a decolonial perspective to consumption literature focused on emotions. It highlights how the felt experiences of certain bodies become erased, as they fail in being an ideal to be performed. It also highlights how some felt experiences, including violent experiences, are kept illegitimate, unseen, and unheard. It shows how discomfort has been used as a political-affective tool of delegitimization, subjugation and oppression, not only against ‘the underclass’ as flawed consumers (Bauman, 2007), but against anyone who offers resistance to the perpetuation of consumer culture. It emphasizes the becoming of consumers as a process that involves affective forces in relation to prevailing normativities without falling into subject-freedom-choice framework. This study then calls for further studies that refuse to normalize ‘the consumer’ as ‘the human’ who counts and explore how consumption can work by legitimizing certain bodies, spaces, emotions, and violence over others.