Rethinking the Body in Global Politics: Bodies, Body Politics, and the Body Politic in a Time of Pandemic 9781138337329, 9780367747497, 9780429442469

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Purnell masterfully interweaves the global and the local, demonstrating how the materiality of bodies is essential to properly understanding the functioning of international politics. Making inroads into rethinking the ontology of bodies by examining topics ranging from war to global health, she demands that we consider how the body is itself a contested site, materially and rhetorically disassembled in ways that are politically significant. By drawing on auto-ethnographic and rich textual methods, she offers an incisive and reflective contribution that is sure to provide a model for narrative work in global politics. – Jessica Auchter, University of Tennessee Chattanooga, USA Rethinking the Body in Global Politics is one of the most exciting, inspiring and disruptive books I have read. Bodies might have been neglected by the discipline of International Relations, but there is no escaping the body here. Kandida Purnell takes us on a valuable detour outside the usual disciplinary frames to draw attention to the processes (dis)-embodiment that render certain bodies so vulnerable to death and injury. In doing so, she adds some much needed theoretical flesh and empirical muscle to our once barren disciplinary bones. – Thomas Gregory, University of Auckland, New Zealand

C?\ Taylor & Francis � Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Rethinking the Body in Global Politics

This book rethinks the body in global politics and the particular roles bodies play in our international system, foregrounding processes and practices involved in the continually contested (re/dis)embodiment of both human bodies and collective bodies politic. Presented in the form of reflective/reflexive and theoretically innovative essays, the book explores bodies in general and their precarious, excessive, ontologically insecure, and emotional facets; the fleshing out of contemporary necro(body)politics; and the visual-emotional politics embodied through the COVID-19 pandemic. The empirical analyses presented feed into contemporary International Relations (IR) debates on British and American politics and international relations and the Global War on Terror, while also speaking to broader interdisciplinary (Sociological, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Philosophy) theoretical literature on bodies and embodiment, visual politics, biopolitics, necropolitics, and affect/emotions and feelings.

Kandida Purnell is Assistant Professor of International Relations who has previously published on the body politics of the Global War on Terror, war (un) commemoration, and war performance and army/artist collaboration. Kandida continues to collaborate with Natasha Danilova and Emma Dolan on the Carnegie-funded “War Commemoration, Military Culture, and Identity Politics in Scotland” project while her solo research into “Feeling COVID-19” and “Bringing Bodies Back: Repatriation and War Performance within Forever War” are ongoing.

Interventions The series provides a forum for innovative and interdisciplinary work that engages with alternative critical, post-structural, feminist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic and cultural approaches to international relations and global politics. In our first 5 years we have published 60 volumes. We aim to advance understanding of the key areas in which scholars working within broad critical post-structural traditions have chosen to make their interventions, and to present innovative analyses of important topics. Titles in the series engage with critical thinkers in philosophy, sociology, politics and other disciplines and provide situated historical, empirical and textual studies in international politics. We are very happy to discuss your ideas at any stage of the project: just contact us for advice or proposal guidelines. Proposals should be submitted directly to the series editors: • •

Jenny Edkins ([email protected]) Nick Vaughan-Williams ([email protected])

‘As Michel Foucault has famously stated, “Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.” In this spirit, the Edkins–Vaughan-Williams Interventions series solicits cutting edge, critical works that challenge mainstream understandings in international relations. It is the best place to contribute post disciplinary works that think rather than merely recognize and affirm the world recycled in IR’s traditional geopolitical imaginary.’ Nation-Branding in Practice The politics of promoting sports, cities and universities in Kazakhstan and Qatar Kristin Anabel Eggeling Cultures of Violence Visual arts and political violence Edited by Ruth Kinna and Gillian Whiteley A New Political Imagination Making the case Tony Fry and Madina Tlostanova Humanitarianism, Human Rights and Security The case of Frontex Nina Perkowski Affective Heritage and the Politics of Memorial Museums after 9/11 Curating trauma Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas Rethinking the Body in Global Politics Bodies, body politics, and the body politic in a time of pandemic Kandida Purnell Everyday Border Struggles Segregation and solidarity in the UK and Calais Thom Tyerman

Rethinking the Body in Global Politics Bodies, Body Politics, and the Body Politic in a Time of Pandemic

Kandida Purnell

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Kandida Purnell The right of Kandida Purnell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-33732-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-74749-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44246-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by SPi Global, India

For Michael

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction

ix x 1

1

Bodies 1.1 Precarious bodies 1.2 Emotional bodies

31 32 40

2

Body politics 2.1 Necro(body)politics 2.2 Death is hard work

62 63 75

3

The body politic 3.1 The body politic 3.2 Out of date 3.3 The English patient

95 96 106 112

4

Conflicted bodies 4.1 Angles of arrival 4.2 Out of touch 4.3 Pressured parts

129 130 137 149

Conclusions

159

Index

167

Figures

0.1 3.1 3.2

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground), 1989 Leviathan frontispiece by Abraham Bosse with input from Thomas Hobbes (1651) Illustration by Ben Jennings for The Guardian

5 102 105

Acknowledgements

There is nothing that can really convey how much I owe to those named here, nor how much I appreciate them. Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams (the Interventions Series Editors) and Rob Sorsby and Claire Maloney at Routledge were incredibly patient, granting extension after extension after I requested them during the years spent on the academic job market – going from post to post and place to place – before finding the time and space and, ultimately, the sense of security that would enable me to eventually write this book. I also owe so much to my PhD supervisors Marysia Zalewski and Andrea Teti, who were always there over the many years this book took to come out. Thank you also to artists Barbra Kruger and Ben Jennings for granting me permission to reproduce their brilliant work in this book.

Introduction

Try as we might to rid ourselves of it, in the end everything brings us back to the body. We tried to graft it onto other media, to turn it into an object body, a machine body, a digital body, an ontophanic body. It returns to us now as a horrifying, giant mandible, a vehicle for contamination, a vector for pollen, spores, and mold. (Mbembe 13/04/2020a: par. 4) Bodies are contested sites of global politics that are acted upon and act relentlessly in life and beyond – to the point of their continual redoing and eventual undoing. This has been my assumption for over a decade since I began rethinking the body in global politics and the particular role bodies play in our international system. For students and newcomers to the topic of bodies and what I refer to throughout this book as (re/dis)embodiment – the continuously contested and intense localglobal, social-political process through which bodies continually come to be or not be1 – this book is intended as an introduction to (re)thinking local-global politics in, through, and with bodies and, therefore, introduces and unpacks concepts and arguments from first principles throughout – serving as a quasi-textbook introduction to the local-global politics of bodies. Moreover, for the ever-growing number of scholars already investigating particular aspects and dimensions of global body politics within the discipline of International Relations (IR),2 this book serves as text consolidating and pushing forwards knowledge about bodies and how they work as sites of global politics by providing a unique, theoretically robust and thoroughly interdisciplinary theoretical-analytical framework with the potential for broad application across diverse empirical cases. As such, in this book, I present new and accessible ways to study IR – for current students and established scholars alike – ways that start and end their thinking and research with bodies, because local-global politics always does. In sum, within this book, I explain why and how it matters, interpersonally, personally, locally, nationally, globally, and, always, politically that bodies are performative, excessive, and ontologically (in) secure, coming to be known and to function simultaneously as individual bodies and (body) parts of the lively collective body politic and feeling their way within a blatantly local-global necropolitical landscape. Moreover, on the global body politics of the COVID-19 pandemic that goes on as I finalise this manuscript,3 I posit that what we are witnessing is the novel coronavirus working as a catalyst to

2  Introduction speed up what was previously a slower rate of socially and politically constructed patterns of (re/dis)embodiment and, therefore, both excerpting pressure on every part of the local-global endoskeleton’s4 supply chain of bodies and threatening to compromise the undisrupted flow of necropolitical order itself. This book’s four substantive chapters are devoted to laying out my rethinking of bodies, body politics, the body politic, and modes of bodily conflict and yet require and assume no existing knowledge of bodies, embodiment, or body politics. In this way, the chapters provide a step-by-step guide to rethinking the body through the notion of (re/dis)embodiment and are intended to offer something of a blueprint for students and scholars motivated to approach global politics through the lens of bodies. To be more precise, this book is presented in the form of reflective, reflexive, and theoretically innovative chapters on (1) bodies in general and their precarious, excessive, ontologically insecure, and emotional facets; (2) the necropolitics defining contemporary local-global patterns of (dis/re)embodiment; (3) the body politics of the unwell (rather than dead) metaphor the body politic focussing on the performative materialisation of the outdated and unwell human body at its source through a close study of the diagnosis, hospitalisation, and recovery of the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister (PM) Boris Johnson; and (4) the visual-emotional politics and landscape engendered and embodied through the spring and summer of 2020’s first wave of COVID-19, paying attention to (re/dis)embodiments facilitated by the social-political construction of atmospheric walls and mechanisms, including angles of arrival, the containment of grief, numbing by numbers, and the pressuring of particular body parts. In the following pages, intended as an introduction to the merits of thinking and rethinking the body in global politics, I introduce the empirical frame within which my theoretical framework was devised and honed, provide a thorough literature review to detail IR’s (mis)treatment of bodies and body politics, and discuss the interdisciplinary detours informing my approach. I do this before outlining the book’s structure and contributions and providing some reflections on my methodology.

Rethinking the body in a time of COVID-19 The story has been well told by now, but I will retell it again briefly for the sake of providing context. On 31 December 2019, a pneumonia of unknown cause, detected in Wuhan, China, was first reported to the World Health Organization. The outbreak was declared a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020 and spread to Europe shortly afterwards, where outbreaks led to national lockdowns in Spain, Italy, and France before the United Kingdom was finally ‘locked down,’ and the population was instructed to ‘stay at home’ between 23 March and 10 May 2020, when initial restrictive measures began to be gradually eased. Meanwhile, over the Atlantic, the United States would soon boast the world’s highest death would rise steeply as I wrote this book over the spring and summer of 2020. Indeed by the time of making final alterations to my manuscript, in January 2021, the UK’s death toll would pass 100,000 and the excess death

Introduction  3 rate in England had become one of the highest on earth (see S ­ ample, 14/10/2020). As I explain further in this introduction, my methodological approach leads this book to highlight my own subjectivity and brings together personal, reflexive accounts written from my particular location in the south-east of England, United Kingdom, throughout the English ‘lockdown.’5 From here, I have become a part of a population particularly badly decimated during the pandemic.6 Thus as my manuscript deadline approached in 2020, this book came by chance to empirically focus on and provide analysis of what I understand not as unprecedented or exceptional social-political dynamics and patterns of local-global (re/dis) embodiment but rather an extreme case from which findings – about patterns of (re/dis)embodiment, the character of contemporary necro(body)politics, and the social-political (re)construction of emotional and embodied landscapes – are, therefore, applicable within other empirical contexts. During the quarantine that followed the 23 March British lockdown and those implemented elsewhere, bodies may have retreated from many of the spaces they used to fill – from Parliament buildings, offices, lecture theatres, airports, libraries, coffee shops, bars, and restaurants. However, this book explores global body politics through the COVID-19 pandemic, firstly because in their retreat and as Achille Mbembe puts it so well in the earlier quote, during a pandemic, bodies have at the same time ‘return[ed] to us’ in intense, profound, and threatening ways, and try as we might, we cannot escape them. Indeed, our own bodies now return to us, becoming relentless and constant sources of health anxiety and making our friends, families, and neighbours biological threats. Indeed, the pandemic has not only brought our own bodies back to us but also made us hyperaware of the bodies of others. We cannot help but notice now how some bodies cough, splutter, and infect other bodies. We know that sometimes this is intentional but also that sometimes it is not, and we realise that even dead ones can do it.7 We now realise all too well that owing to political decisions, even if defining politics relatively narrowly, such as what goes on in parliaments and government buildings, for example, some bodies must ‘shield’8 from COVID-19, some bodies are protected from it, some bodies will be nursed back to health if they need to be while others are made and left more vulnerable,9 and some bodies are used and used up – they are knowingly exposed to the power of death, succumb, and allowed to die.10 We see now that in life, and differently in death, some bodies count and are duly counted, while others will be lost count of or discounted. Some bodies are valued highly – deemed invaluable and irreplaceable. Indeed, even when these bodies go physically ‘missing’11 from us, as many hundreds of thousands have globally because of having become infected with COVID-19, we remain haunted by their ‘seething presence’ (Gordon, 1997:8). Because of this at the very least inconvenient, often horrifying, and at most deadly return of the body, throughout this book, I refer to the COVID-19 pandemic as a means to demonstrate many of the ways in which bodies are unendingly yet un-passively contested as sites of global and more broadly defined politics that occurs in spaces far beyond our parliament buildings and legislative chambers. Indeed, the bodies discussed in this book are at the brunt of and exposed to dynamics, forces, and imperatives so much

4  Introduction bigger than comparatively petty party and even national politics and the force of state power. Rather, I alternatively follow feminist efforts detailed in this introduction and spearheaded by Cynthia Enloe (1990) to conceive of international politics as deeply personal and vice versa. Indeed, from this counter position, it is understandable that Michel Foucault (1977: 308) reversed Carl von Clausewitz’s dictum,12 often cited within the war studies canon, because of hearing ʻthe distant roar of battleʼ in the centre of civil, apparently civil, society and even during so-called peacetime. I can hear it too, even from my own unique but intensely privileged embodied position towards the top of the global endoskeleton of the world as a white English woman who has risen to work as an academic and, therefore, live in ways that make me more secure – in a myriad of ways – than the vast majority of the human population. So while the body has our attention, appearing now thanks to COVID-19 ‘as a horrifying, giant mandible, a vehicle for contamination, a vector for pollen, spores, and mold’ (Mbembe, 13/04/2020a: par. 4 ), throughout this book, I am also using the empirical case of the COVID-19 pandemic because while I have been acutely aware of the body and rethinking it since my student days, within the discipline of IR, there has not been widespread and similarly acute attunement to the politics of bodies amongst the vast majority of my peers and predecessors. Indeed, for the most part, and for most of the time since the discipline of IR’s 1919 inception, those devoted to the thinking, writing, and teaching of the subject have left the narrowly and broadly defined politics out of bodies entirely. As such, intensely and globally contested processes of (re/dis)embodiment have been ignored and/ or denied and so occluded because of a common preference for the analysis, scrutiny, and politicisation of the other contested units in our international system – namely, man, the state, and war.13 In turn, these fetishised levels of analysis have then been almost entirely disembodied as they arrive in our texts, lectures, and policy recommendations, apparently ready-made with (in the case of man) and comprised of (in the case of the state and war) pre- and a-political bodies. This is entirely problematic as, to repeat this book’s thesis, bodies are not outside of politics (in both the normal and disruptive-redistributive senses described earlier) but rather always and already contested sites of global politics. (Re)thinking through bodies In my long-term endeavour to rethink the body in global politics, I have followed some writing within the discipline of IR. However, out of necessities explained later in this section, I have had to look far beyond for inspiration. Through this and other theories introduced more broadly in this chapter and thoroughly unpacked in the substantive chapters combined with intensive empirical research which I have conducted not only about the COVID-19 pandemic for this book but also prior to this study via case study investigations drawn from the Global War on Terror (GWoT),14 I have arrived at an understanding of bodies as performative, lively, and ontologically insecure; always a process and always in process; and excessive and affective – feeling their way through life and the world. Long in development, this understanding has emerged through not only the immersive

Introduction  5 research carried out through the spring and summer of 2020 and framed by the COVID-19 pandemic but also during my long-term case study investigations into processes of (re/dis)embodiment) within three empirical settings emerging under the banner of GWoT. These are (1) the space of the Camp Delta detention centre under the jurisdiction of the US military’s Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTFGTMO) where I homed in on the 2013–2015 Guantánamo Bay hunger strike (see Purnell, 2015); (2) the (re/dis)embodiment of injured and dead American soldiers, paying particular attention to contests over these bodies’ value, visibility, and grievability (see Purnell, 2018); and (3) army-artist collaborations and the performance of GWoT in public (see Purnell and Danilova, 2018; Danilova and Purnell, 2020; Danilova, Purnell, and Dolan, forthcoming). Through these protracted studies, the rethinking of bodies laid out in this book was facilitated through my focus on internationally contested and what seemed to be bodies extremely exposed to often violent operations and practices of power(/knowledge). Indeed, I selected these very obviously contested sites of body politics as a means to trace processes of bodily contest more easily, which in these cases are documented via policy updates, government memorandums, press releases, three minutes of meetings, newspaper articles, etc. However, I did this with an ultimate aim of revealing the more subtle ways, processes, and logics informing how every body is contested as a site of no fewer amounts of global politics and to, therefore, push the discipline’s boundaries outwards – from battlegrounds and war zones and even famines and pandemics, to the everyday and everywhere of even and especially apparent peacetime and private life. This is illustrated well by Barbara Kruger’s iconic Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground), 1989 (see Figure 0.1), which, while produced by Kruger for the 1989 Women’s March on Washington in support of reproductive freedom and, therefore, highlighting another obvious case of bodily contest, is emblematic of this book’s thesis demonstrated via the case of the COVID-19 pandemic that every body is a contested site of global politics (Figure 0.1).

Figure 0.1  Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground), 1989

6  Introduction As I explain in this book, while bodies, body politics, and the (re/dis)embodiment of IR’s traditional and typical units of analysis may have ‘long been outside the frame of International Relations’ (Wilcox, 2015a: 1), bodies were (and are) always political. Bodies are, therefore, explicitly foregrounded throughout this book – within both the co-constitutive theoretical contributions and empirical analyses presented – and what such bodily foregrounding demonstrates is that there is much to be gained by taking the very particular (re)embodiment and contestation of specific bodies into account within IR (and beyond) because bodies – just as man, the state, and war – are intensely contested sites of global politics.

Bodies in/and IR Bodies only make themselves known if there is a problem – if they are unwell or injured, for example. As such, when all is seemingly well, bodies are liable to being forgotten and vanishing (see Leder, 1990). Within IR, such disappearing of bodies has happened frequently and for far too long, as the embodied subjects writing ‘the mainstream’ have presumably glided through life without a bodily glitch. Thus in 1993 and as I explain in this introductory chapter, while the wider social sciences and humanities were experiencing the corporeal turn, David Campbell and Michael Dillon asked, ‘Where is the body in International Relations?’ (1993: 12). Four years later, it was still nowhere to be found, as Jan Jindy Pettman’s (1997: 94) remark, ‘Body politics [are] not available for critique in disciplines practiced as disembodied, in the absence of bodies, both of the writers and of their subjects,’ demonstrates. Within IR, bodies are mentioned rarely and only when they simply cannot be overlooked and make themselves known within spaces and cases that ‘count’ as sites of global politics within even the narrowest of definitions and the ‘realist’ lens. For example, the Siege of Caffa in 1346 is one of the rare occasions when bodies will appear within the realist frame because, in this case, thrown over city walls by the Mongol army, plague-ridden dead bodies were literally used as weapons in a military conflict. I mention Caffa because an unnamed ‘COVID cardiologist’ from a ‘top London hospital’ recently ‘vented his spleen’ to The Telegraph newspaper’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (12/05/2020), likening the UK government’s treatment of British care homes during the COVID-19 pandemic to the Medieval siege. However, throughout the pandemic, the virus’s weaponisation of particular bodies has become a controversial social, legal, national, and international political issue. From national travel bans restricting the entry of particular bodies to particular states, to stories about spreaders, to saliva being used as a murder weapon.15 COVID-19 has made every body threatening. Far beyond becoming a threat and potentially deadly weapon via COVID-19 infection, rethinking the body in global politics means acknowledging that relations within the international system are always embodied, and there is always the option to include within analysis of the body politics any case, event, situation, or moment under the purview of work in IR. This might include discussion on how bodies are acted or being acted upon even and especially when they are being used or contested less obviously than in the cases of the Caffa siege or a care home abandoned to COVID-19.

