The Carnivalesque Politics of a Pandemic Body

Abstract

Covid-19 has affected our lives in innumerable and formerly unimaginable ways. Among its effects is the threat to our identity in terms of broken bodily boundaries, severed social contacts, and a blurring of our group belongings. A response to this mingled physio-social threat has been an unprecedented surge of trans-subjectivity, as a form of intersubjectivity that is both elevated and reduced. In this paper, this phenomenon is explored in its carnivalesque manifestation, expressing itself as both a revolt against state control and an effort to re-appropriate a sense of bodily self and other. I illustrate these ideas with theoretical, visual and clinical materials.