Collectivity and COVID-19

Albeit less well defined, it seems to me that Halberstam is searching for a radical form of collectivity which transgresses human and non-human, lives and lifeless things through children animation films. This is also why he argues that animation might have the potential to display radical collectivity as evidenced in animation films such as Finding Nemo (beyond oneself but the whole ocean ecology, p. 184) or Monsters Inc.(between monster and child, a queer kinship, pp. 44-45). Such a potential could be easily lost in the heroic, successful narrative of general films which assume a normalized adulthood. In this sense Halberstam interprets children animation as potentially queer world which allows failure and alternative to exist.

Virus seems to provide multiple grounds for practicing “low theory” which “locate all the in-between spaces” (Halberstam, p.2). I was caught up by Yasco’s remark that the standard of social distancing lessens among families which can be problematic for those non-family members who live under the same roof. Kinship, a critical notion in queer studies, begs to be re-examined. With the spread of the virus across borders, it is also a time to rethink what a home or nation means.

I also see the notion of collectivity vital in the time of COVID-19. Although some people see the global epidemics as commonly shared experiences, there are intersecting differences among how people experience the plague. While some of us can live and work safely at home and some citizenship gets extended, others such as homeless and unattended refugees are in precarious states. A radical form of collectivity needs to be imagined beyond the national, cultural, biological, environmental borders.

In the meantime, I am not fully content with the term collectivity which implies a certain shared experience or cultural bonding. Could people with different class, gender, racial, national, sexual, ability, religious backgrounds empathize with each other in spite of various differences? At this moment I might prefer ‘solidarity’ because it assumes different individuals or groups of people supporting each other despite their difference. To me, overcoming differences among groups or even species has a special place in Halberstam’s nuanced analysis of animation.