Introduction  7 For the specific study of global politics, the widespread and long-term forgetting and occlusion of all but the most obvious bodies, the analytical neglect of the facts, and the contested, intensely political process of embodiment through which bodies continually come to be are acutely problematic because what has been traditionally called IR – even narrowly interpreted – is always played out by, in, and through embodied subjects of flesh and blood, as wars’ gains and losses are measured in body counts. As Vivienne Jabri points out (2006: 825), the very lack of bodies in IR of all places speaks volumes, with ‘the absence of bodies in the discourses of a discipline that was borne of a concern with war and hence violence against bodies, itself raises curiosity as to the conditions of possibility that enabled this absence.’ Bodies – not states, Christine Sylvester reminds us – are ‘the primary target of war violence’ (2012: 483). Indeed, in her 2012 challenge, Sylvester argues, ‘To study war as experience requires that human bodies come into focus as units that have war agency and are also prime targets of war violence and war enthusiasms’ (ibid: 484). In more recent years, critical/post-structuralist, feminist, and postcolonial scholars have made concerted attempts to highlight and make amends for the discipline’s impoverishment and historic disembodiment. For example, in 1997, Diane Saco brought the sexed and gendered body of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth I into IR by arguing that it inspired the resurgence and fleshing out of the corporal conceptual metaphor of the body politic in the late 16th century. Fishel then goes way beyond this in her 2017 return to this fleshed out conceptual metaphor in The Microbial State, which aims to update IR thinking about the body politic and the conduct of global politics itself in light of insights about bodies derived from the contemporary life sciences. As I further detail in Chapter 3, the body politic is used as a metaphor to not only ground conceptions of political community in the works of philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (conceptions unthinkingly and selectively transposed into the discourses of IR) but also as a metaphor that materialises in the performative form of a very particular embodied and human being – as the individual, sovereign, liberal, masculinised subject – with extensive political ramifications. As another notable exception, Cynthia Weber’s Performative States (1998) posited to IR that Butler’s antifoundational insight on bodily materiality – that the appearance of apparently natural human bodies is nothing more than the result of ‘a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of a boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter’ (1993: 9) – should also be applied to states (see Weber 1998). Following a period of a dearth of work on bodies in IR, in 2005, Cristina Masters brought the feminist thought of Donna Haraway into the discipline’s purview by considering how ‘the constitution of the cyborg soldier within the military, rather than displacing and disturbing gender, reinscripts gender onto bodies of technology revealing gender as socially constituted’ (2005: 112). In the same year, Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat also presented the article “Through the Wire” to look at the bodies of asylum seekers and in particular at a spate of lip-sewing protests occurring in Australian detention centres as a means to move beyond Giorgio Agamben’s, at the time (1998) paradigmatic, bare life thesis. The article resonated particularly with my own research puzzles as it acknowledged bodies doing things

8  Introduction in ways that both traditional and critical theoretical frameworks applied within IR at the time could simply not explain. Charlotte Epstein (2008) and Iver B. Newman (2008) then novelly placed the body at the very centre and titles16 of their investigations into ‘the forms of power brought into play by the deployment of biometrics’ (Epstein, 2008: 149) and the Norwegian diplomatic service by drawing on Foucault’s body-centric notions of the disciplinary and biopower and considering the gendering of diplomats’ bodies as a variable influencing the ‘hierarchic order and so differentiat[ing] diplomats’ life chances’ (2008: 671), respectively. By writing in 2010 “Commodified Cadavers and the Political Economy of the Spectacle,” Renee Marlin-Bennett, Marieke Wilson, and Jason Walton inspired me to think further about how different kinds of dead bodies and even body parts are contested internationally. This morbid fascination became a longterm case study investigation into the historical (mis)treatment of dead American soldiers’ bodies (see Purnell, 22/10/2017 and Purnell, 2018). In addition, Rosemary Shinko’s 2010 article titled “Ethics after Liberalism: Why (Autonomous) Bodies Matter” attempted to address ‘the problematic aspects of the absence of the body in current International Relations scholarship’ by theorising the body of the condemned, the mother, and the obliterated as ‘resistant surfaces’ (2010: 723). Considering the question of what bodies can do as sites of global politics, Karin Fierke’s 2014 book Political Self-Sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations sparked my interest in hunger strikes, which was reignited the following year as mass hunger strikes began inside Guantánamo Bay and the site became another of my long-term case studies (see Purnell 2015, 25/02/2018). In the same year, Kevin McSorley also pointed IR and my student self towards sociological accounts of the body ‘in an attempt to develop a language to better speak of its myriad violences and its socially generative force’ (2014: 107). However, it is contributions emerging in later years and detailed next which have had a more profound effect on my work by bringing out more explicitly how bodies and global politics always intimately implicate each other. In the space of just a few years, Jessica Auchter (2014a, 2014b, 2015, 2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2018, and 2020) sought to give absolute prominence to the role of dead bodies in global politics and in doing so has begun to redress what she named the discipline’s ‘vitalist bias’ (2014a: 28) by paying attention to the treatment and (in)visibilities of particular bodies, including those of tortured Abu Ghraib detainees (2016b), Rwanda’s genocide victims (2018), 9/11 victims (2014a), and Muammar Gaddafi (2015b). In a similarly determined effort, Lauren Wilcox (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, and 2017) has interrogated contemporary practices of violent warfare and security as a means to finally and explicitly theorise the subject of violence as embodied, produced through practices of violence, and productive in the book Bodies of Violence (2015a). Making the central argument that ‘the bodies that practices of violence take as their object are deeply political bodies, constituted in reference to historical political conditions while at the same time acting upon our world’ (2015a: 3), Wilcox has done this through a focus on the violently embodied practises of hunger strikes (2012), suicide bombings (2013), and drone strikes (2015b and 2017). Finally, published in 2016 and profoundly influencing on how I have come to think about

Introduction  9 the role of power(/knowledge) in the production/destruction at the ontological level,17 Gregory’s article titled “Dismembering the Dead: Violence, Vulnerability, and the Body in War” draws on Adriana Cavarero’s thesis Horrorism (2008) to explain how, in this case, military power(/knowledge) materialising as violence against Afghan civilians ‘is no longer concerned with questions of life and death, but seeks to destroy the body as body’ (2016: 944) and ‘prevents certain bodies from appearing as fully human’ (ibid: 2). As I explain in Chapter 1, Gregory’s intervention becomes central to my understanding of (re/dis)embodiment as it carefully traces the undoing of human bodies from their rhetorical dehumanisation to, in this case, their physical dismemberments. In even more recent years, a subsequent wave of still largely early career IR scholars interested in the body and embodiment has begun to emerge. More recent work of my own is included in this category, and I have chosen to delineate between this and the long first wave introduced earlier to make my rethinking clearer. Those previously mentioned were published and influenced me while I was formulating the theoretical contributions underlying my rethinking of the body, while the second emerged, or I did not discover them until, afterwards. However, in a way that I could only have dreamt of as a PhD candidate, the community of body and embodiment-centric IR scholars who are mapped out next are now active across IR’s ever-diversifying subfields, and our below listed work is consistently being published within the discipline’s highest-ranking journals. Particularly within the subdisciplines of critical military studies (CMS), critical security studies, and feminist IR, an array of scholars have begun foregrounding the embodied experience of global politics. Within CMS, because of its purview, this has entailed scholars examining war and post-war situations with a concentration on the military – militarised bodies. For example, Synne Dyvik (2013) has detailed the US Army’s control over the material bodies of American soldiers that she argues has increased in recent years because of the introduction of policies working to regulate the types of hairstyles and cosmetics male and female soldiers are allowed, while in 2016, the then newly launched journal Critical Military Studies devoted a special issue to the topic of embodying militarism, confronting methodological challenges towards researching embodiment in military settings (Baker, 2020 and Dyvik, 2013) and including pieces on the sensorial aspects of war (Hast, 2016) and militarisation of the everyday through the British Army’s military fitness initiative (McSorley, 2016). Clearly resonating with my effort to underline how bodies are in themselves contested as sites of global politics, Julia Welland (2017: 524) has considered how post 9/11 conflict in Afghanistan was ‘mediated through the bodies of the British soldiers,’ while Audrey Reeves (2019), in conversation with British veteran David Venus, has explored the physical reshaping of soldiers’ bodies through the experience of war, along with the effects of the post-war embodiment of trauma, and Linda Åhäll (2019: 149) has explored ‘affective, embodied encounters between military and civilian bodies in the everyday as choreography of war.’ Speaking to this CMS and critical securities studies literature, over the past few years, Natasha Danilova and I have written about how, during the GWoT, the (in)visibiisation of particular

10  Introduction soldiers’ bodies ‘re-secures the frame of virtuous war and limits rather than widens the space for critical discussion’ (2018: 4) and how the bodies of soldiers are museumified through curatorial practices working in the service of the ‘construction of classed, raced, and gendered hierarchies…all of which sustain the dominance of warrior-like masculinity deployed in the service of the British state’ (2020: 287).18 Beyond work considering the body and/or (re)embodiment of the soldier-veteran and/or the direct effects of military violence on bodies, work in IR remains lesser. However, this is changing, with David Duriesmith and Noor Huda Ismail (2019: 1) considering ‘how embodied attachments to militarism shapes foreign fighters enduring involvement in jihadi networks’ and Catherine Baker’s edited collection Making War on Bodies (2020), coming to press as I finalise this manuscript, appraising contemporary formations of militarisation thorough a range of everyday experiences with a particular focus on aesthetics and embodiment. Finally, within IR’s burgeoning literature on pop culture Tim Aistrope draws on Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection and ‘takes seriously the embodied dimensions of popular culture and political discourse’ (2020: 163). As I include myself in this latest wave of theorists considering bodies and/ or aspects of embodiment within IR, my own work to date can be summarised as follows. I have described the 2013–2015 Camp Delta hunger strike (see Purnell, 2015) as both a material and brute contest of (re/dis)embodiment and an antagonistic asymmetrical challenge employing biology itself as a means to provoke dominant actors determined to save their biopolitical fac(ad)es by preventing deaths inside the camp to revealing, and by their nature obscured, violently necropolitical tendencies. In response to the hunger strike, JTF-GTMO began force-feeding hunger-striking detainees through a procedure declared torturous by the United Nations (UN). I then examined the treatment of injured and dead American soldier’s bodies during the GWoT and detailed how the treatment, visibility, and even disposal of bodies was informed by a logic wherein soldiers’ material bodies were valued highly – as a ‘precious resource’ no less with which to fuel the GWoT – while being simultaneously invisibilised, uncounted, and commemorated, literally disposed of as landfill in some cases, in the same manner as nonhuman battlefield waste (see Purnell, 2018). Perhaps surprisingly and providing some hope, through these cases, time and again, I have found bodies – be them living, suffering, or dead – acting (producing effects) in the international system, often in the face of and sometimes even disrupting huge structures of power, to contest their continuous performative and in these cases violent (re) embodiment and make themselves known and/or known differently. In the case of the 2013–2015 Camp Delta hunger strike, the detainees’ provocation worked to touch and move other bodies to enact solidarity hunger strikes and force-feedings wherein visible bodies that matter stood in for detainees and in so doing moved invisiblised, necropolitical practices into the public eye. This in turn pressured and moved other legal and governmental bodies to act and engendered an unprecedented wave of detainee removals and releases from the camp. Similarly, in the case of injured and dead soldiers’ bodies, I found moments of politics forced because of these bodies being known, counted, and making other bodies

Introduction  11 feel differently. In particular, I point to the US government’s 2009 policy U-turn on what is known as the Dover Ban,19 which essentially moved killed in action (KIA) back into the public eye (see Purnell, 2018). Through these ongoing studies into the site of Naval Station Guantánamo Bay and the treatment and repatriations of wounded and dead soldiers, which I expand on in this book by providing details and analysis outside of previous publications, I have come to understand and write about bodies in extreme situations – bodies directly exposed to machineries of power within IR’s more mainstream remit – militaries and states, for example, to demonstrate and explain my core provocation: that bodies are contested sites of global politics in a fundamentally ontological and existential sense. In every case (study), I have, therefore, underlined processes of (re/dis)embodiment as a means to illustrate not only how the body is (as Michel Foucault argues) ‘directly involved in a political field’ (1976: 26, emphasis added) and accordingly ‘trained,’ ‘marked,’ and ‘tortured’ but also how embodied subjects are brought into and out of material existence as bodies. The works mentioned thus far demonstrate that bodies and various sensorial dimensions of embodiment (namely the visual and affective dimensions) are being considered within IR by an increasing number of scholars. However, this is nowhere near the critical mass required to move the discipline towards taking bodies as seriously as individuals, states, and what is known as anarchy. Thus with the COVID-19 crisis providing this book’s backdrop and empirical context and Mbembe arguing that ‘the pandemic will change the way in which we deal with our body’ (24/04/2020: par. 5), this book is intended as a call to action for IR writ large to change the way it deals with the body. Throughout this book, I particularly underline the urgency for a greater appreciation of processes and practices involved in the continual (re)making and moving of bodies as I argue this is vital for appreciating global politics. Indeed, it is this book’s premise that bodies – just as ‘man, the state, and war’20 – are contested sites of global politics.

Interdisciplinary detours Despite being inspired by and spurred on to work on the global politics of bodies by the IR scholars mentioned thus far, my rethinking of the body in global politics has entailed forging a new path which took me well beyond my discipline’s borders. This is not only because of the aforementioned long-term dearth of IR literature on my topic but also because of the absolute abundance of bodily theory existing elsewhere. Indeed, while IR’s mainstream has assumed and then accordingly occluded the Enlightenment body, the 1990s’ corporeal turn saw social and cultural theorists rethinking the body as a project (Schilling, 1993), a mirror (Baudrillard, 1998), a symbol (Synnott, 2002), a commodity (Scheper-Hughes and Wacquant, 2002), and an event (Budgeon, 2003). Key to these approaches is the concept of embodiment which has profoundly shaped my (re)thinking of the body. Indeed, not long after an initial foray into the neighbouring discipline of sociology, I made my first step towards rethinking the body when I surpassed lingering, ‘rationalist’ mind/body dualism and animated the corpse object body so often assumed and ‘scaled up’ to the state ‘level’ within IR through discovering

12  Introduction the concept of embodiment, which I have come to understand as the contested, intensely political process through which bodies continually come to be. The thoroughly interdisciplinary influence on my rethinking of the body in global politics results in this book describing a lively yet extremely precarious international system and global politics comprised of individual and collective bodies which affect and depend existentially on one another. In doing so, the bodies and global body politics detailed in this book stand in stark contrast to dominant notions of statehood and international actors operating in IR and beyond while the illustrative cases provided make plain why rethinking along such lines is so urgently required. Indeed, the bodies I see around me and discuss in this book behave not as fixed blob-like and apparently unitary actors but correspond with one another in ways that bounded bodies ‘belonging’ to individual, sovereign, ‘rational’ liberal subjects simply should not. Far from being contained, these bodies intermingle – spilling out of themselves, sticking to each other, and becoming parts of or coming apart from one another. Crucially, this process of embodiment is never finally over, meaning neither are bodies always in process. It is accordingly that I describe embodiment further in this section as through embodiment that the apparently pre- and a-political Cartesian corpse – still haunting many of IR’s sections and syllabuses – comes to life. In particular, Sara Ahmed’s vibrant work on bodies, emotions, and being (2004, 2006, 2014, 15/09/2014, and 2017) has had a profound impact on the rethinking done in and through this book, and elements are accordingly unpacked in turn in the following chapters. These have enabled me to paint a picture of bodies and emotions as mutually constitutive of bodies existing and functioning simultaneously as individuals and the (body) parts or collectives. However, because of the centrality of the concept of embodiment towards the rethinking done in this book, in the following section, I have retraced my steps through the sociological, phenomenological, and cultural and gender studies texts containing embodied subjects in the place of inert, passive corpses so influential and naturalised within IR’s mainstream frameworks and beyond. Introducing (re/dis)embodiment No one ever says, here I am, and I have brought my body with me. (Whitehead, 1938) Simply stated, embodiment is the continuously contested and intense local-global, social-political process through which bodies continually come to be or not be (hence my use of (re/dis)embodiment throughout this book). To study (re/dis) embodiment is, therefore, to study what comes before and after bodies, as well as what happens to embodied subjects. Indeed, in this book, theorising local-global patterns of (re/dis)embodiment means examining where bodies come from and where they go as well as what they do while they are around. I do this through a two-part process which is explained in more detail in the following section on the book’s structure and contributions. However, in brief, the process of explaining and illustrating the process of (re/dis)embodiment involves (1) breaking down

Introduction  13 the process of (re/dis)embodiment into distinct elements that can be studied separately or in conjunction with one another and (2) using the case of the body politics of the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate the process in motion in specific regions to bodies caught up in the crisis. However, before doing this and for especially those unfamiliar with the concept of embodiment, this section explains how coming to consider the intensely contested, local-global, and social-political process of (re/dis)embodiment at all entails breaking away entirely from often hardwired rationalist and dualist thinking. Have you ever described yourself as feeling run down or running like clockwork? Such colloquialisms illustrate the internalisation and normalisation of Cartesian dualism and in particular the idea of the body as passive, as object, and as mechanic (see Howson, 2004). However, there is wide sociological and feminist literature that not only recognises but also problematises the prevalence and implications of the naturalisation of very particular Enlightenment-era thinking about bodies. Indeed, it was exposure to this which enabled my own rethinking. However the roots of philosophical dualism run deep, and while there are, of course, other ways of knowing, and I will come to these, I was not exposed to them as a student of IR. Rather, dualism was presented to me as truth and has been naturalised as such within ‘Western’ systems of thought, the ‘hard’ and ‘softer’ ‘sciences,’ and the dominant structures and institutions of power globally. This is being challenged, but mind/body dualism and associated dichotomies are proving stubborn. As mentioned earlier, towards appreciating the global politics of bodies, surpassing dualism was the very first step I took and such is detailed next in the hopes that you can follow me in making it. Indeed, embracing dualism and embodiment are absolutely necessary if you are to continue rethinking the body in global politics throughout this book – particularly as I have entirely devoted part I to breaking processes of (re/dis)embodiment and discussing and illustrating the specific social-political phenomena facilitating it. These are the body’s excessive qualities, precariousness, and emotions (discussed in Chapter 1) and necropolitical interference (discussed in Chapter 2). To provide some contextualisation of what the concept of ‘embodiment’ challenged and disrupted, prior to its 20th-century emergence within the Western canon of thought so problematically naturalised and presented uncritically as universal and as truth for so long, the body is likened by Plato to a dungeon for the immortal and perfect human soul from within which only shadows of perfect forms can be experienced.21 Later on, in the Old Testament, the body is God-given and sacred as God first makes man before taking from his side a piece of flesh out of which woman is moulded. However, while initially innocent, the body is gradually corrupted, coming to represent and be associated with sin (see Welton 1998). Indeed, the body’s conceptual estrangement from the apparently higher and immaterial can be traced back much further than the work of René Descartes’s 1641 Meditations. However, it is Descartes’s identification of two mutually exclusive types of stuff – res cognitas (mind) and res extensia (the natural, material body) – which relegated the body to the status of nothing more than ʻan animated corpseʼ (Leder, 1990: 20). Passive and mechanistic, dominated by the mind dwelling ‘self,’ the body itself could and was, therefore, similarly relegated

14  Introduction to the outside and beneath of the ‘higher’ study of the apparently rational world of politics and so-called IR. For Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, such Enlightenment-era thinking lingers as somewhat of a persistent hangover within disciplines aiming to be scientific (including mainstream IR) and means that today’s university students study ʻmindless bodies on the one hand and disembodied minds on the otherʼ (1990: 20). However, the body is not only objectified by dualist thinking. With subjectivity and ‘the self’ located firmly in the mind, the body is also othered and lowered. As feminists and postcolonial scholars22 have long highlighted, the hierarchically defined mind/body dichotomy has come to structure thinking far beyond the geographical-imagined West and has been problematically mapped on to other apparent binaries, including human/animal, culture/nature, civilised/ barbaric, and man/woman – with the former associated with the mind and imbued with power and the latter associated with the subordinated body in each case. Now more than ever, the naturalisation of such dualist Enlightenment-era thinking about bodies and the violence it entails is apparent. Accordingly, this aspect of contemporary body politics is the first I discuss in Chapter 2 with specific reference to the COVID-19 pandemic. In short, embodiment theory is born out of criticisms that Cartesian dualism is deterministic and reductionist. Thus in seeking ʻto explicate the bodily roots of Cartesian dualismʼ (Leder, 1990: 7), the concept of embodiment encapsulates the idea that body and mind cannot be separated as easily as mind/body dualism would allow. It is the idea that body and mind are one and the same, constituting and determining one another simultaneously, and it is based on the criticism that dualism is insufficient – leaving us with an inanimate mass of flesh for a body. As an alternative to this, embodiment theory places emphasis on the life of the body and as such refers to it as the lived body. Indeed, where the disembodied mind of the Cartesian corpse body would keep the subject ‘self’ locked in the mind, embodiment – the idea of the lived body – allows for an understanding of the simultaneousness of subject and object in the body. Providing the groundwork for social theorists involved in the 1990s corporeal (re)turn is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1962 conception of the body subject as presented in his book Phenomenology of Perception. In this text, Merleau-Ponty transcends dichotomous mind/body dualism, arguing that the Cartesian approach overlooks ‘sentience’ through which the embodied subject makes meaning out of the world, providing reflexive examples of his own embodied experiences throughout. However, because of theorising a particular (European, male, and masculinised) body as universal, Merleau-Ponty’s work has been critiqued, and in response, Iris Marion Youngʼs Throwing Like a Girl (1980) is aimed at exploring the theoretically neglected embodiment of gender and explicitly highlights the lack of attention to the different embodiment of women. Crucially, sociological work on embodiment underlines what is described as the mutually constitutive conception of the body-subjectʼs agency and social structure. In doing so, embodied subjects are awoken from passivity and brought into the social scientific frame as actors. For example, sociologist-embodiment theorist central to the 1990s’ corporeal turn Chris Shilling (1993: 9) emphasises how

Introduction  15 it is our bodies which allow us to act, to intervene in and to alter the flow of daily life. Indeed it is impossible to have an adequate theory of human agency without taking into account the body. In a very important sense, acting people are acting bodies. However, even prior to the corporeal turn, the concept of embodiment – as the process through which the embodied subject is mutually constituted by structure and agency (to employ social constructivist vocabulary) – was shaping the most central and influential of sociological theories while being completely ignored within IR. This includes Pierre Bourdieuʼs work on the habitus (1977) where there is also emphasis on the effects of social structures on embodied subjects. In this case, attention is paid to the embodiment of social class by way of ‘taste.’ However, with more relevance to political science, Beverly Skeggs’s work (1997: 100) very clearly articulates how politics is embodied and produces the body subject through highlighting how ʻwhite working class women are generally smaller, less healthy and live shorter lives,ʼ while Wendy Seymourʼs (1998: 36) phenomenological description of the embodied subjectʼs relation to social structure (see the following quote) is more convincing for explaining how bodies are materially made through social processes: Male bones and muscles are strong because men have been encouraged to use their bodies. Throughout history, men have been encouraged to see themselves in particular ways. Menʼs minds have internalised particular social messages and expectations about the male body. Such messages simulate the spinal nerves to activate the voluntary muscles that move the joints and bones of the skeleton in specific ways….The critical relationship between ideas and actions makes it difficult to separate social ideas from their embodiment. Here, Seymour’s reference to ‘encouragement’ by unnamed actors begins to hint at the intensely political nature of the process of embodiment that I underline throughout this book. However, moving beyond sociological texts, Butler’s theory of performativity (‘the reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomenon that it regulates and constrains’ [1993: 2]) even further underlines how operations of power(/knowledge) get literally under the skin to flesh bodies out. Indeed, Butler’s work compliments the embodiment theory thus far introduced by explaining how the process involves the ongoing use of force as Butler describes bodies as ‘forcibly materialized through time’ (ibid: 1). Indeed, it is following Butler that I describe bodies as intensely contested sites of global politics throughout this book. Furthermore, towards explaining exactly how material bodies come to be, in Excitable Speech (1997: 159), Butler’s description of how ‘words enter the limbs, craft the gesture, bend the spine’ (1997: 159) brings to light how the process of embodiment involves the discursive being forcibly fleshed out as bodies become. Having thus moved far beyond mind/body dualism to acknowledge how the body subject is constituted through social and political forces, I use the term

16  Introduction ‘embodiment’ throughout this book to describe the intensely contested and ongoing social-political process through which bodies continually come to be. To provide an example before moving on, processes of (re)embodiment introduced earlier are demonstrated well through the example of the soldier. Indeed, basic training is known as boot camp because during the process, soldiers painfully break in their new army boots while being drilled intensively as their former civilian bodies are physically sculpted, becoming more toned and muscular through the US Army’s regime of exhaustive forced exercise. Through this process of very obvious (re)embodiment, soldiers become finely (state)crafted beings. Then in the line of duty, the process of (re)embodiment goes on, as soldiers’ bodies are punctured by bullets and shrapnel, for example. These war materials sometimes even break soldiers’ bodies into pieces as limbs are blown off by landmines or improvised explosive devices and injure soldiers beyond repair, and it is accordingly that I move on to describe bodies as precarious and explore processes of (dis)embodiment in Chapter 1. Indeed, the literature inspiring my rethinking of the body in global politics does by no means end with the social-political theory cited earlier. Having thus far animated the Cartesian corpse and begun to unpack the concept of embodiment through phenomenology and post-structuralism, it has been my intention in this introductory section to illustrate why and to begin to demonstrate how bodies are contested sites of global politics. However, beyond the broad dynamics of agency structure and power/knowledge implicated in the process of embodiment noted earlier, there is much more at work and, therefore, much more rethinking of the body yet to be done. In Chapter 1, I continue to fill in the process embodiment by describing aspects of bodily excess, ontological (in) security, and the role of the senses and emotions towards contesting bodies’ as the continually (re)materialise. Indeed, in Chapter 1, I will also further detail the politics of bodies and how the embodied subject may act in spite of the constant material interpellation described so far.

Structure and contributions This book’s chapters progress through the gradual presentation of my co-constitutive theoretical-empirical rethinking of the body in global politics and are devoted to breaking down and explaining contemporary local-global processes of (re/dis) embodiment in phases. In Chapter 1, I begin to isolate key variables and strands, these are bodily excess, precariousness, ontological (in)security and emotions, being affected, and feelings. I do this before moving on to unpack my thoughts on body politics and the body politic (in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively) and presenting my more explicitly COVID-19 case study (in Chapter 4). To provide more detail, Chapter 1 is devoted to providing the ‘basic’ theoretical tools necessary for rethinking bodies of any kind and in any situation and uses examples drawn from both more ‘obviously’ globally political and the everyday instances of (re/dis) embodiment to illustrate the applicability of rethinking the body to any case within the discipline’s purview. In summary, in Chapter 1, I unpack three assertions that bodies are excessive and precarious, ontologically insecure, and feeling their way. However, I push IR’s ontological security theory (OST) forwards through my

Introduction  17 focus on (1) the ontological (in)security of bodies and (2) emphasis on how, more and deeper than a matter of identity, acute ontological insecurity can lead to material disembodiment and bodies coming to not be all together. Chapter 2 introduces broad dynamics of body politics and themes structuring how the pandemic is playing out. I also introduce the biopolitical and necropolitical theory informing this book’s analysis and explain the motif of ‘mask and face,’ which runs through contemplating what it might entail to ‘face up’ to a more explicitly necropolitical future. As I detail in Chapter 2, patterns of local-global (re/dis)embodiment taking shape and being revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic are increasingly informed and indeed defined by their necropolitical logics and racialised dividing practices that have been becoming increasingly prevalent and widespread since at least the time of the Atlantic slave trade.23 However, I argue that COVID-19 has engendered a shift towards more blatant and visible techniques of necropolitical death production and the disembodiments of those designated to be used up as necropower makes further encroachments into the lives and deaths of every body in the wake of the pandemic and the shadow of the economic disaster it threatens. With specific reference to the embodiment of the COVID-19 pandemic at the level of the UK population, in Chapter 3, I illustrate the utility of appreciating the metaphoricity (the power of metaphor) of the body politic by exploring how the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was embodied at the level of the UK population by presenting studies on (1) the relation between individual and collective bodies exploring who became the ‘chin’ of PM Boris Johnson’s 5 March 2020 comment that the United Kingdom might ‘take it [COVID-19] on the chin’ and (2) the outdated bodily metaphors exemplified by PM Boris Johnson’s very own ‘fight’ with COVID-19 and re-embodiment through this period. Gaining further traction and fleshing out the rethinking of the body done in Chapters 1 and 2, this chapter draws from and builds on notions of the body politic existing in social, political, and international theory and more recently brought into direct conversation with the contemporary life sciences in Stefanie Fishel’s Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic (2017). Beyond this, ideas are intermixed with Ahmed’s (2014 and 2019) explanations of how bodies simultaneously exist, are known, and function as individuals and parts of collective bodies to highlight how bodies politic are (a) the result of an embodiment in the sense of a making-into-a-body composed of lively collective body parts; (b) become intelligible with a series of properties characteristic of human bodies (with organs and limbs, for example); (c) human properties entail certain dynamics characteristic of human bodies (vulnerability and anxiety around self-preservation, for example); (d) problematic, particularly human embodiment makes possible bodies politic in the contemporary international system that tries to be individual, sovereign, rational, and masculine; (e) are generally unhealthy given the outdated and, at the core, violent and discriminatory (power/) knowledge about bodies informing their materialisation. In Chapter 4, I focus on the particularities of the emotional landscape carved out and embodied over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic through a bottom-up approach which speaks to and reaffirms the prevalence of the global forces, logics, and patterns of (re/dis)embodiment outlined elsewhere

18  Introduction in the book. Taking forwards Ahmed’s ideas about ‘atmospheric walls’ (15/09/2014), I argue that this is an increasingly sharpened and segmented emotional landscape and draw on auto-ethnography and survey results combined with broader critical discourse analysis (CDA) to investigate the social-political construction, function, and implications of atmospheric walls working to contain grief and keep some (body) parts numb during the pandemic, arguing that this worked through the spring and summer of 2020 to contain some bodies and with them emotion itself, which in turn allowed others to continue circulating. As a contrast to the previous chapters, this one is more deeply rooted in the and, indeed in my, everyday, embodied, and often mundane experiences through the spring and summer of 2020 and details the performative materialisation of an ever-sharpening emotional landscape through a localised study as I particularly reflect on my own angle of arrival into the pandemic and critically reflect on my part and position within the body politic and indeed the endoskeleton of the world before honing in on and considering the implications of the affective particularities of being out of touch during the pandemic. I end Chapter 4 by examining the social-political affective manipulation and indeed numbing of parts of the population through mechanisms of numbing and the command to stay alert given to a body politic already segregated by increasingly heightening atmospheric walls. Taking the case of the initiative to ‘clap for carers’ and the discursive (re)production of the National Health Service (NHS) as the UK's ‘beating heart’ and ‘fuelled by love,’ this chapter ends with an appraisal of the social-political and affective-embodied social-political functions of pressuring particular parts of the body politic during the pandemic. Contributing to knowledge about national (un)commemoration rituals and contested grievability, in Chapter 4, I very carefully consider the emotional (re)orientation of bodies and of collective body parts comprising the British body politic during the COVID-19 outbreak and quarantine of spring 2020 to argue that, in reverse to an economy of fear such as that seen taking hold of populations during the GWoT, a very lack of fear of COVID-19, affective numbing within some parts of the British body politic, and the continent of grief in others have allowed and facilitated the continuation of a particular formation political economy that produces the dead bodies of those reduced to use and reveals the gendered and raced lines dividing grievable from ungrievable bodies and collective body parts with the contemporary UK setting.

Methodology Once, I needed the perfect time & place to write. I stood in my way like a poison-pen letter to myself. But slowly…I learned to write in my own skin, like it or not. (Berlant & Stewart, 2019: 10) Who would’ve thought that I would finally find the ‘perfect time and place to write’ and the courage to ‘write in my own skin’ (ibid) ‘locked down’ during the onset of a global pandemic? Certainly not I. However, having done exactly that,

Introduction  19 the methodology underlying this book is antifoundational and reflexive, innovative and creative, and it is primarily inspired and facilitated by authors within my discipline daring to abandon the ‘methodological safety net’ (Zalewski, 2013a: 133) provided and clung to by IR’s positivist orthodoxy. Briefly detailed in this section, these alternative approaches towards research gave me not only the courage to abandon the safety of positivist methodology and traditional social sciences research methods and resist ‘the seductions of quantification’ (see Merry, 2016) and the easy acceptability that comes with it but also allowed for this book to come to fruition in its final unconventional form. Due to the methodology outlined in this section, in the end, this book’s chapters have been presented as a combination of vignettes, auto and digital-ethnography, and reflective/reflexive essays bringing in the results of broader critical discourse analyses and surveys as I employ the feminist research ethics defined by Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui True (2008: 694) as ‘attentiveness to the power of epistemology, boundaries, relationships and the situatedness of the researcher’ and take into account the roles of emotion and positionality within my research process. In this methodology section, I have provided initial reflections on the unique position from which I contacted this research. However, preceding this and a more detailed breakdown and discussion of my research methods is a brief description of my methodological passage towards writing in this book within and to the discipline of IR aimed at current students similarly going against the grain in our field. Seeing that ‘theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin’ (Ahmed, 2017: 10), this book is simultaneously deeply theoretical and empirically rich to the point of the personal – triangulating auto-ethnography, surveys, and critical discourse analyses throughout. To provide more methodological detail, epistemologically and ontologically, rethinking the body as I do through this book has meant taking a wholly antifoundational approach that aims to reveal not what bodies are but rather the nature and logics underlying the unending practices, processes, and contests through which being becomes embodied and bodies, therefore, become. Beyond epistemology and ontology, my research process itself – my method – was a mess.24 However, while not typical in IR,25 over the years, I have learned from the authors cited here to describe my method less shamefully and more accurately as a process consisting of iterative, co-constitutive, and inseparable theoretical, empirical, and reflexive elements. However, as a further attempt towards finding a more nuanced research methods vocabulary to ‘fit’ my messy method, I would describe what I did as innovative, reflexive, case study based, broadly defined participatory digital and auto-ethnographic process tracing, and critical discourse analysis. However, it is important to note that, heeding Auchter’s (2014: 35) warning that ‘identifying discourses is not always easy, as multiple discursive systems may overlap at any given time,’ I understand discourses as multiple, overlapping, and contested and have accordingly directed my analysis towards the very discursive contest of bodies as, from my antifoundational epistemological-ontological standpoint, it is discursive contest which works so politically towards processes of (dis/re) embodiment under scrutiny throughout this book.

20  Introduction Method of mess To provide more detail on what I did towards the production of this book (my method), while not the result of linear and well-defined planning, data collection, and writing up stages, I did have a plan, at some point. In fact, I originally intended for this book to rethink the body in global politics through a series of case studies drawn from the GWoT and to bring those into conversation and make theoretical interventions that spoke to each of those cases through this book. As such and as mentioned earlier, for years, I had been carrying out empirical research into the body politics of the GWoT. This involved pointed case studies into (re/dis) embodiments focussed on Guantánamo Bay, British and American soldiers, and war performance and commemorations. Indeed, that research and my analysis of it still informs this book and is explicitly presented in relation to particular bodily aspects, features of body politics, and processes of (re/dis)embodiment in the following chapters. However, rather than being presented one after the other in the form of case study chapters that follow preliminary, more traditionally presented, explicitly theoretical chapters, the empirical and theoretical have instead been interwoven throughout, pushed, and brought up to date through the ever-unfolding case of the COVID-19 pandemic, which became this book’s empirical focus, coming to eventually overshadow this book in every sense as I ‘wrote up’ between March and September 2020. When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, everything changed. Findings from my GWoT-focussed work do still feature in this book and are interwoven into this book’s first part, especially as I gradually unpack my rethinking of the body, body politics, and the body politic by examining elements of the process of (re/dis)embodiment in turn. However, as I have explained in this introduction, unconfined to subject matter within the typical IR frame of war, the case of COVID-19 provided a much more fitting, and I believe a much more compelling, case through which to make my claims about every and everyday bodies. When the lockdown began, my embodied experience much more explicitly became a part of the research. Indeed, in line with the feminist research ethic outlined thus far and problematising the notion of the field as a place for the disembodied and apparently objective researcher to exploitatively extract data from,26 I conducted utterly immersive COVID-19-focussed research between March and September 2020 as I simultaneously reworked the pre-COVID-19 draft manuscript and rewrote it into this final form. I have incorporated reflexive field notes and diary entries into the research methods within previous projects (see Purnell and Danilova, 2018), but what I did with this book was of a new order entirely, as my every waking27 moment, thought, and experience through those long and hard months became data. Reflexive reflections What ends up mattering most is moving through and being in the day. Listening to the radio, travelling, walking into the room, reading, preparing food, listening to music, gardening, watching a plasma screen, checking Facebook,

Introduction  21 feeding animals, staring into space, shopping, talking, listening, and noticing (however absent-mindedly) what’s in the street, the shops, a billboard, a museum, a holiday spot, a class, a meeting. (Zalewski, 2013b: xvii) Intended as a chronicle of contemporary global politics as it is (re/dis)embodied and materialises as everyday lived and most often mundane experiences, I have tried to underline throughout this book that what is known as IR does not come from somewhere else but happens in, to, and through every body. Towards bringing this out in the text that follows, I have particularly followed Marysia Zalewski (cited earlier) and throughout my research process made sure to ‘pay attention to the ripples and flows of ordinary life’ (ibid: i). Indeed, as part auto-ethnography, this book includes personal, emotional, and intimate snippets from daily life alongside the presentation and discussion of ‘data,’ including textual-discourse analysis and survey results. As ethically feminist and treating ‘non-elite people as knowers and subjects of research’ (Ackerly and True, 2008: 701), I have aimed for this book to contribute to wider disciplinary efforts to explicitly bring the everyday and especially the embodied experiences of global politics into our disciplinary frame,28 and it is specifically towards this end that I not only describe and discuss the local-global politics of bodies by detailing events, situations, and developments happening elsewhere and to other people but have also written myself into the text. Indeed, finding the global in everyday embodied experiences (including even the mundane ones, such as those described earlier by Zalewski), it follows that (a) my own body and everyday embodied experiences are sites of global politics, and (b) these should, therefore, be included in this book. Grounded throughout in my own personal and unique embodied experiences, within this book, I have attempted to personally narrate global politics from my own unique and uniquely embodied situation, and the chapters, therefore, have an intentionally narrative and increasingly auto-ethnographic quality as the book progresses, with Chapter 4 being most heavily informed by my own experiences ‘on the ground’ through the spring and summer of 2020. Indeed, the reflexive and reflective, more explicitly auto-ethnographic elements within this book are particularly inspired by the increasing amount of IR scholars adopting auto-ethnographic, narrative methods within the discipline.29 Moreover, as ‘technique[s] of social investigation conducted through the self’ (Wakeman, 2014: 708), narrative auto-ethnography sits well with my argument that every body is a contested site of global politics as it follows that my own embodied self is no more or less politically contested than any other. However, of course, I acknowledge throughout and particularly reflect on how as a young(ish),30 white, English, woman, my body affords me a great deal of privilege, makes certain things (in)visible to me, and keeps me safe from harm a lot of the time. In fact, it is acknowledging and reflecting on these very particularities that allowed me to explore research puzzles about the emotional and embodied landscapes and (in)visibilities of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the spring and summer of 2020 and this period of immersive and reflexive ethnography, as a way to keep track of my thoughts, feelings, and reactions during the pandemic, I began keeping a diary. I did not do this consistently

22  Introduction because some days I could not find the words or bring myself to write. However, when I could, I did. Indeed, the draft version of this manuscript doubled up as a makeshift field diary, within which I would often find myself manically scrolling through to find the right place to insert the day’s date and my corresponding thoughts and feelings in case they might later be found relevant for chapters and sections as the book’s structure emerged. Sometimes a diary entry would stem from a hastily posted and often quickly deleted tweet. I even began sharing some of my more coherent diary entries publicly when I became a contributor to the COVID-19 Global Health Diaries established by Owain Williams in April (2020).31 Some of the entries I published online and snippets of which feature in this book. However, even when not explicitly referring back to a particular date and situation, this book is inescapably informed by my unique and uniquely embodied experience of living through the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak and first wave. Regarding my material, embodied self as what Tami Spry calls ‘a site of scholarly awareness and corporeal literacy’ (2001: 706), I have, therefore, made the conscious effort to reflect on and write my experience and feelings into this book alongside the inclusion, detail, discussion, and narrative of other embodied experiences and actions. Indeed, the digital ethnography conducted towards this book in the spring-summer of 2020 leads to my inclusion of the testimonies of members of the public beyond my local vicinity into this book's analyses. As an immersive digital ethnography, this element of the research can be understood as an extension of my ‘offline’ auto-ethnographic efforts wherein I continued to ‘take in’, read about, watch footage of, and discuss the COVID-19 pandemic and local-national-global developments via applications including Twitter, Facebook, and Whatsapp. Indeed, as a result of again considering my online but no less embodied and affective experiences as data, this article duly includes my reflections on Government announcements, news articles, Whatsapp group chats, Twitter posts, and blogs alongside survey results and auto-ethnographic reflections on my activities in real life. In their final COVID-19 focussed form, the chapters comprising this book are not neatly separated into ‘theoretical’ and ‘empirical’ contributions. Rather, each contains a blend of co-constitutive theoretical-empirical reflections. However, as the book progresses, I do gradually move further into the details of the 2020 pandemic after placing more weight on supplying the necessary theoretical tools initially. Finally, towards this book, some more conventional, pre-planned, and unplanned in interviewing, surveying, and ethnographic research also took place over the summer of 2020. As the main brunt of this, once the first wave had passed and there seemed to be time to look back for the first time since the pandemic’s onset, I put together a survey using Google Forms32 and circulated this to residents of Chertsey. Through this survey, made available from 14 July–29 July 2020 through the local members-only Facebook groups Chertsey Chatter and Chertsey Chat33 and completed anonymously by 177 residents, I wanted to better gauge local feelings in relation to key moments and events. I also wanted to know how people had been touched by COVID-19 itself – either by getting ill or experiencing the loss of family, friends, and relatives. As findings shared in Chapter 4 show, this survey provided insights and granularity that neither national statistics nor my broader discourse analyses and ethnographies could.

Introduction  23 Research impact As a social-political-international theorist investigating processes of (re/dis) embodiment, I have made it my work to look and think and dwell on what has been kept outside of the lives and experiences of many of my peers – even within IR my subject matter is considered grim and depressing – take my study on the treatment of dead bodies and their disposal for example (see Purnell, 2018). I have made it my business to know and think and feel about what others shy away from but never have I been caught up in my own research quite as obviously as now, and I would certainly never claim to have built up any emotional resilience or ability to detach myself from my work. Rather, and as I hope to have conveyed by now, writing this book on and during the pandemic lockdown of the spring and summer of 2020 was an absolutely immersive, sometimes cathartic, but more often intense and intensely draining and stressful experience in what was already an incredibly stressful time. I have considered that I used the writing process and distraction of my manuscript’s approaching deadline as a coping mechanism through which to manage and offset the stress and even trauma of the pandemic itself. However, turning my experience of the lockdown and pandemic into work and tasking myself with writing reflexively about what was an already draining and risky situation also entailed additional stressors which should serve as a warning and reminder of the violent potential of research and academic life and the need for deeper reflection on these always already raced, classed, and gendered issues.

Notes 1 This introduction’s section titled “Introducing (Re/dis)embodiment” provides background for the concept of embodiment before Chapters 1 and 2 are devoted to breaking down and explaining contemporary local-global processes of (re/dis)embodiment, which I define as the continuously contested and intense local-global, social-political process through which bodies continually come to be or not be or become other than bodies. 2 See my discussion in the section titled “Bodies in/and IR” for a thorough overview of this work. 3 This bulk of this book was written during the Spring and Summer of 2020. 4 I use the word endoskeleton here having been inspired by Dionne Brand’s (04/07/2020: par. 1) observation that ‘what the COVID-19 pandemic has done is expose even further the endoskeleton of the world.’ 5 I refer to the ‘lockdown’ here as what was put into place by the UK government on 23 March 2020 and gradually released in stages from 10 May onwards. 6 Through the spring and summer of 2020, the United Kingdom maintained a very high excess death rate – the highest in Europe at the time of this writing and globally earlier on before Latin American countries overtook the United Kingdom. See the Financial Times’ COVID-19 data visualisation page: https://www.ft.com/content/ a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938. 7 Because of the risk of being infected by a dead body, Public Health England (15/05/2020) has issued guidance for personal protective equipment (PPE) to be worn by persons caring for the deceased with suspected or confirmed coronavirus.

24  Introduction 8 In order to ‘shield’ the United Kingdom’s depleted NHS, Public Health England issued guidance (31/05/2020) stating that ‘people classed as clinically extremely vulnerable are advised to take additional action to prevent themselves from coming into contact with the virus.’ 9 For example, the UK Office for National Statistics (07/05/2020) revealed that the COVID-19 mortality rate had been found to be 4.2 times higher for black males and 4.3 times higher for black females than for white males and females. 10 For example, Kayla Williams, a 36-year-old black woman from London died in her home on 21 March 2020 after being told by the NHS she was ‘not a priority’ (see Laville, 25/03/2020). 11 Here I am alluding to Jenny Edkins’s thesis titled ‘Missing: Persons and Politics’ (2011), which I draw and build on throughout this book. 12 Foucault (2003: 15–16) reversed Carl von Clausewitz’s often-cited dictum apparently explaining the relations between war and politics to alternatively purport that ʻpolitics is the continuation of war by other means.ʼ 13 Kenneth Waltz’s (1959) neo-realist contribution to the discipline of IR identifies man, the state, and war as the units of analysis essential for the purpose of theorising (in) stability in the international system. 14 For discussion and analysis of detailed and protracted case studies, see Purnell (2018 and 2015) on the contest of the injured and dead bodies of American soldiers and Guantánamo Bay hunger strikers, respectively. 15 See, for example, the cases of Belly Mujinga (see The Guardian, 12/05/2020) and Trevor Belle (see White, 21/05/2020). 16 Noted due to how unusual it was in 2008 to see the word ‘body’ in a highly ranked IR journal article’s title published in the European Journal of International Relations, the title of Newmans’s article is The Body of the Diplomat. 17 I use the word ontological here because I am referring to how operations of power/ knowledge play a role in making bodies come to be known and, therefore, come to be as such. 18 These articles are two outcomes of the wider research project titled War Commemoration, Military Culture and Identity Politics in Scotland funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities in Scotland (RG13890/70560). 19 Issued in March 2003 (on the eve of the invasion of Iraq), the Dover Ban is a US Department of Defense) directive working to prohibit the publication and broadcast of images and videos capturing any part of the process of the ritual repatriation of America’s war dead; this directive states, ‘There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein or Dover AFB, to include interim stops.’ 20 Kenneth Waltz’s (1959) paradigmatic neo-realist contribution to the discipline identifies man, the state, and war as the units of analysis essential for the purpose of theorising war and peace in the international system. 21 For a more detailed history of the pre-Enlightenment philosophy of the body, see Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco (2005). 22 While it is beyond the scope of this book to provide an overview of the history of feminist and postcolonial thinking on this matter, the following passage from Yaa Gyasi’s Homecoming (2016) encapsulates the impetus behind work to problematise Western dualism by othering it through the narration that ‘the need to call this thing “good” and this thing “bad,” this thing “white” and this thing “black” was an impulse that Effia did not understand. In her village, everything was everything. Everything bore the weight of everything else.’ 23 See Mbembe 2003, 2015, and 2019 and Chapter 2 for more of my own interpretation of contemporary necropolitical formations. 24 See John Law (2004) on ‘messy’ research within the social sciences. 25 For notable exceptions, see Zalewski 2013a and 2013b and Maeva Clement and Eric Sangar’s 2013.

Introduction  25 26 See Katrina Kusic and Jakub Zahora (30/03/2020) for a discussion of works similarly problematising the notion of ‘the field’ in IR. 27 For this project, I even wrote reflexively about my changing sleep patterns and the contents of my ‘lockdown dreams’ (see Purnell, 28/04/2020). 28 See, for example, Åhäll (2018), Holland and Solomon (2014), Saunders and Holland (2018), and Saunders and Crilley (2019). 29 For an overview of auto-ethnography in IR, see Morgan Riggs and Roland Blieker (2010), while on narrative IR, see authors contributing to the Journal of Narrative Politics since its 2014 launch, inspired by Naeem Inayatullah and Elizabeth Dauphinee’s edited collection titled Narrative Global Politics (2016) and Dauphinee and Paulo Ravecca’s instructive article titled “Narrative and the Possibilities for Scholarship” (2018). 30 At the time of writing, I am 35 years old. 31 See https://covid19healthdiaries.com/diaries?id=89. 32 See the following link for the online pilot survey: https://docs.google.com/ forms/d/1sSoE35O8h3FYQ9j2XuOBF-ure8nEfpbSIyKnUapkV3M/prefill. 33 At the time of circulating the survey, Chertsey Chatter had more than 11,000 members while Chertsey Chat had more than 3,000.

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Introduction  27 Enloe, Cynthia. 1990. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkley\London: University of California Press. Epstein, Charlotte. 2008. ‘Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies: Crossing the Biometric Borders,’ International Political Sociology, Vol. 1, 149–164. Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose. 12/05/2020. ‘Government’s Handling of Covid-19 Is a Very British Disaster,’ The Telegraph, URL: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ business/2020/05/12/governments-handling-covid-19-british-disaster/. Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. Boston: Addison Wesley. Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Fierke, Karin. 2014. Political Self-sacrifice: Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Fierke, Karin and McKay, Nicola. 2020. ‘To “See” Is to Break an Entanglement: Quantum Measurement, Trauma and Security,’ Security Dialogue, Online First: 1–17. doi: 10.1177/0967010620901909. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. An Introduction. London\ New York: Penguin Books. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972– 1977, ed. Colin Gordon; trans. Leo Marshall Colin Gordon, John Mepham and Kate Soper, Brighton: Harvester. Foucault, Michel. 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey, New York: Picador. Frank, Aurthur. 1990. ʻBringing Bodies Back in: A Decade Review,ʼ Theory, Culture, Society, Vol. 7: 131–160. Gordon, Avery. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis\London: University of Minnesota Press. Gregory, Thomas. 2016. ‘Dismembering the Dead: Violence, Vulnerability and the Body in War,’ European Journal of International Relations, 22(4), 944–965. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington\ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Gyassi, Yaa. 2016. Homecoming. London: Penguin. Hansen, Lene. 2006. Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War. London\New York: Routledge. Haraway, Donna. 1988. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,’ Feminist Studies, Vol.14(3): 575–599. Hass, Lisa. 2008. Merleau-Pontyʼs Philosophy. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Hast, Susanna. 2016. ‘Sounds of Silence: Reflections on Songwriting and International Relations,’ Critical Military Studies, Vol. 2(1–2): 113–136. Howson, Alexandra. 2004. The Body In Society: An Introduction. Cambridge\Oxford: Polity Press. Inayatullah, Naeem and Dauphinee, Elizabeth. 2016. Narrative Global Politics, Theory, History and the Personal in International Relations. London\New York: Routledge. Jabri, Vivienne. 2006. ‘Shock and Awe: Power and the Resistance of Art,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34: 819–839. Kusik, Katerina and Jakub Zahora. 30/03/2020. ‘Fieldwork, Failure, International Relations,’ E-IR, URL: https://www.e-ir.info/2020/03/30/fieldwork-failure-international-relations/.

28  Introduction Laville, Sandra. 25/03/2020. ‘London Woman Dies of Suspected Covid-19 after Being Told She Was “Not Priority”,’ The Guardian, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ mar/25/london-woman-36-dies-of-suspected-covid-19-after-being-told-she-is-not-priority. Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London\New York: Routledge. Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. University of Chicago Press: Chicago\London. Leder, Drew. 1992. The Body in Medical Thought and Practice. Boston\London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Marlin-Bennet, Renee, Wilson, Marieke, and Walton, Jason. 2010. ‘Commodified Cadavers and the Political Economy of the Spectacle,’ International Political Sociology Vol. 4: 159–177. Masters, Cristina. 2005. ‘Bodies of Technology: Cyborg Soldiers and Militarized Masculinities,’ International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 7(1): 112–132. Mbembe, Achille. 13/04/2020a. ‘The Universal Right to Breathe,’ In the Moment, URL: https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/ amp/?__twitter_impression=true. Mbembe, Achille. 24/04/2020b. ‘Achille Mbembe: The Necropolitics of a Pandemic,’ Autonomies, URL: http://autonomies.org/2020/04/ achille-mbembe-the-necropolitics-of-a-pandemic/. McSorley, Kevin. 2014. ‘Towards An Embodied Sociology of War,’ The Sociological Review, Vol. 62(2): 107–128 McSorley, Kevin. 2016. ‘Doing Military Fitness: Physical Culture, Civilian Leisure, and Militarism,’ Critical Military Studies. Vol. 2(1–2): 103–119. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962 The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routeledge. Merry, Sally Engle. 2016. The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Newman, Iver B. 2008. ‘The Body of the Diplomat,’ European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 14(4): 671–695. Office for National Statistics (ONS). 07/05/2020a. ‘Coronavirus and the Social Impacts on Great Britain: 7 May 2020,’ ONS, URL: https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/ coronavirusandthesocialimpactsongreatbritain7may2020. Office for National Statistics (ONS). 30/07/2020b. ‘Comparisons of All-Cause Mortality between European Countries and Regions: January to June 2020,’ ONS, URL: https:// www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/ articles/comparisonsofallcausemortalitybetweeneuropeancountriesandregions/ januarytojune2020. Phillips, Tom. 12/06/2020. ‘Brazil Overtakes UK with World’s Second-Highest Covid19 Death Toll,’ The Guardian, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/12/ brazil-coronavirus-death-toll-second-highest. Public Health England. 15/05/2020a. ‘Guidance for Care of the Deceased with Suspected or Confirmed Coronavirus (COVID-19),’ Gov.uk. URL: https://www. gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-guidance-for-care-of-the-deceased/ guidance-for-care-of-the-deceased-with-suspected-or-confirmed-coronavirus-covid-19. Public Health England. 31/05/2020b. ‘Guidance on Shielding and Protecting People Who Are Clinically Extremely Vulnerable from COVID-19,’ Gov.uk, URL: https://www.gov. uk/government/publications/guidance-on-shielding-and-protecting-extremely-vulnerable-persons-from-covid-19/guidance-on-shielding-and-protecting-extremely-vulnerable-persons-from-covid-19#staying-at-home-and-shielding. Purnell, Kandida. 2015, ‘Body Politics and Boundary Work Nobodies on Hunger Strike at Guantánamo (2013–2015),’ Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 39(4): 271–286.

Introduction  29 Purnell, Kandida. 22/10/2017, ‘The Politics of Grief and the Forever War: Who Speaks for the Fallen?’ Duck of Minerva, URL: http://duckofminerva.com/2017/10/the-politics-ofgrief-and-the-forever-war-who-speaks-for-the-fallen.html. Purnell, Kandida. 2018, ‘Grieving, Valuing and Viewing Differently: The Global War on Terror’s American Toll,’ International Political Sociology, Vol. 12(2): 156–171. Purnell, Kandida. 25/02/2018. ‘Re-branded and Expanded: Visual Politics and the Implications of Guantanamo’s Make Over’, Duck of Minerva, URL: https://duckofminerva.com/2018/02/re-branded-and-expanded-visual-politics-and-the-implications-of-guantanamos-make-over.html. Purnell, Kandida. 06/04/2020, ‘The Body Politics of COVID-19,’The Disorder of Things, URL: https://thedisorderofthings.com/2020/04/06/the-body-politics-of-covid-19/#more-17655. Purnell, Kandida. 28/04/2020. ‘On Dreams of/and Death,’ Global Public Health COVID19 Diaries, URL: https://covid19healthdiaries.com/diary?did=168. Purnell, Kandida and Danilova, Natasha. 2018, ‘Dancing at the Frontline: Rosie Kay’s 5SOLDIERS De-Realises and Re-Secures the Global War on Terror,’ Critical Studies on Security, Vol. 6(3): 370–375. Reeves,Audrey. 2019. ‘Yoga for Veterans and Military Personnel: In Conversation with David Venus,’ Critical Military Studies, Online First. doi: 10.1080/23337486.2019.1678324. Sample, Ian. 14/10/2020. ‘COVID-19: ‘England and Wales among highest per capita death tolls,’ URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/14/ covid-19-england-and-wales-among-highest-per-capita-death-tolls. Saunders, Rob A and Holland, Jack. 2018. ‘The Ritual of Beer Consumption as Discursive Intervention: Effigy, Sensory Politics, and Resistance in Everyday IR,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46(2): 119–141. Saunders, Rob and Crilley, Rhys. 2019. ‘Pissing on the Past: The Highland Clearances, Effigial Resistance and the Everyday Politics of the Urinal,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 47(3) 444–469. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Wacquant, Loic. 2002. Commodifying Bodies. London\ Thousand Oaks\New Delhi: SAGE Publications. Seymour, Wendy. 1998. Remaking the Body: Rehabilitation and Change. London\New York: Routledge. Shilling, Chris. 1993. The Body and Social Theory. Great Britain: SAGE Publications. Shinko, Rosemary E. (2010). ‘Ethics after Liberalism: Why (Autonomous) Bodies Matter,’ Millennium, Vol. 38(3): 723–745. Skeggs, Beverly. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender. London: SAGE Publications. Spry, Tami. 2001. ‘Performing Ethnography: An Embodied Methodological Praxis,’ Qualitative Enquiry, Vol. 7(6): 706–732. Sylvester, Christine. 2012. ‘War Experiences/War Practices/War Theory,’ Millennium, Vol. 40(3): 483–503. Synnott, Anthony. 2002. The Body Social: Symbolism, Self, and Society. London and New York: Routledge. Tickner, J. Ann. 2006. ‘On the Frontlines or Sidelines of Knowledge and Power? Feminist Practices of Responsible Scholarship,’ International Studies Review, Vol. 8(3): 383–395. von Bertalanffy, Ludwig. 1956. ‘General System Theory,’ General Systems, Vol. 1: 1–10. Wakeman, Stephen. 2014. ‘Fieldwork, Biography, and Emotion: Doing Criminological Auto-Ethnography,’ British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 54(5): 705–721. Welland, Julia. 2017. ‘Violence and the Contemporary Soldering Body,’ Security Dialogue, Vol. 48(6) 524–540. Welton, Donn. 1998. Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader. Massachusettes\Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

30  Introduction White, Megan. 21/05/2020. ‘Taxi Driver Dies from Coronavirus after Being Spat at in Row over £9 Fare,’ LBC News, URL: https://www.lbcnews.co.uk/uk-news/ taxi-driver-dies-coronavirus-spat-fare/. Wilcox, Lauren. 2012, ‘What the Body Does: Theorizing Hunger Striking and Embodied Agency in International Relations,’ Chapter Presented at Millennium – Journal of International Studies Annual Conference. Wilcox, Lauren. 2013. ‘Explosive Bodies and Bounded States,’ International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 16(1): 1–20. Wilcox, Lauren. 2014. ‘Making Bodies Matter in IR,’ Millennium: Journal of International Relations, Vol. 43(1): 359–364. Wilcox, Lauren. 2015a. Bodies of Violence: Theorising the Embodied Subject in International Relations. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Wilcox, Lauren. 2015b, ‘Drone Warfare And The Making Of Bodies Out Of Place,’ Critical Studies on Security,Vol. 3(1): 127–131. Wilcox, Lauren. 2017. ‘Embodying Algorithmic War: Gender, Race, and the Posthuman in Drone Warfare’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 48(1): 11–28. Wodak, Ruth and Meyer, Michael. 2009. Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis (Introducing Qualitative Methods series). London\Los Angles\New Delhi: SAGE Publications. Zalewski, Marysia. 2013a, ‘Theorizing emotion: affective borders in Homeland,’ Critical Studies on Security, Vol. 1(1): 133–135. Zalewski, Marysia. 2013b. Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse. London\ New York: Routledge.

1 Bodies

If you look closely (as you must in order to rethink the body), what appears as a human body is not an individual bounded unit but a leaky container of other bodies and things. Mine is no exception. Over the years, I have broken, healed, grown, and shrunk. Moreover, I realise that even after death, my body in its recognisable human form will soon become something else – breaking down to become a part of things other including the earth, plants, and animals. As Jenna Brager (12/05/2015: par. 1) describes it, ‘The body is made of hydrogen and oxygen and when the body comes apart it becomes a part of what surrounds it, what consumes it.’ In these ways and many others, bodies are never finally finished or bounded, but rather always in process and, as I explained in this book’s introduction this process is called (re/dis)embodiment: the continuously contested and intense local-global, social-political process through which bodies continually come to be or not be. Even death itself cannot fix or finalise the body, and to speak of any bodily essence or even define the human body would be an attempt to confine it, and that is something I am not interested in doing.1 Alternatively, I have a fascination shared with Elizabeth Grosz (1994: xi). Indeed, ‘it is the abilities of bodies to always extend the frameworks which attempt to contain them, to seep beyond their domains of control, which fascinates me’. Therefore, even though etymologically slippery (see Lieberman, 14/10/2015) and given my epistemologically antifoundational approach, this chapter is not intended to provide a definition or description of bodies and what they are but to better describe the processes and practices of (re/dis)embodiment through which bodies continually come to be, come apart, and become other. To unpack (re/dis)embodiment in this chapter, I concentrate on and discuss in turn two of the most crucial phenomena contributing to the processes: precariousness and emotion. In Section 1.1, I describe how, as ultimately precarious, bodies come to be, not be, and/or be differently because of existential and ontological excesses and a related ontological (in)security allowing for discursive, exclusionary violence to become fleshed out by virtue of performativity. In Section 1.2, I then explain the mutually constitutive relation of bodies to emotion and underline the social-political function of emotion towards not only ongoing processes of (re/dis)embodiment but local-global political individual and collective bodily

32  Bodies movements and (re)orientations. Throughout this chapter, I bring in particular empirical examples drawn from my case study research into particular aspects of the body politics of the GWoT and point to reflections made during the spring and summer of the UK’s COVID-19 pandemic as doing so helps illustrate how precarity and emotions work in processes of (re/dis)embodiment.

1.1 Precarious bodies We live in a world where people can be taken apart and become parts of other bodies. Where somebody, irreplaceable to one, becomes only a part to be used and used up in the eyes and service of another. In this world, anybody can at least potentially come apart, become a part, or even become a nobody because (re/dis) embodiment is an ongoing and socially and politically contested process, the continuation of which every body existentially depends. We are currently witnessing the novel coronavirus COVID-19 working as a catalyst to speed up what was previously a slower rate of socially and politically constructed death and, therefore, excerpting pressure on every part of what Dionne Brand (04/07/2020: par. 1) has called the ‘endoskeleton of the world[’s]’ supply chain of bodies. However, because of the global politics of bodies, which plays out differently from time to time and place to place, some bodies are more likely than others to become disembodied while such transformations and disembodiments are always the result of ontological (in)security which, common to every body and discussed in this paper, demonstrates how bodies are contested sites of global politics through the process of (re/dis)embodiment. Towards unpacking claims about bodily precariousness and making plain how processes of (re/dis)embodiment can result in the reduction of bodies to body parts and in literal dismemberments, in this section, I draw and build on literature dealing with bodily excess, ontological (in)security, and precariousness to explain how and why those becoming known as and thus becoming (some)bodies hang eternally in the balance. Following Butler (2009: 25) to understand bodily precariousness as meaning ‘they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed. In some sense, this is a feature of all life, and there is no thinking of life which is not precarious,’ the two interrelated arguments that I present in this section are more precisely that (1) with the bodily being in itself located elsewhere, in excess of any body, the constitutive excess of the body is absolutely central for bodily precariousness and the ongoing process of (re/dis)embodiment, and (2) the precariousness of bodies produces ontological insecurity and can make or break any body – at both the surface level of self and identity and materially. 1.1.1 Bodies in excess Discussed already materially and biologically, embodied subjects constantly exceed themselves by intentionally and sometimes unintentionally overspilling and leaking (as individual, bounded, Cartesian bodies enslaved by the mind should not). Thus while human bodies may have legal and political rights, no

Bodies  33 amount of security, police, or law enforcement can prevent blood, sweat, and tears from seeping out of any body. However, on top of being materially leaky, bodies are existentially and ontologically excessive – to the point that they can literally not be without others. This makes bodies very precarious indeed, and in this section, I further expand on the notions of ontological and existential excesses and outline how these contribute to processes of (re/dis)embodiment. Hard as I try, I can never really see myself as others do – as a whole and from the outside. There is always something missing. Towards explaining this, phenomenologists have for a long time pointed to the excessive qualities of the embodied subject. For example, Drew Leder (1990: 7) explains that ‘there are, in fact, certain bodily profiles, aspects of one’s moods and intentions, that are far more available to others than oneself.’ As an illustration of how we cannot see ourselves from the outside, people are well-known to be unable to pick out photographs of their own body parts when placed amongst those of the body parts of others.2 However, thinking more about the politics of bodily excesses, Butler (2015: 97) has emphasised how ‘even as located beings, we are always elsewhere, constituted in a sociality that exceeds us,’ while Edkins (2011: viii) agrees that ‘who people are is very bound up with who they are in relation to others.’ I, for example, am a partner to one, a daughter to two, a sister to another, and a teacher to many. However, I will not come across in the same way to either of my parents or any two of the hundreds of students I’ve taught over the years. Instead, I am known differently to every body. Indeed, being of a different relation to each and every other means there is space for contest over what it means to be somebody. In short, is therefore that I describe bodies as existentially and ontologically excessive insecure – because being in itself is located beyond the embodied subject and is existentially dependent on others. Indeed, we are nothing and literally no body without one another because, as Butler (2011: 34) puts it so well, who we are, bodily, is already a way of being ‘for’ the other, appearing in ways that we cannot see, being a body for another in a way that I cannot be for myself, and so dispossessed, perspectivally, by our very sociality. I must appear to others in ways for which I cannot give an account, and in this way my body establishes a perspective that I cannot inhabit. The meaning and status of ‘Kandida,’ in my case, is in excess of, ungraspable, and uncontainable by either myself or anyone else and, therefore, beyond the control of or protection from anybody. Rather, the who and what ‘I’ am emerges as a general but always contested and shifting consensus and makes ‘me’ existentially and ontologically dependent on others. Being an Assistant Professor of IR, a British citizen, and a white woman with a privileged body that matters, I do not feel likely to have my status as somebody and as a human being brought into question any time soon. However, some bodies are more precarious than others, meaning being in existential and ontological excess can be their undoing and hence Butler’s (2015: 208–209) caution that we are ‘exposed in ways that sustain us but also in ways that can destroy us.’

34  Bodies 1.1.2 Ontological (in)security The bodily existential and ontological excesses described thus far means that, as embodied subjects, we are literally nothing and nobody without each other. Indeed, I have argued that being constituted in a sociality exceeding us makes embodied subjects very precarious, potentially to the point of destruction and means no body should ever be taken for granted. Indeed, this is because any body could at least potentially be taken away by a process of disembodiment. In order to further unpack these claims, in this section, I continue to emphasise and explore the social-political implications of bodily precariousness and the bodily excesses discussed above through the concept of ontological (in)security. However, before going on to provide examples of disembodiments made possible by aspects of bodily precariousness and ontological (in)security, it is important to explain exactly what I mean when I refer to ontological (in)security. This is particularly necessary because a rich and gradually expanding IR literature on ontological security3 and referred to as ontological security theory (OST) has been emerging since the late 1990s.4 In particular, in this chapter, I bring IR’s emerging OST into conversation with interdisciplinary approaches to bodies and embodiment, as the broader and deeper notion of ontological (in)security I put forwards is central to understanding processes of (re/dis)embodiment which are in turn the bedrock of my overall rethinking of bodies. The ontological security referred to within OST is rooted in the psychoanalytic theory of R. D. Laing and its reworking by Anthony Giddens (1991) and has been described most succinctly by Ben Rosher (03/08/2020: par. 1) as ‘concerned with the ways in which we know who we are and our place in our socio-material worlds.’ It is the notion of security and, indeed, insecurity, as very much bound up in the sense of selfhood that allows agents to maintain their psychological well-being and indeed to be and behave as coherent entities within a social setting. As Rosher goes on, We perform our selves in the world through embedded routines and discourses which serve to ‘bracket out’ the underlying fact that life is contingent and largely beyond our control in order that we are able to ‘go on’ with the everydayness of life. (ibid) Within the OST literature that I draw and I build upon in this chapter, there is also an appreciation of the role of trauma in bringing on insecurity of the ontological kind and thus triggering states to perform increased ontological security routines. Jessica Auchter (2020: 113) has thus written about the role of burials and indeed reburials towards re-security states ontologically in the wake of disaster and/or atrocity, arguing that ‘states often turn to dead body management as a means of securing themselves and their identities.’ Moreover, during the COVID-19 pandemic, J. Paul Goode, David R. Stroup, and Elizaveta Gaufman’s article titled “Everyday Nationalism in Unsettled Times: In Search of Normality during Pandemic” demonstrates the OST analytical approach well in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic as they list, analyse, and compare the ways a number of states, including China, Russia, the

Bodies  35 United Kingdom, and the United States, have been grappling with their national identities and seeking ‘a return to national normality’ (Goode et al., 2020: 1) during the pandemic, including through ‘performing national solidarities and exclusions by wearing face masks; consuming the nation in the form of panic buying and conspiracy theories; and enforcing foreign policies through social media’ (ibid). Interestingly, Goode et al. also discuss how states have been seeking to (re)secure themselves through practices relating to ‘embodiment’ (ibid: p. 13–14) and seem to be moving towards a notion of the (re)embodiment of the nation via the inclusion/ exclusion of particular bodies within the population. Due to its utility as a theory for thinking through personhood and statehood as socially politically constructed processes and with both persons and collectives of persons – bodies politic as I describe them in Chapter 3 – being embodied and these processes of (re/de)securitisation, therefore, feeding into (re/dis)embodiment, within this book, I engage directly with the ‘OST’ notion of security of the self as I describe dominant (for example, military and government) bodies’ contradictory character traits and agitations caused by what I describe as the slipping of their biopolitical masks revealing necropolitical faces and disrupting not only these actors’ sense of self but also their image on the world stage. However, towards further explaining processes of (re/dis)embodiment, I also expand on OST and the notion of ontological security described in two ways: (1) OST literature is primarily concerned with the ontological security of states, while I widen this out to enquire into the ontological (in)security of what comes to be known as and thus comes to be bodies through ongoing process of (re)embodiment, and (2) by taking the ontological security of bodies as the primary focus, the notion put forwards in this paper moves beyond dualist thinking, such as that called back into within OST as concerned with ‘security not of the body but of the self’ (Mitzen, 2006a: 344). Indeed, where OST isolates selfhood5 as the referent object of analyses and leaves the body, let alone the social-political process of (re/dis) embodiment out of its frame of reference favouring the study of the apparently unembodied self and claiming that the two may be separated as ‘conflict may benefit a state’s identity even as it threatens its body’ (ibid. 365), the ontological (in)security that I refer to and describe throughout this chapter and book threatens the embodied subject, which is simultaneously body and self and always already political. To provide further elucidation of my understanding and use of the concept of ontological (in)security towards explaining bodily precarity, I follow Anthony Burke (2007: 12) to understand ontology as ‘a statement about the nature and identity of being.’ Plainly speaking, one’s ontology is concerned with being in itself and how bodies and things get their being. Following on from this understanding, the bodily precarity that I have attempted to capture through my use of the term ontological insecurity is at the level of bodily being in itself, which I argue is fundamentally precarious and existing in excess of the self because of the ‘interdependence of our embodied social life’ (Butler, 29/04/2020: par. 5) and the continually contested process of material (re)embodiment. In short, and in contrast with OST, which as ‘security not of the body but of the self’ (Mitzen, 2006b: 344) leaves the body outside, what is at stake within ontological (in)security (as

36  Bodies I understand it) is that, while some bodies are made more precarious than others and some have their ontological security threatened more readily, any body has the potential to become a literal nobody via a process of disembodiment ending in a body being known, used, and becoming something else. Towards outlining the extent and implications of my reworking of the concept of ontological (in)security in a tripartite effort spread across this and the following two chapters and in a different vein than OST, which relies largely on Anthony Giddens’s (1991)6, within in this book, I make three main points about the ontological (in)security of bodies. In this chapter, I build on Judith Butler’s notion of precariousness (2004 and 2015), along with work done in IR by Thomas Gregory (2016) on the notion of ‘exclusionary violence’ and Adriana Cavarero’s understanding of ‘ontological dignity’ (2008), to show how those known to themselves and others as human persons, as somebodies, can simultaneously become seen and used as other than bodies and as nobodies. In Chapter 2, I continue to work with this concept of ontological (in)security to demonstrate how bodies can be reduced to and come to count as less than human while their value simultaneously increases as a body part until the point of death and using up. I also use this notion of ontological (in) security to describe how human bodies become reduced to body parts, used, and used up in the service of other bodies and for the purpose of maintaining a localglobal necropolitical economy based itself on a model of bodily extraction that is unseeing and counting of even precious raw materials in their human bodily form, which remains apparent to others. Moreover, Chapter 3 is precisely focussed on how, in the UK context, the COVID-19 crisis has engendered (re/dis)embodiments at the ‘level’ of the ontologically insecure body politic and how this plays out in and through the bodies comprising it as lively parts as I consider the implications of the social-political construction of atmospheric walls working to set (body) parts of the body politic apart from one another and PM Boris Johnson’s instruction for the United Kingdom to ‘take it [the COVID-19 pandemic] on the chin.’ 1.1.3 Becoming (no)bodies With being located in between bodies and making bodies so fundamentally precarious and ontologically insecure, rethinking the body in global politics involves recognising that the process of embodiment has at least the potential to become a process of disembodiment for everybody (hence my use of (re/dis)embodiment throughout this book). Thus what is a body one day may become something other the very next. Suicide bombing and decapitation illustrate this point well, as they not only inflict deadly violence by ending life but also inflict ontological violence by undermining the body itself. Such practices classified as an offence to ‘ontological dignity’ for Adriana Cavarero (2008) and for my purpose to describe bodily precariousness illustrate exactly why I argue that bodies are ontologically insecure at a much deeper than surface level of ‘identity’ and ‘selfhood.’ Indeed, such violent practices implicated in violent processes of disembodiment reveal what is at stake through their visible and visceral undoing of the body. However, such violent practices work not only to (re)/(de)/humanise bodies and demonstrate bodily precariousness but also hint at more subtle processes and practices

Bodies  37 of (re/dis)embodiment that work constantly to make every body become more/ less ontologically (in)secure. A further illustration of disembodiment by virtue of precariousness is the 2010 murder of a group of Afghan civilians by a unit of apparently rogue US soldiers who were known as the Afghan Kill Team (AKT). Similar to the practices of suicide bombing and beheading mentioned earlier, these murders were written about by Gregory (2016) to provide an example of how ‘the appearance of a coherent and bounded body is contingent upon an exclusionary violence that prevents certain bodies from appearing as fully human’ (ibid: 950). Gregory chose this case because it involves the victims’ bodies being destroyed as bodies through the use of ‘a violent act that exceeds what is necessary to kill the victim and focuses instead on the destruction of their body’ (ibid: 945). Indeed, the AKT’s destruction of the body as body serves as an example of ontological violence working to disembody those made extremely ontologically insecure by, in this case, the well-theorised dehumanising discourse accompanying and facilitating the GWoT7 and leading a member of the AKT to recall in court that his victim ‘didn’t register as a person’ (cited in Gregory, 2016: 952). Here, in no longer registering ‘as a person,’ the AKT’s victims – even before being physically disembodied, had become nobodies, or as Gregory (ibid: 958) puts it, The bodies of these men were not vulnerable just because they were exposed, or in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because they had been outside the dominant frames of intelligibility. Listening to the language used by members of the Afghan Kill Team, coupled with the atrocious nature of the attacks, it is clear that the victims had been made vulnerable not simply because their bodies were present at the scene, but because their bodies had been made vulnerable by the racialised norms that circumscribe who or what counts as human. Facilitated by what Gregory describes as ‘racialised norms that circumscribe who or what counts as human,’ the AKT’s acts of murder demonstrate well how and why I argue throughout this book that bodies are precarious to the point of ontological (in)security that can and does materialise as physical disembodiment and those formerly known as somebodies becoming other. 1.1.4 Habeas corpus? Having so far discussed the ontological (in)securities engendering processes of disembodiment materialising as the destruction of bodies as bodies through practices of suicide bombing, decapitation, and acts of excessive violence, the implications of bodily ontological (in)security as I have outlined them can be further illustrated by returning to my long-term case study investigation into the body politics of the Island of Bahía de Guantánamo’s Naval Station Guantánamo Bay (NSGB). Indeed, in such an extreme space as this, beings known elsewhere and to others as unique human beings can become so ontologically insecure that they are discursively and performatively disembodied – transformed into things, including pumpkins and mops.

38  Bodies Tarik Bakarwi and Shane Brighton describe war as ‘a generative force like no other’ (2011: 126), and I agree, as during my long-term case study investigation into the body politics of the NSGB, I have noticed this violent conflict generating things such as mops and pumpkins in the place of formerly embodied subjects. Indeed, during the GWoT and as Afghan civilians were being physically dismembered by US soldiers to whom they ‘didn’t register’ as persons, Camp Delta detainees too were being disembodied, having become the targets of the same ‘exclusionary violence’ fuelling the AKT and described earlier as making them knowable and intelligible as things other than embodied human subjects in the eyes of JTF-GTMO, whom in this case detainees’ depend on existentially because of their absolute domination within the space of the camp. However, with ontological (in)security being common to every body, the seemingly strange, extreme, and disturbing events occurring at NSGB are recounted next as a means to make plain and illustrate a process of discursive-materialising disembodiment that could potentially happen to anybody because of a precariousness common to all. It is not easy to disembody someone. Indeed, outlined in turn here, the process of disembodiment occurring at NSGB entailed geographical, legal, political, and social/cultural – discursive – dimensions. Juridically, despite JTF-GTMO naming Cuba as NSGB’s ‘host country,’8 Bahía de Guantánamo was released from Cuba by the 1903 Cuban-American Treaty but remains unincorporated into the United States. The Bay, therefore, occupies what Amy Kaplan (2005: 832) describes as ‘liminal national space’ and comprises no part of any national or international legal or political body. Accordingly, those incarcerated inside the Bay’s detention facility have been excluded from the protections provided to subjects of both domestic criminal law and international law governing conduct in war. Within this legal-political context, detainees’ disembodiment is traceable to President George W. Bush-era decisions, including the (re)making of detainees as ‘unprivileged enemy belligerents’9 and the declaration that international law and the Geneva Conventions in particular would not be applied within the space.10 Notably, between 2002 and 2013, detainees were also denied the writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum which, meaning you will have the body to show,11 made detainees’ legal disembodiment complete. Within IR, these legal derogations and denials made by the United States led to the unincorporated space of Camp Delta being held up as an example of exceptionalism – with Giorgio Agamben (2004: 610) noting that Camp Delta’s detainees are ‘subject only to raw power’ with ‘no legal existence’ (ibid), and Banu Bargu (2014: 8) arguing that ‘Guantánamo may be the most conspicuous example of the “liberal exceptions.”’ However, it is Andreja Zevnik’s (2009: 87) description of the camp as an ‘ontologically indefinable space’ which stands out because it references the ontological indeterminability I noticed afflicting camp detainees particularly. Having been denied the rights afforded and protections provided by international and domestic legal frameworks, detainees found their legal-political status becoming lesser than the often-sighted iguanas, which roaming the naval station are themselves protected under the US Endangered Species Act. Indeed, arriving in the space of what was then known as Camp X-Ray stripped of the aforementioned legal and political rights and protections, detainees were already

Bodies  39 extremely exposed – with no human rights and not even a body to show because of being denied the writ of habeas corpus.12 However, already legally and politically dehumanised, the process of detainees disembodiment as human and re-embodiment as other only continued upon arrival at the camp. Processes of (re/dis) embodiment aimed at detainees inside the camp were alternatively engendered by social processes and the extreme social relations and skewed power dynamics within the space. In fact, enacting further exclusionary violence within the space of Camp Delta became socially acceptable and normalised for JTF-GTMO (the body-wielding absolute power over those interned inside the camp) to treat detainees as animals, and, accordingly, detainees unloaded from cargo planes in the early days of the GWoT were kept in outdoor wire cages, placed on chain leashes, and made to bark during their initial reception.13 On top of this, JTF-GTMO continued the process of detainees’ disembodiment and erosion of their ontological security as bodies through a dehumanising assault of further exclusionary violence delivered in the form of repetitive speech acts within a space of extremely unequal power relations. For example, in the early days of Camp X-Ray and at the height of the theatre of the GWoT (see Purnell, 25/02/2018), this was particularly intense, as detainees were referred to collectively as ‘orange meat’14 and ‘the pumpkin patch’15 by members of JTF-GTMO.16 Crucially, much more than name-calling, the repetition of such dehumanising speech acts, especially being enacted by those with absolute power over detainees, can be seen to have become performative and accordingly to ‘flash into flesh’ (Stewart, 2007: 69) as detainees’ literal disembodiments as those known as people to others elsewhere become known differently inside the camp and to their captors. In particular, Camp Delta detainees’ denial of the writ of habeas corpus (meaning that you will have the body to show) can be seen to have materialised via the process of legal-political-social dehumanisation as detainees’ becoming other than bodies inside the camp. As an example of this legal-political-social exclusionary violence becoming performatively fleshed out inside the detainment facility, there is a record of former Camp Delta detainee Omar Khadr becoming known and used as a mop by MPs to absorb urine after Khadr himself had been refused permission to use a bathroom (see Worthington, 2007). However, to even further demonstrate the materialisation of Camp Delta detainees’ legal, political, and social processes of disembodiment as human and embodiment as other, a video clip of Khadr’s interrogation by JTF-GTMO speaks volumes. In particular, the video testimony, made public in 2008, further illustrates the materialisation of a process of disembodiment and goes further than any example employed so far by showing how this can even be internalised and further performed by the targets of exclusionary violence themselves. Having been shot in the back at point-blank range and captured by the US Army, Omar Khadr was transferred to NSGB at the age of 15 and accused of throwing a grenade which killed a US soldier during the December 2001 battle for Tora Bora (ibid). A year later, at the age of 16, JTF-GTMO filmed Khadr’s interrogation and the video was made public in 2008. In the video, Khadr – unaware that he is being filmed – speaks of a profound loss of his own body, telling FBI interrogators, ‘I have lost my eyes, my feet, everything’ (cited in Pugliese 2011: 113). Shortly

40  Bodies after this, Khadr can be seen to lift up his orange jumpsuit to reveal deep scars on his chest while explaining how requests for medical attention have been repeatedly denied by JTF-GTMO. Reflecting on this part of the video, Joseph Pugliese (2009: 13–14) has commented that ‘Khadr’s corporeal gesture marks the limits of his speech act and also its failure…. Khadr’s body is fragmented, dispersed and lost…. Khadr is transmuted into a ‘no body.’” Following on from Pugilese’s observation, I have included Kadhr’s case here for how it illustrates the version of ontological (in)security I have outlined in this chapter. In this case, the process of Kadhr’s disembodiment has gone further than being a legal, political, or even social matter, as the object of these exclusionary violences (in this case Kadhr) can be seen to have internalised and become a further performative materialisation of the process of his disembodiment. In short, Kadhr’s body has become so ontologically insecure within the space of NSGB that it is lost to even him. The examples discussed in this section have been intended to illustrate not only what I have referred to as ontological (in)security but also to demonstrate how bodily precariousness can lead to a process of disembodiment encompassing legal, political, and social/cultural aspects of exclusionary violence. As I have explained, the examples drawn from the GWoT were selected because of the extreme power imbalances and exposure of already precarious bodies to the blunt end of US military violence. However, my point all along and throughout this book is to warn that any body has the potential to be similarly disembodied. Ominously, as I finalise this chapter, habeas corpus has been suspended in New York City following the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests against the Minnesota police killing of George Floyd (see Johnson, 05/06/2020). As mentioned earlier, with this writ meaning “you will have the body to show” (in and to a court of law), New Yorkers, too, have become legal nobodies as the process of their disembodiment has gone into motion. Moreover, knowing that some bodies are more precarious than others and given the prevalence of structural racism in the United States, including within the police force murdering 226 Black Americans in 202017 and engendering the BLM movement, the ontological security of especially those black bodies being now indefinitely detained in New York is most certainly at high risk while the development goes to show why I argue that no body should be taken for granted. Drawing and building on the interrelated ideas about bodily precarity presented thus far on (1) the existential and ontological excess of embodied beings and (2) the ontological (in)security this engenders, as this book goes on, I duly examine forms of bodily precarity intensified through the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, in Chapter 2, I draw out the necropolitical logics and exclusionary discourse materialising as somebodies being disembodied as persons and becoming human capital stock in the eyes of those wielding power(/knowledge) over their lives and deaths. In Chapter 3, I discuss how bodies become known and function simultaneously as body parts of the body politic and individual bodies, as well as the contest this ensues.

1.2 Emotional bodies Having thus far highlighted the excessive aspect of bodies and ontological (in)security issues engendering the precariousness of embodied beings, the remainder of

Bodies  41 this chapter is devoted to explaining the personal-global politics of another vital dimension of our continual (re/dis)embodiments: the role of emotion. Towards this end, in the following pages, I provide a thorough consolidation of and build on interdisciplinary literature drawn from what is known as IR’s recent affective turn18 and beyond from philosophy, cultural studies, and political and social theory that deals with emotion and the closely related concept of affect in order to explain what emotion is, what emotion does to bodies, and why understanding emotions is necessary for rethinking not only the body in global politics but also global politics itself. I do this by first introducing my understanding of the mutually constitutive relation between emotions and bodies before making the political implications of this absolutely explicit with broad reference to empirical examples drawn from my previous research into the GWoT and more recent research conducted into and during the COVID-19 pandemic – the emotional politics of which are explored in-depth in this book’s fourth chapter. In short, taking particular inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological approach to emotions, bodies, and politics (see particularly 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2006, 2014, and 15/09/2014), in the following sections, I argue that emotions and bodies are mutually constitutive and explain that, as an intersubjective, social-political phenomena, emotions can be manipulated and intensified to the point of touching, pressing, and moving bodies closer towards or further from one another, therefore, playing an important role in (re/dis)embodiment at not just the individual level but the collective level of community and populations. However, before unpacking this further, I give an overview of the literature that takes emotions into account in IR, detail this literature’s shortcomings towards rethinking the body in global politics, and provide an explanation of terms to aid delineation between the closely related and often interchangeable emotions, feelings, and affects. 1.2.1 Emotions and/in IR There is now a substantial amount of literature considering the role of emotion in global politics. However, this is relatively new, with Marysia Zalewski submitting just five years ago in Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory’s edited collection titled Emotions, Politics, and War (2015: 34) that ‘we know emotions matter to us as people, but we are very unclear how they matter, or indeed, how much they matter in the context of war, politics and security.’ Indeed, as embodied and apparently personal, the discipline of IR came late to the process of making explicit enquiries about the emotional aspects of global politics. However, and again as in the case of bodies, emotions have been implicitly present within the mainstream.19 For example, Neta C. Crawford (2000: 116) has pointed to realist IR texts and their influences – namely, Thucydides, Thomas Hobbes, Hans Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz – to show that ‘theories of international politics and security depend on assumptions about emotion that are rarely articulated and which may not be correct.’ According to Crawford, such theorists allude to and assume the passions while failing to explicitly take into account the social-political construction of either and recommending that ‘systematic analysis of emotion may have important implications for international relations theory and the practices of diplomacy, negotiation, and postconflict peacebuilding’ (ibid.).

42  Bodies Writing eight years later, Emma Hutchison and Roland Blieker (2008: 115) complain rightly that ‘there are still only very few systematic inquiries into emotions and even fewer related discussions on method’ and lay out possible ways forward, including meaningful engagement with feminist theory, interpretive approaches, and aesthetic modes of enquiry. Towards this end, Hutchison and Blieker themselves established somewhat of a working group on emotions in IR, the result of which is the 2014 special issue of International Theory, which showcases efforts to break the task of approaching emotions and world politics into four main challenges: ‘(1) the importance of definitions, (2) the position of the body, (3) questions of representation, and (4) the intertwining of emotions and power’ (ibid: 493). With many in the discipline now rising to the challenge of building robust theoretical, analytical, and methodological frameworks through which to appraise the role of emotions in global politics and for the sake of context, those responding to Hutchison and Blieker’s third and fourth challenges in particular demand reviewing here, as it is into these conversations that I intend to contribute through this chapter and exploration of the emotional politics and landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic in Chapter 4 . Notable contributions to understanding the continuum of body-emotion-politics arising out of Hutchison and Blieker’s efforts come from Jonathan Mercer (2014), who grapples with the problem of ‘scaling up’ an agentcausal approach to emotions (as coming from bodies) to the state level; Brent Sasley, who provides an overview of and attempts to build on efforts to ‘theorise states’ emotions’ (2011) through applying inter-group emotions theory; and Rose McDermott (2014), who suggests a somatic approach to the study of emotion in world politics, nobly encouraging IR theorists to start their investigations from the body. However, these contributions remain limited from my perspective because of placing emotions in bodies and or ‘states’ from the start and, therefore, occluding both the politics of (re/dis)embodiment via emotion and emotion vis-àvis bodies. However, in 2015, Linda Åhäll and Gregory’s edited collection titled Emotions, Politics, and War changed the conversation hugely by engaging with approaches acknowledging the social-political role and functions of emotion and taking the mutual constitution of emotion and bodies seriously. Indeed, within this collection, Hutchison and Blieker contribute a chapter underlining how the politics of grief plays a vital function in post-war reconstruction, while Gregory contributes a chapter on the emotional resonance of Dun McCullins’s photography, with Åhäll and Gregory explicitly classifying emotion as a social/political phenomenon at the outset explaining in their introduction (2015: 6) how ‘affect is located in those intensities that pass from body to body (human, nonhuman, partbody, and otherwise).’ On the implications of emotions on global politics, within this collection, Jack Holland (2015: 168) investigates the role of the state towards the affective articulation of crisis, noticing that ‘during moments of perceived national crisis the state retains the ability to articulate affect in ways that serve particular political and policy agendas.’ Karin Fierke then discusses possibilities for emotion to take hold of national bodies through the example of German humiliation as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, while Brian Massumi claims the US military doctrine of pre-emption is based on nothing but feelings and as

Bodies  43 such ‘operates in the realm of affect’ (in Åhäll and Gregory, 2015: 20). Indeed, my work in this chapter responds directly to the questions raised through this collection as to how exactly according to the intentions of whom, to what extent, and with what effects do emotions enter and reshape political communities and, of course, the bodies comprising them. Meanwhile, outside of Åhäll and Gregory’s collection, Ty Solomon (2012) has considered the role a very lack of emotion plays politically by revisiting responses to 9/11 before writing again on the topic of 9/11 with Holland (2014) to underline the ability of the state to manipulate affect in the wake of crisis. Again, within this chapter and book, my own questions about emotional body politics within the COVID-19 pandemic draw and build directly on Solomon and Holland’s contributions as I respond to a troubling lack of particular feelings within particular swathes of the British population during the 2020 pandemic in comparison to other traumatic events, including 9/11. Finally, IR theorists have also begun to home in on the global politics of specific feelings, with Lloyd Cox and Steve Wood (2017) writing about how an emotional topography underlines and facilitates global political processes through the case of feelings of revenge in relation to the targeted assassination of Osama Bin Laden, Eric Van Rythoven (2018) tackling IR’s mistreatment of fear, and Audrey Reeves (2020) discussing love and its role in memory politics and commemoration practices. I too (see Purnell, 2018) have carefully appraised grief in relation to contest over the value and visibility of suffering and dead American soldiers during the GWoT, arguing that the suppression of feelings of grief has in this case facilitated a war without closure and end. In a similar and continued effort to better understand how different feelings work differently by these pointed efforts, in this book, I have written about specific feelings shaping the emotional landscape and engendering the (re)orientation of bodies within its empirical study and in Chapter 4, I home in again on the suppression and cultivation of grief and in this case also a surprising (lack of) fear circulating through the British COVID-19 outbreak and allowing the British population to continue circulating. Despite the previously cited efforts made within IR to bring emotion into the study of global politics towards my aim of thoroughly detailing and explaining the social-political role emotion plays in the process of (re/dis)embodiment and the role of bodies in contributing to emotional global politics, I have again looked to interdisciplinary literature on emotions, feelings, and affects. These interdisciplinary influences are, therefore, delineated between and discussed in the following section as I further expand on the emotional component of global body politics. 1.2.2 Emotional vocabulary To be absolutely clear, throughout this book, I use the noun emotion to describe the intersubjective phenomenon which intensifies and can be manipulated in the atmosphere in between bodies. I then use the noun feelings to describe what comes to be felt and named in language by embodied subjects, such as fear, hate, disgust, or love, for example. Finally, I use the term affect and more often the terms affected and affective to refer to and describe what feelings then do to

44  Bodies bodies and provide the often-cited example provided by Ben Highmore (in eds. Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 118) to illustrate that it is affect that ‘gives you away: the tell-tale heart; my clammy hands; the note of anger in your voice; the sparkle of glee in their eyes’…. Affect is the cuckoo in the nest; the fifth columnist out to undermine you; your personal polygraph machine.’ However, as should by now be apparent, emotion, feeling, and affect are entangled and contested concepts associated with particular literature. Indeed, within even the more precise literature informing my particular usage of this vocabulary, authors’ preferences and usage differ significantly for reasons it is worth briefly expanding upon. Within the English language, emotion and affect are etymologically synonymous, with the word affect deriving from the Latin affectus (meaning passion or emotion). However, it is relatively easy to explain authors’ use and preferences for the words emotion or affect. Contemplated by philosophers and political theorists, including Plato, Machiavelli, Descartes, and Kant, emotion is a term employed historically by Cartesian dualists who associate it with the body and, therefore, conceptually oppose emotion to reason/rationality and all that is mind. From this perspective, known as the ‘Darwinian model,’ emotions are part of human ‘instinct’; they are ‘natural’ and outside of the social-political. Due to dualism’s hierarchical structure and the power imbued and sexism and racism built into the category of mind, from the Darwinian perspective, emotions are also negatively perceived as containing the possibility to cloud one’s judgement as a supposedly rational actor.20 Indeed, ‘following your instincts’ (see Peck, 24/05/2020) was invoked by the UK government as an understandable reason for Number 10 Special Advisor Dominic Cummings to have made a 250 mile trip from London to Durham during the British lockdown and contrary to government guidelines in late March. With Cummings hanging on to his job, having been excused a moment of passion-fuelled deviation from the rational-political framework in the name of fatherly ‘instinct,’ we have seen during the UK’s COVID-19 outbreak the durability of the Darwinian model within public-political discourse. As I further elucidate and illustrate in this chapter, the de-politicisation of emotion is of great detriment to the study of local-global, social-political life and indeed towards rethinking the body in global politics, as emotions do not come naturally from any body and are instead carefully socially and politically constructed, intensified and manipulated, and intensely contested, coming from the outside-in to bodies, as Teresa Brennan (2004: 1) has so well conveyed through asking, ‘Is there anyone who as not, at least once, walked into a room and “felt the atmosphere”?’ Moreover, far from approaching emotion as something to be suppressed, I approach emotion in this book as a complicated and extremely politically potent phenomenon making great change and movement in the world as this book comes to print. In an attempt to mark themselves out from dualistic thinking, theorists of affect have surpassed dualism through the concept of embodiment– the idea that the mind and body are mutually constitutive and constituting. As social and cultural theorists and often feminist and or critical scholars contributing to the affective turn from the mid-1990s onward, affect theorists, therefore, keenly emphasise the embodiment of felt emotionality and stress that what is felt in the body cannot

Bodies  45 be pushed out of the mind and or excluded from the decision-making processes of the so-called rational actor because the mind is body, meaning the rational is always already emotional and vice versa. Contemporary affect theory draws and builds on the philosophical work of a competing lineage to rationalist dualism and is driven by the alternative question not of what the body is but of what the body can do. Indeed, what affect theory emphasises is the capacity of the body to be affective. For example, Spinoza names three affects – laetitia (joy), tristitia (sorrow), and cupiditas (desire) – which contribute to or reduce what Spinoza describes as the body’s ‘vital force.’ Similarly, in Matter and Memory (1896), Henri Bergson refers to affect as implicated in the body’s life force (‘elan vital’), while following Spinoza, (1970: 124 ) Gilles Deleuze defines the body ‘not by its form, its organs and its functions and not as a subject either’ but ‘by the affects of which it is capable.’ In short, affect has been used as an attempt to get past and around mind-body and emotional-rational dualism and comes to describe a force and capacity of embodied subjects. However, as my introduction outlines with specific reference to feminist critique of IR’s historical exclusion of the bodily emotional and, as Ahmed (2004a: 206) explains more broadly, ‘feminist work on bodies and emotions challenged from the outset mind-body dualisms, as well as the distinction between reason and passion.’ Moreover, I have chosen to discuss and theorise emotion because, and again from Ahmed, ‘emotion is the term used in everyday life to describe what I wanted to give an account of’ (2004a: 207). In short, I do not believe it is necessary or even analytically useful to switch words for the purpose of contesting dualism. Thus while a proponent of embodiment, within this book, I use the word emotion as a noun to describe the intersubjective phenomenon that comes to be felt by the embodied subject as feelings while employing affect as a verb to describe what happens when emotions come to touch and move bodies as they materialise and come to be felt by embodied subjects. Moreover, I have an explicit preference for the specific word emotion to describe this intersubjective phenomenon and again particularly follow Ahmed here because of our shared appreciation stemming from the word’s very etymology. Outlined in her introduction to Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004a: 11), meaning ‘to move, to move out,’ the Latin root of the word emotion is emovere, and it is the capacity of emotion to move bodies that makes the phenomenon so politically potent. Indeed, as I argue and demonstrate throughout this book, it is according to what is felt that embodied subjects move closer together, further apart, and – because of ‘the relationship between movement and attachment, being moved by as a connection to’ (2004a: 209) – to the point of coming apart from or forming a part of a collective. In the following section, I more explicitly explain the role of emotion in the process of (re/dis) embodiment. 1.2.3 Emotion and bodies The relation of bodies to emotion is one of mutual constitution, and, accordingly, the remainder of this chapter is devoted to explaining how this intersubjective phenomenon contributes to processes of (re/dis)embodiment. In this section, I

46  Bodies first expand further on how bodies and emotion mutually constitute one another, which also involves clarifying the notion of agency underlying my approach to emotions, bodies, and beyond. I then move on to demonstrate how the ways in which emotions come explicitly into the social-political process of (re/dis) embodiment, as well as national and global politics, and, therefore, how emotions come into the purview of IR, be it narrowly or broadly defined. As mutually constitutive, emotion makes bodies materially different and is able to move bodies while bodies simultaneously change the emotion floating in the atmosphere in between bodies. In everyday life, we enter and exit spaces filled with emotion as our very presence and activities simultaneously affect the atmosphere. Ahmed (15/09/2014) describes this mutually constitutive social process so well, and I, therefore, cite her at length: It might be electric; it might be tense. It might be heavy, light. Maybe an atmosphere is most striking as a zone of transition: an upping, a downing. The laughter that fills the room: more and more. An occasion is being shared; the sounds of glasses clinking; the gradual rise of merriment; we can hear things get louder. Or a sombre situation: quiet words, softly spoken; bodies tense with the effort of holding themselves together by keeping themselves apart. The sound of a hush or a hush that follows a sound, one that might interrupt the solemnity, piercing through it, turning heads. The process of emotional-bodily mutual constitution is unending. However, towards further unravelling specifically the politics of it, I am forced to break it down and to, therefore, write about one aspect of the mutual constitution of emotion and bodies before writing about the other. As such, in the following pages, I first describe how emotion works to make and move bodies before describing what bodies do to emotion. However, while I must write about this mutually constitutive relation in the two parts explained one after the other, I in no way mean to suggest that the first part discussed in these pages comes before or causes the second part because with bodies and emotion being mutually constitutive, they go on simultaneously. Indeed, just as the precariousness described earlier, it is my contention that emotion too makes bodies physically different and hence Ahmed’s (2004a: 4) assertion that ‘emotions shape the very surfaces of bodies.’ However, more than shaping the surfaces of bodies, emotion also gets under the very skin and into the body and hence Brennan’s (2004:1) description of the transmission of affect as process ‘responsible for bodily changes’ after which ‘physically and biologically something is present that was not there before.’ Indeed, after being touched by something, we might well say that we have a sad feeling, that we are full of pride, or that we are bursting with happiness even. Something (the feeling) is present that was not there before, and it is important to underline the materiality of this process and, therefore, its role in (re/dis)embodiment. Emotion makes bodies materially – that is, physically and psychologically different – and it is accordingly that I describe the phenomenon as implicated in the process of (re/dis)embodiment. We know this implicitly and refer to it often, saying, for example, that we have been touched by something or that something has

Bodies  47 made an impression on us. Towards theorising this process of bodily (re/un)making through emotional impressions, Ahmed (2004a: 4) has emphasised not only that ‘we need to remember the press in an impression’ but that ‘the root of the word oppression, is from press’ (2017: 50). As such, with the act of pressing requiring force, the ability of emotion to press is understood as capable of making impressions by pressing on bodies and, therefore, playing a part in (re/dis)embodiment under scrutiny throughout this chapter. Moreover, in relation to the (re/dis)embodiments engendered through the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, in Chapter 4, I explore the social-political emotional pressing of particular bodies comprising collective (body) parts of the body politic in much greater detail through an investigation of how the power of love came to pressure NHS and care workers in the United Kingdom through their weekly performative clapping on and into service and in some cases towards death by the public led by government ‘clappers.’ In this case, I suggest that during the pandemic, dominant bodies came to govern by increasingly affective means discursively mobilising and weaponising love as a force to be directed in the form of pressure via the weekly performative clapping enacted throughout the body politic during the first wave of COVID-19. On top of touching, pressing on, and getting into bodies, emotions move us, and we again refer to this colloquially all the time, saying, for example, that we attended a moving service or listened to a moving speech or piece of music. Indeed, to return to the etymological root of emotion (emovre meaning to move, to move out) and Ahmed’s argument that ‘emotions are directed to what we come into contact with: they move us “toward” and “away” from such objects’ (2006: 2), it is important to underline the ability of emotions to move bodies closer together to further apart from one another. It is also important to underline that, by moving bodies, emotion also works to (re/dis)embody collectives and hence Ahmed’s argument that ‘emotions work to shape the surfaces of individual and collective bodies.’ Indeed, in this chapter and book, I explore the implications of bodies moved to the point of becoming part of a collective defined by feelings in common, becoming (re)embodied as the parts of bodies which stick together and often against others because and for as long as they feel the same. Indeed, because of increasing emotional disjuncture during the first wave of the COVID19 pandemic, in Chapter 4’s investigation into the emotional landscape carved out and embodied over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, I will take forwards Ahmed’s ideas about ‘atmospheric walls’ (15/09/2014: par. 24) that can involve conscious decisions and collective will. People can ‘in effect’ turn their backs to form an atmospheric wall, a way of preventing some from staying. Or an atmospheric wall can be the effect of a habituation: someone who arrives would stand out, would not pass in or pass through, and the difference becomes uncomfortable by virtue of being a difference at all. Considering the affective walls constructed during the spring and summer of 2020 to be of the habitual kind, in Chapter 4, I explore the techniques and habits working to carve out an increasingly sharpened and segmented emotional landscape, in turn working to place particular parts of the body politic further out of

48  Bodies touch during the spring and summer of 2020. Towards this end, in Chapter 4, I draw on digital and auto and digital-ethnography and local survey results combined with broader discourse analyses to investigate the social-political construction and function of atmospheric walls working to contain grief and keep some (body) parts numb or pressured during the pandemic. However, before this more pointed empirical study, in the following section, I bring the theory espoused so far to life by further describing the social-political capacity of emotion to touch, move, shape, and (re/dis)embody. 1.2.4 Emotional (body) politics Floating in the atmosphere in between bodies at the transpersonal end of what I follow Diana Coole (2005) to describe as an ‘agentic spectrum,’ emotion has thus far been explained as able to touch, impress upon, and get into bodies where it is felt and can fill embodied subjects up with feelings, including grief, anger, pride, and happiness. However, while it is implicitly known that feelings have a profound effect on politics, whether narrowly or broadly conceived, and from the hate in hate speech to the terror in the GWoT feelings themselves litter our disciplinary terrain, I have yet to spell out how emotions come into not only bodies but also (global) politics and conversely how emotions come into politics and in this way respond directly to Zalewski (2015: 34) to explain ‘how they matter, or indeed, how much they matter in the context of war, politics and security.’ Therefore, in this final section on the emotional dimension of the social-political process of (re/dis) embodiment), I emphasise that emotion is an extremely potent political phenomenon with the ability to get into, reshape, and move not only individuals but also social-political groups, nations, and transnational bodies with collective feelings. Having thus far begun to explain what emotion does to bodies, it is at this point imperative to underline that the embodied, as actors sitting in the middle of an agentic spectrum between the pre-personal and the intersubjective (see Coole 2005), are by no means passive receptacles of emotion. Rather, as mutually constitutive of the emotion floating in the atmosphere, bodies take in the atmosphere differently according to what Brennan (2004) calls their own unique ‘affective situations’ and Ahmed (15/09/2014a: par. 4) calls their specific ‘angle of arrival’ and particular bodily ‘attunement [that] helps us to explain not only what we pick up but what we do not pick up’ (ibid: par. 6). To make bodies feel the same way and (re)orient bodies comprising a particular population further towards or against something or some other bodies, bodies must then enter an effective atmosphere with their affective situations pre-aligned. In this way, our unique histories and experiences leading up to our arrivals into a particular atmosphere really matter. Arriving differently is something I, therefore, consider much further in Chapter 4 as I try to make sense of the intensely polarised politics of fear and fearlessness permeating parts of the United Kingdom’s body politic during the COVID-19 pandemic. Another factor towards the alignment of bodies’ affective situations is trauma. Indeed, Edkins (2003: 15) underlines in general ‘the connection between trauma, violence and political community’ and Hutchison (2010: 65) argues in specific relation to the Bali 2020 bombings that ‘traumatic events can influence the

Bodies  49 constitution of community in international relations.’ Building on these connections and towards further explicating the mutually constitutive yet variable relation between emotions and bodies, I understand collective trauma and its encirclement as playing a role towards increasing the likelihood that a politics of emotion will take hold of and politically reorient a population. Furthermore, with the etymological root of trauma being the Greek trayma, meaning pierced or perforated, trauma is more specifically envisaged as working within the process of (re/dis)embodiment) described throughout this chapter as able to disrupt bodies by opening them up and in this way making them more sensitive to receiving emotion in the same way as it is manipulated and intensified in the atmosphere. Indeed, in Chapter 4, I reflect on my own embodied history of trauma and (re)orientation into the pandemic through this lens. However, before doing so, the case of 9/11 provides a textbook example of the affective (and effective) social-political (re)orientation and alignment of bodies through the catalyst of trauma. Having produced an initial void of meaning and intelligibility, 9/11 disrupted knowledge – including that defining American security culture and modes of American self-identification as exceptional, untouchable, and invulnerable. Remarking on this post-9/11 void, David Campbell (2002: par. 4) describes a ‘void of meaning… prompted by the images of the World Trade Centre’s destruction’ while Richard Jackson (2005: 29–30) attributes what he agrees is a ‘void of meaning’ to two factors: the ‘sheer visceral horror of the images’ and, additionally, ‘the perennial sense of “hyper-reality”’ reported by Americans describing their experience of the day. Crucially, this void was soon filled in as 9/11 became knowable and intelligible as it was ‘grammatically reconstructed’ (Jackson, 2005: 38) and made an example of terrorism and an act of war against the American people and their ‘way of life.’21 However, the American population had been traumatised; towards further (re)aligning Americans’ affective situations and therefore facilitating and sustaining the politics of fear underlying the GWoT, the traumatic event of 9/11 was then encircled. Initially consumed in common as a visual spectacle consumed by the population, the footage appeared live, as bodies began falling from the flaming and smoke-filled North Tower as US Airlines Flight 175 was flown into the frame and South Tower at 9:03 am and as the South and North Towers collapsed at 9:59 am and 10:28 am, respectively. However, the communal consumption of 9/11 was not limited to the day itself. Quite the opposite, the American consumption of the traumatic footage of the flaming and smoking towers, suicidal jumpers, and buildings collapsing became habitual and ritual, as the footage and story were repeated again and again, and again. In this way, Americans were (re)traumatised every few minutes for the first few days, every few hours for months afterwards, and then every six months and annually.22 Indeed, with Jean Baudrillard (2002: 403) referring to ‘the unforgettable incandescence of the images,’ they would be forever burned into the retina of America’s public eye. Indeed, as I have written elsewhere (Purnell, 13/09/2017: par. 1), in the case of 9/11, ‘the common experience of trauma produced collective feelings and began working on 9/11, to move, stick, and bind the population of bodies comprising the American body politic together.’ In the case of 9/11, the collective body materialising as a result of feelings in common in the wake of the attack was one impelled by the president himself

50  Bodies (Bush, 11/09/2001) in the instruction that ‘none of us will ever forget’ and (re) constructed by dominant bodies working to not only bring 9/11 and trauma back into the present but also to manipulate and intensify the politics of fear discussed earlier. Indeed, in relation to this case, I have argued (Purnell, 13/09/2017: par. 4) that since 9/11, the American being in itself became dependent upon remembering 9/11, as ‘the ones who will never forget 9/11 will be American and the ones who forget will not,’ meaning ‘remembering or forgetting 9/11 therefore becomes not only a mechanism for setting bodies apart from and/or against one another but an ontological security issue for the American body politic to which the periodic (re)traumatisation of the parts comprising it is so vital.’ Drawing and building on the idea that a collectively encircled memory of trauma can facilitate the coming together of bodies and the turning against of bodies, within this book’s reflective/ reflexive chapter on the emotional politics of the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 lockdown period (Chapter 4), I discuss how emotional landscapes came to (re/ dis)embody the population of bodies comprising the British body politic during the spring and summer of 2020 first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. 1.2.5 Manipulative bodies Beyond arriving into, picking up, and taking in the affective atmosphere differently according to their unique experiences, embodied subjects also have the ability to unconsciously or intentionally intensify and manipulate the emotional atmosphere themselves and with the mutually constitutive relation of bodies and emotion now outlined in theory. In the remainder of this chapter, I discuss and use examples to illustrate not only how emotion comes into local-global politics via the bodies it touches, gets into, and moves but also how bodies get into, manipulate, and intensify the affective atmosphere. In particular, in this chapter’s final section, I interweave Ahmed’s contributions on emotional politics (see particularly 2004a and 200b) with more of my own empirical research to home in on and explain processes of emotional intensification and manipulation and the role of trauma in explicitly contributing to processes of the (re/dis)embodiment of both individuals and collectives of bodies. Emotion becomes a feeling on, in, and to an embodied being only once sufficiently intensified and, therefore, able to press. This is how emotion works to materially make an impression on bodies and make bodies materially different and hence Ahmed’s (2004b: 4) exegesis that ‘materialisation involves a process of intensification.’ It is accordingly that I continue to emphasise and seek to explain the role of emotion on the intensely social-politically contested process of (re/dis)embodiment under scrutiny in this chapter. However, with the materialisation of bodies via emotion requiring force (hence Ahmed’s (2014: 29), note that ‘we need to remember the press in impression’) and that force being excerpted by bodies (hence my emphasis on the mutual constitution of emotion and bodies), some bodies are better placed than others to manipulate and intensify the affective atmosphere which goes on to press and impress upon bodies. Indeed, it is in this unevenly distributed ability of bodies to get in to manipulate and intensify the affective atmosphere in between that the very politics of emotion lies.

Bodies  51 On the entirely political question of which bodies have better access and ability to manipulate and intensify emotion and to, therefore, press, move, and reorient bodies, Ahmed (2014: 140) writes that ‘the creating of an impression can be a technique of power’ and has provided extensive examples of what she describes as affective economies engendered by what are known typically as dominant government and media bodies. For example, Ahmed (2004b) describes in detail the intensification of an affective atmosphere producing what was felt as fear and directed towards asylum seekers and immigrants by the British population in the early 2000s. In this case, with particular reference to former UK government ministers’ use and repetition of words, including swarm, flood, overwhelmed, and swamped and their circulation throughout the British press, Ahmed argues that emotion intensified in the atmosphere in between the bodies comprising the British population to the point of impressing upon the bodies of British citizens who were moved closer together and turned against asylum seekers and immigrants and, accordingly, reshaped political orientations within the British body politic. Investigating the local-global politics of the co-constitutive conception of emotions and bodies outlined in this chapter, I have spent years tracing the role of emotions on processes of (re/dis)embodiment within long-term case studies and time and again have found (1) bodies are touched, moved, and made different – (re/dis)embodied – according to how they feel and (2) subordinate, as well as dominant bodies, manipulate affective atmospheres. As such, this chapter’s final section is devoted to illustrating the claims made to this point through the presentation of findings emphasising the role of emotion in the (re/dis)embodiments of actors involved in British and American soldiers’ repatriation processes and contests over incarcerations inside Guantánamo Bay during GWoT. 1.2.6 Moving dominant bodies I once took a flight from London to Rome. Long before the coronavirus closed borders, I was on my way to a conference to present a paper about grief and the contested (in)visibility of dead and wounded American soldiers during the GWoT (See Purnell, 2018). The flight was quite empty but a rather tall man was sat towards the back of the plane in a cramped row and after take-off was offered a seat in mine since I happened to have it all to myself. That man’s name was Geoffrey Hoon, and during the flight he told me a story about another one – a flight he had taken as a visiting Professor of law at the University of Louisville in Kentucky during the 1979/80 academic year. He told me about how, on this flight across America, he remembers being seated near and seeing ‘men who had been very severely injured in the [Vietnam] war returning I assume to a Veterans Facility in Louisville.’23 Going on to become the United Kingdom’s Secretary of State (SoS) for defence through 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed and coming to ‘understand the reasons for US involvement rather better’ than he had as a young lawyer with an anti-Vietnam position, Mr Hoon explained to me that he had personally initiated and gone on to attend the United Kingdom’s elaborate and highly visible Royal Air Force Brize Norton homecoming ceremonies held for British soldiers KIA during

52  Bodies the GWoT. As SoS in attendance at Brize Norton, Hoon would therefore have witnessed what Nicola Lester (2015: 251) has provided a detailed testimony of: It is difficult to find the words to capture the atmosphere at the ceremony. Sadness, pride, and disbelief have become indistinguishable emotions felt by hundreds of people. But it is the families who are the most distinct, their grief uncontrollable, often helped to stand as their bodies buckle under the weight of their hearts breaking. Crucially, Hoon informed me that the United Kingdom’s Brize Norton homecoming ceremonies were specifically designed ‘based on the ceremonies that I had seen on the TV when the bodies of US soldiers were brought back from Vietnam.’ Indeed, during the long conflict in Vietnam, Dover Ceremonies for American soldiers KIA had beamed into living rooms across America, live in technicolour and for the very first time given the advent and increasing affordability of the television as the war dragged on, meaning Americans bore witness to flag-draped coffins ‘rolling off planes at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii as if off a conveyor belt’ (Scott-Tyson, 26/02/2009: par. 5). As a time-honoured American ritual performed at the Air Force Base (AFB) in Dover, Delaware, the Dover ceremony was traditionally captured in photographs, featured in newspapers, and broadcast nationally on the network news, allowing the American people to see the dead bodies of soldiers KIA returned to American soil. As anthropologists arguing that ‘violent blood sacrifice makes enduring groups cohere’ (1999: 4), Caroline Marvin and David Ingle go as far as to argue that, in the American context, the flag-draped coffin, which signifies the sacrificed soldier’s body, takes the place of the cross as a national ‘totem,’ the visible return of which through the Dover ceremony binds the national body together in grief as wars draw to a close.24 However, as the topic of the conference paper I was on route to present (see Purnell, 2018) as the GWoT picked up speed and troops were deployed within Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003 emphasised, the Americans had blotted out such public, commemorative rituals as a result of increasing concerns about ‘casualty sensitivity,’25 while the UK government had done the exact opposite and unleashed sadness, pride, and grief into the atmosphere through not only the ceremonies themselves but also the photographs circulated in the press afterwards. As Lester (2015: 251) adds, Photographs are published the following day, capturing this moment: grief and anguish in its naked form, with human expressions wild and feral. Seconds later families will compose themselves, but that single moment is caught forever. With the United Kingdom’s Brize Norton and later Wootton Bassett homecoming ceremonies (see Freeden, 2011) becoming so visible during the GWoT and providing such a stark contrast to the invisibilities engendered by the Americans’ 2003 ‘Dover Ban,’ which, in line with the visual necropolitical imperative outlined in Chapter 2, blacked out exactly the kind of homecomings ‘we’ had established in

Bodies  53 the same period. Before my mid-flight meeting, I had been puzzled. However, there is something about the sight of the wounded body and the sight of the flag-draped coffin that is very powerful. Indeed, in this case, it is touching and moving to the extent of inspiring policymaking and fundamentally changing GWoT commemoration practices – making UK repatriations so starkly divergent from those being increasingly invisibilised on the other side of the Atlantic (See Purnell, 2018) in a time when UK/UK military policy was so aligned in other ways. Indeed, in this case, one man’s emotional response to the close up sight of the wounded would in turn allow the British public to see and feel the toll of this more recent war while those across the Atlantic were denied the sight and opportunity to publicly mourn their dead between 2003 and 2009 by virtue of the Dover Ban (See Purnell, 2018). Clearly, as demonstrated so far and with the case of Hoon, bodies with ownership of and access to the means of production, public visibility, and a publicly audible voice via direct access to mass media, for example, are more readily able to contribute to the social-political process through which atmospheres occupied by national populations of bodies become affectively charged, manipulated, and intensified to the point of impressing upon, touching, and moving bodies. However, and again as this case and the wounded soldiers’ ability to touch and move a future SoS into action demonstrate, other subordinated bodies are also able to play a role in the emotional politics outlined thus far. Indeed, in previous research, I have looked to the words and deeds of soldiers, military families, Camp Delta detainees, non-governmental organisations, and civil society organisations (CSOs) and found subordinate and even extremely vulnerable bodies in positions of utmost subjugation capable of working, manipulating, and intensifying affective atmospheres to the point of touching, making impressions on, and moving other bodies. For example, in the case of the American struggle against the US Department of Defense’s 2003 Dover Ban (the aforementioned directive working to prohibit the publication and broadcast of images and videos capturing any part of the process of the ritual repatriation of America’s war dead), leading to it being partially revoked in 2009, I (see Purnell, 2018) traced the affectively motivated and facilitated formation of a collective body of American citizens. In this case, the collective felt community was composed of mainly veterans, military families, and others literally touched and moved by the deaths or injuries of American soldiers during the GWoT and who accordingly ‘were moved to demand and take the right to count and account for soldiers’ suffering and deaths in public and in the very face of dominant bodies that ‘don’t do body counts’ (ibid: 156). Furthermore, the feeling of grief – contained to a part of the American populace in direct contact with the injured and KIA during the early years of the GWoT due precisely to the Dover Ban’s restriction on the public sight of repatriations and commemorations – can be seen to have been the feeling that moved bodies to action. For example, I used process tracing and snowball sampling to reach activists and war photographers, including Ashley Gilbertson who was motivated to embark on his Bedrooms of the Fallen (2014) project because of the very lack of any national commemoration efforts after a personal experience in Fallujah, where in front of him and at point-blank range Lance Corporal William ‘Billy’ Miller was shot and killed, leaving Gilbertson (2014: 83), in his own words, ‘covered in Miller’s blood, forever changed’ and soon returning to America ‘to

54  Bodies photograph his [Miller’s] absence.’ Indeed, upon returning to the United States, Gilbertson spent time working on the project in Arlington, Virginia, and reflected at length (ibid: 85) about entering a community cut off in and by feelings of grief: My time at Arlington gave me access to a tiny minority of Americans: those directly touched by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These families had borne the brunt of the nation’s war on terror, yet they wept quietly, alone…. These families struck me as more isolated in their grief than any other community I’ve photographed. They lived every day with a tragic reality few pundits or politicians would come near: their dead sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. Similarly, in the case of the 2013–2015 Camp Delta hunger strike, I (see Purnell, 2015) traced the growth of a collective body defined again by feelings in common amongst the parts comprising it. In this case, the hunger strike became visible to the American public eye and wider global audience against the will of dominant bodies who had by this point placed a media blackout on the camp and were attempting to cultivate a more humanitarian image and to roll back on what Vivienne Jabri (2006: 819) describes as the shock and awe tactics ‘aimed at the gaze of a wider global public arena.’ Indeed, as a key site of GWoT – a conflict operating and contested in the realm of affect from the very start (see Massumi, 2002) – life and death at Camp Delta, as well as what enters and exits is tightly controlled. As such, between March and May 2013, as the prison hunger strike grew, the mainstream American mass media picked up and covered the story, while a small pool of journalists with access to Naval Station Guantánamo Bay (NSGB) had little to report beyond the daily figures as they were banned from taking photographs on base and had no access to detainees. However, and to illustrate how the hunger strike grew despite the invisibility of those partaking in it, CSOs and activist collectives using social media began to mobilise around the issue of Camp Delta’s ongoing detainments and the hunger strike/force-feeding occurring inside. Illustrating well how subordinated bodies and even those I have described in this chapter as nobodies can work to contest their disembodiment and inhumane treatment, feelings which came to circulate in the atmosphere in between the bodies comprising the American population came to be initially transmitted by detainees themselves. Indeed, detainees managed this via occasional op-eds26 handed over to the press via their pro bono lawyers and the accidental and unsanctioned27 broadcast of a detainees’ testimony during a rare press tour. In this most stark example of a detainee’s affective interruption, during the 17 November 2013 edition of CBS’s 60 Minutes, on CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl’s autumn 2013 visit to Camp Delta and viewed by 12.2 million Americans, the voice of then still indefinite British detainee and persistent hunger striker Shaker Aamer, who, seemingly aware that a tour and filming was going on, can be heard making loudly the following oration: Please we are tired. Either you leave us to die in peace or either tell the world the truth. Open up the place, let the world come and visit! You cannot walk not even half a meter without being chained. Is that a human being? That’s the treatment of an animal!

Bodies  55 Due to the episodes’ impact, Stahl (cited in Rosenberg, 1/11/2013) was interviewed live the following morning on CBS’s The Morning show and described feeling ‘horrible emotions’ after hearing ‘that man yelling.’ Crucially, by referring to Aamer as that man, Stahl shows herself to know Aamer as a human being (a man) and in doing so (re)humanises him in the eyes of the viewing American public subject to the aforementioned exclusionary discourse facilitating Ammer to become indefinitely detained. As I have explained elsewhere (see Purnell, 2015), through this and other interruptions, an affectively motivated collective eventually managed to make itself known, visible, and felt in the most public of American spaces, including on the White House lawn where solidarity force-feedings took place through the spring and summer of 2013. After being made less visible and having limited access to the general public in comparison to the political and mass media bodies and while it is more difficult for subordinate bodies to generate collective feelings through which to move bodies into action, the cases discussed here demonstrate that it is not impossible. Furthermore, the cases also suggest that even more than moving people and collectives towards or against a policy, strategy, or party, how we feel about some body or somebodies can make the difference between life and death and beyond that how and the extent to which they will be grieved, if at all. As Ahmed (2004a: 191) explains, ‘Emotions work to differentiate between others precisely by identifying those that can be loved those that can be grieved, that is, by constituting some other as legitimate objects of emotion [while denying others the same privilege].’ In this way, emotions, too, are implicated in delineating between politically qualified/disqualified life and, therefore, in making some bodies more precarious to the point of death and or disembodiment. Again, using the case of the affective economy of fear of asylum seekers and immigrants produced in the United Kingdom, Ahmed has illustrated well how an affective economy can work towards the material production of dead bodies and is worth quoting at length. The containment of the bodies of others affected by this economy of fear is most chillingly and violently revealed in the literal deaths of those seeking asylum in containers, deaths that remain unmourned by the very nations who embody the hope of a future for those seeking asylum. This is a chilling reminder of what is at stake in the affective economies of fear. (Ahmed, 2004b: 136) Underlining why I have focussed on precariousness and the emotional aspect of (dis)embodiment in this chapter, in previous passage, Ahmed begins to trace a process – from the production of an emotional atmosphere, to its impression in the form of the feeling of fear in bodies that accordingly are moved to actions, including allowing the deaths of others who have at the same time been made more precarious to the point of crucially going ungrieved. Indeed, through the framework outlined in this chapter, the very lack of mourning of these dead asylum seekers referred to in Ahmed’s example suggests the maintenance rather than further manipulation of the particular emotional atmosphere engendering ‘the deaths of those seeking asylum in containers’ and, therefore, the continuation of

56  Bodies this particular formation of UK anti-asylum and immigration politics. Moreover, in tracing this line, Ahmed paves the way for my investigations into the mutually constitutive process of (re/dis)embodiment and affective atmospheres during the UK’s COVID-19 outbreak of spring 2020. In particular, illustrating the utility of rethinking the body in global politics by paying attention to emotion, feelings, and affect as I have defined and explained them, in Chapter 4, I very carefully consider the emotional (re)orientation of bodies and of collective body parts comprising the British body politic during the COVID-19 outbreak and quarantine of spring-summer 2020 to argue that, in a reverse to an economy of fear, a very lack of fear of COVID-19 within some parts of the British body politic and the continent of grief in others have allowed and facilitated the continuation of a particular formation of politics and economics which goes on in a formation that produces the dead bodies of others and reveals the gendered and raced lines dividing grievable from ungrievable bodies and body parts of the collective contemporary UK body politic. Within this book, I continue to work with the co-constitutive relation of bodies and emotions outlined in this chapter. I do this in a time of pandemic supposing that being forcibly separated and not seeing is able to do even half as much work as the close proximity and sight of the dead facilitated in the case of Mr Hoon and Brize Norton – especially given how during COVID-19 we have been literally quarantined, made to social distance, and forced out of touch as so many have suffered and died, with even funerals being been banned for a time (see Maddrell, 2020). In particular, in Chapter 4, I home in on the particularities of the socially and politically constructed containment of grief shaping and facilitating the United Kingdom’s pandemic and (re/dis)embodiments occurring within it. However, beyond moving into this and other discussions on the emotional body politics of the UK COVID-19 outbreak, the following chapter introduces and expands on the so far only briefly mentioned necropolitical formation of power framing the pandemic writ large.

Notes 1 For an excellent, broad, and interdisciplinary introduction to the contest of legalpolitical contest around definitions and applications of the word/concept body see Anna Agathangelou’s entry in Keywords for Radicals (2016) on ‘bodies.’ 2 See, for example, Wuillemin and Richardson (1982). 3 See, for example, Huysmans (1998), McSweeney (1999), Mitzen (2006a, 2006b, 2018), Steele (2008, 2017, 2019), Mitzen and Larson (2017), Steele and Homolar (2019), Agius (2017), Erbele (2019), and Ejdus (2019). 4 For a thorough overview of OST literature and key debates and fissures within it, see Gustafsson and Krickel-Choi (2020). 5 Mitzen (2008: 344) describes selfhood as ‘the subjective sense of who one is, which enables and motivates action and choice.’ 6 As an exception to this, John Cash (2020) promotes an alternatively inspired OST, drawing on psychoanalytic theory to bring state actors’ ‘collective cultural unconscious’ into account. 7 See, for example, Jackson (2005, 2007) and Butler (2004, 2009). 8 In literature aimed at newcomers to the base, JTF-GTMO instructed that ‘personnel assigned to Guantánamo Bay are not authorised to visit host country’ (JTF-GTMO, 06/01/2004: 12).

Bodies  57 9 ‘Unprivileged enemy belligerent’ is a category extra to the eight enumerated under Article 4 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The categorisation of detainees as such works to deny them the privilege of Geneva’s protections. 10 By the Bush administration’s logic, the Geneva Conventions were not applied to detainees because ‘we don’t have to’ (cited in Kinsella, 2005: 168). 11 Giorgio Agamben (1998: 124) has written about the centrality of this writ and the ability to present the body towards democratic inclusion. 12 Having been denied an application of habeas corpus since arrivals began in January 2002, Boumediene v. Bush narrowly applied the writ to Camp Delta’s detainees, limiting its application to protect the fact, place, and duration of detentions only. 13 See Freeman (14/07/2005). 14 See former detainee Mozzam Begg’s testimony (2006: 200). 15 An unnamed FBI agent present at Camp X-Ray in 2002 reported to the US Justice Departments’ attorney general that JTF-GTMO MPs referred to the detainees’ outdoor processing area as ‘the pumpkin patch.’ See Seims (2011). 16 Camp guards serve at the rank of US Marine Corps military police and are thus known as ‘MPs’ (and are thus referred to as such from this point). 17 See Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-uspolice-by-race/. 18 Affect/emotion have been increasingly discussed within IR since Neta C. Crawford’s 2000 article titled “The Passion of World Politics.” 19 An exception to this is Jonathan Mercer’s (2006: 288) rationalist attempt to incorporate emotions into IR’s levels of analysis. However, Mercer starts from the problematic assumption that ‘emotion is part of human nature.’ 20 See Ahmed’s introduction to The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004a) for more on the Darwinian approach to emotions. 21 See Jackson (2005). 22 See Simpson (2006). 23 Personal correspondence (2020) on file with the author and with many thanks to Geoffrey Hoon for grating me permission to include these details. 24 Marvin and Ingle (1999) describe the American ‘totem cycle’ as starting with an event in response to which American flags appear in public en masse in public. The appearance of patriotic waving flags makes the American body politic’s boundaries permeable, allowing American soldiers to pass through to the outside where they fight and die in what must then be perceived by the American public as legitimate wars. After the bloodshed, the final stage of the totem cycle is reached, as again, totemic soldiers move – this time back from beyond the boundaries and home to America where they are ritually greeted by the public, who again wave the flag as parades and parties are held for the living and military funerals are carried out for the dead. 25 For literature on American public opinion and casualty sensitivity see Mueller (1970, 1973); Hallin (1986) on the Vietnam War, Muller (1994) on the Gulf War, and Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifer (2006) on the GWoT. 26 See, for example, Moqbel (14/04/2013). 27 According to JTF-GTMO Standard Operating Procedure (01/03/2004), it is prohibited to film, record, or photograph Camp Delta detainees, and before visitors leave, JTF-GTMO should vet and censor all journalists’ footage and recordings, deleting any photographs or recordings capturing detainees’ images or voices.

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Bodies  61 Simpson, David. 2006. 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Solomon, Ty, 2012. ‘“I Wasn’t Angry, Because I Couldn’t Believe It Was Happening”: Affect and Discourse In Responses to 9/11,’ Review of International Studies, 38:4: 907–928. Steele, Brent. 2008. Ontological Security in International Relations: Self Identity and the IR State. London and New York: Routledge. Steele, Brent. J. 2017. ‘Organizational Processes and Ontological (in) Security: Torture, the CIA and the United States,’ Cooperation and Conflict, Vol .52(1): 69–89. Steele, Brent. J. 2019. ‘Welcome Home! Routines, Ontological Insecurity, and the Politics of US Military Reunion Videos,’ Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 32(3): 322–343. Steele, Brent. J and Homolar, Alexandra. 2019. ‘Ontological Insecurities and the Politics of Contemporary Populism,’ Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Published, 05/15/2019. Van Rythoven, Eric. 2018. ‘Fear in the Crowd or Fear of the Crowd? The Dystopian Politics of fear in International Relations,’ Critical Studies on Security, Vol. 6(1): 33–49. Worthington, Andy. 2007. The Guantanamo Files the Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison. London: Pluto Press. Wuillemin, Diane and Richardson, Barry. 1982. ‘On the Failure to Recognize the Back of One’s Own Hand,’ Perception, Vol. 11(1), 53–55. Zalewski, Marysia. 2013, ‘Theorizing Emotion: Affective Borders in Homeland,’ Critical Studies on Security, 1(1): 133–135. Zevnik, A. 2009, ‘Sovereign-less Subject and the Possibility of Resistance,’ Millennium – Journal of International Studies, Vol. 38(1): 83–106.

2 Body politics

It is Thursday 5 May 2020, and President Donald Trump is visiting the Honeywell International Inc. factory in Phoenix, Arizona, for a guided tour and photo opportunity. Only five weeks earlier, Honeywell, a multinational conglomerate specialising in ‘Aerospace, Building Technologies, Performance Materials & Technologies, and Safety & Productivity Solutions,’1 converted their Phoenix factory to produce N95 face masks for the US Department of Health and Human Services.2 However, despite Honeywell signage visible to the onlooking cameras and viewing public instructing ‘Attention: Face Mask Required in this Area. Thank You!,’ Trump will not wear a face mask for the visit and press pool, donning instead only a pair of transparent plastic goggles. As his first public venture during the pandemic outside of appearances at the White House and Camp David since 28 March, the 5 May trip was hugely symbolic and much scrutinised. Indeed, Trump’s decision to go without a mask speaks loudly to the problem of gendered and racialised hierarchies stemming from the dualist Enlightenment-era thought critiqued at length in this book because, as Joseph Pierce (26/05/2020) puts it, ‘when @realDonaldTrump refuses to wear a mask, he is making a calculated semiotic move: he marks himself as biologically (somatically) superior to those who “need protection,” i.e. Black, Brown, poor, immunocompromised folks.’ Former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka’s 24 June description of a face mask as a ‘COVID burqa’ (see Moran, 24/06/2020) only exemplifies the particular strand of Islamophobia and sexism informing anti-mask behaviour and action within the US conservative right wing. However, watching the footage of Trump’s mask factory tour on this occasion, it was not Trump’s display of fragile and toxic masculinity but the musical accompaniment to his performance which particularly struck me because as the cameras rolled and photographers clicked away, Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Live and Let Die’ was playing loudly over the factory floor. With Trump previously chastised by the band’s lead singer Axl Rose for using Guns N’ Roses’ music without authorisation at Trump rallies,3 it remains unclear as to whether the audio was pre-selected by the President’s team, or just happened to be playing on the radio. Nevertheless, the particular juxtaposition not only grabbed my attention but also was discussed across social media and reported in the news internationally: it was called ‘inappropriate’ by the Washington Post’s Zach Purser Brown

Body politics  63 (05/05/2020) and ‘a metaphor’ by the American talk show host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel (06/05/2020) for example. To explain why Trump’s factory visit and its particular musical accompaniment became such a talking point and, of course, why I included it here, at the very opening of a chapter about body politics, I shall provide some context. On 5 May 2020, Trump was in Arizona for campaign purposes because of the state’s strategic importance as a battleground within the US presidential race. Indeed, at this time, with almost exactly six months remaining until the 3 November election, Trump’s team arranged the factory visit and photo-call as a means to send a presidential message to the viewing electorate that ‘we have to get our country open and we have to get it open soon’ (cited in Mason, 06/05/2020). By this point in the pandemic, however, the United States’ COVID-19 death toll had just passed 70,000 while severe outbreaks were still afflicting New York and New Jersey, and Americans had by now suffered more COVID-19 deaths than any other nation on Earth.4 With its title and refrain instructing the listener to live and let die, the song playing during Trump’s Honeywell visit was especially striking because of its pertinence. Furthermore, with the face mask featuring so prominently and causing such controversy during Trump’s Arizona factory visit, this particular vignette’s inclusion speaks to the motif of mask and face running throughout this chapter as, through my research, I have found that the behaviour of contemporary dominant (government, military, industrial) bodies comes to make sense if you are to understand them as wearing biopolitical masks over their necropolitical faces. Crucially, in this chapter, I explain that, much bigger than Trump and his administration or any other political party or movement globally, typically masked necropolitical logics and structures have come to dominate and, therefore, define global governance, life, and death in the contemporary international system and play a huge role in determining localglobal patterns of (re/dis)embodiment, as well as death and ways of dying. In short, the following pages expand on necropolitical theory, outlining its significance for rethinking the body in global politics because of seeing that politics and power in the death-oriented necro mode have come to define the global style and character of population management and patterns of classed, racialised, and gendered patterns of (re/dis)embodiment being sped up by the COVID-19 pandemic.

2.1 Necro(body)politics To return once more to the significance of the song playing during Trump’s 5 May visit to the Honeywell face-mask factory (live and let die) and to this chapter’s contributions to body politics, within political theory, there is a name for the kind of politics that concentrates on dividing populations’ of bodies into (a) those allowed, encouraged, and even made to live and (b) populations of others allowed, let, and even required to die. This kind of politics is known as necropolitics, a term coined in 2003 by Achille Mbembe (2003: 39–40) who put forward the notion of necropolitics and necropower to account for the various ways in which, in our contemporary world, weapons are deployed in the interest of maximum destruction of persons and the creation of

64  Body politics death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead. I am not the first to write on the topic of the specifically necropolitical aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and, for reasons explained in this Chapter, I surely will not be the last. Indeed, there are a proliferation of necropolitical practices and processes becoming increasingly prevalent during this global pandemic and duly noted. For example, Christopher Lee (01/04/2020: 5) comments on how the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a disruption for global north polities where normally ‘the spectacle of global capitalism has also concealed this political dispensation,’ while similarly, Hamish Robertson and Joanne Travaglia (18/05/2020: par. 8) say the virus has ‘highlighted in an extraordinary way many of contemporary society’s necropolitical assumptions.’ Vito Laterza and Louis Philippe Römer echo both of these sentiments, again noticing (1) the increased visibility of necropolitical interventions the pandemic has engendered and (2) how COVID19 has brought necropolitics home for and to the global north. Interestingly, Laterza and Römer (12/05/2020: 17) add an optimistic note to their piece, stating, There is some hope though that the truly global, albeit highly uneven, dimension of this pandemic might lift the veil of false consciousness that has so far separated the North from the South, the West from ‘the rest’. As more people in the North experience the frailty of life under the necropolitics of the market. Common to necropolitically informed responses to the pandemic and its management are emphases on disruption. However, COVID-19 does not appear to be disrupting by reordering bodily hierarchies or relations of power between bodies. Rather, the disruption to patterns of life and death are being experienced as a speeding up of existing rates and ways of death and an accompanying closing down of the space between life and death for bodies all the way down what Dionne Brand (04/07/2020: par. 1) has called the ‘endoskeleton of the world.’ Indeed, Brand’s use of a bodily metaphor to describe the structure providing global support is most accurate. As I explain in this chapter, the parts comprising the world’s endoskeleton are in fact populations of bodies arranged hierarchically by value as vertebrae and used up in order to at once fuel other bodies and shield them from exposure. However, and while reaching those already most exposed to death first (those located at the bottom of the global endoskeleton – the poor, the infirm, the most exploited and (ab)used bodies), the COVID-19 pandemic is speeding up slower rates of death5 and, therefore, pressuring vertebrae further up the global supply chain and in turn threatening to compromise the undisrupted flow of necropolitical order itself. Of course, and already cited within this book’s introductory pages, Mbembe himself has returned to build on his conceptualisation of necropolitics as a witness to the COVID-19 pandemic and its (mis)management via multiple interventions. In his first intervention, an interview given on 31 March 2020 to Diogo

Body politics  65 Bercito of the Brazilian newspaper Gauchazh Politica,6 Mbembe tells the interviewer that he is ‘overwhelmed by the magnitude of this calamity’ (see Mbembe, 24/04/2020: par. 67) but explains that those able to socially isolate have ‘a relative power’ (ibid) and are able to ‘escape or delay death’ and draws out the classed, employment based, and spatialised implications of the pandemic within the Brazilian context, explaining that (ibid: par. 11): in theory, the coronavírus can kill everyone. All are threatened. But it is one thing to be confined to a suburb, to a second residence in the countryside. Another thing is to be on the front lines, working in a health centre without a mask. Risks are distributed today according to a scale. As the pandemic goes on, it is indeed the placement of bodies along the scale distributing risk of death that is being gradually revealed as, for example, those in UK care homes were exposed to the risk of COVID-19 and allowed to die first,8 buying other bodies and, indeed, the UK's National Health Service (NHS) more time. As I detail further in this chapter, by the nature of global political economy in the necropolitical mode, wherein every body and body part has a value, as one body is used up (paying the price and becoming part of the toll) another is freed for a time, and, therefore, the scale to which Mbembe refers also distributes bodies temporally by date of expiration. In his second intervention, a piece posted to the Critical Enquiry blog in mid-April 2020 (See Mbembe, 13/04/2020), Mbembe sounds more alarmed and calls for the urgent recognition of the ‘universal right to breathe.’ Indeed, in this piece, Mbembe speaks of a present where ‘there is no doubt that the skies are closing in’ (ibid par. 8) and paints a dark picture of a future wherein humanity is absolutely engulfed by the (necro)power of death, warning that ‘soon, it will no longer be possible to delegate one’s death to others’ (ibid: par. 6). Taking heed of Mbembe’s warning, as the pandemic goes on, it can be expected the rate at which more and more bodies are put at risk and used up will speed up exponentially – spreading from South to North, poor to rich, and black to white at a pace unseen before. It is far beyond the scope of this chapter and book to detail the necropolitics of COVID-19 systematically. However, in the following pages, I, too, concentrate discussion on the body politics and (in)visibilities of contemporary necropolitics. However, unlike the authors named earlier, I do this in specific relation to the function of necropolitical incursions within the processes of (re/dis)embodiment so central to my project of rethinking the body in global politics. Indeed, in what follows, I make a distinct contribution to wider efforts to catalogue and scrutinise contemporary necropolitical formations by expanding on necropolitical theory through detailing specific techniques and patterns of (dis/re)embodiment coming to light during and because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, doing so contributes significantly to the general rethinking of the body in global politics unveiled through this book and builds directly on the explanation of (re/dis)embodiment provided in Chapter 1 as the necropolitical logics described in this chapter are understood to be profoundly interlinked to bodily precariousness, ontological (in)security, and (un)likelihood that any particular body will become the target of the exclusionary and often deadly violence of disembodiment described so far and

66  Body politics further exemplified in this and the following chapters. In short, it is my two-part contention in this chapter that (1) the character of contemporary structures and dominant institutions and bodies of power(/knowledge) can be distinguished by their distinctly necropolitical character and logics and that (2) understanding these necropolitical characteristics and logics are key to understanding local-national-global patterns of (re/dis)embodiment, which I specifically discuss in relation to necropolitical processes through which bodies become known and used as body parts. Towards the unravelling of this twofold point, the following pages include an introduction to necropolitical theory, my expansion of it through analysis of practices and processes of (dis/re)embodiment during the COVID-19 pandemic, and further elaboration on the motif of mask and face introduced earlier. 2.1.1 Biopolitical masks The line between biopolitical and necropolitical techniques is fine. However, Mbembe brought necropolitics firmly into the lexicon of political theory because of his belief that ‘the notion of biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death’ (2003: 39–40). And I agree, something has shifted that the concept of biopolitics no longer sufficiently captures. Towards amending this, where Foucault describes biopolitics as involving power assuming ‘the right to take life or let live’ (1976: 136), necropolitics’ subtle emphasis on death instead makes this particular style of governance an alternative assumption of the right to make death or let die. Indeed, with the word necro relating to death and dead bodies, necropolitics is a political style distinguishable from others because of a particular orientation around and manipulation and management of death and ways of dying, meaning necropolitical practices and processes are often subtly but always fundamentally invested in the management and administration of death and ways of dying within populations of bodies under their purview. Crucially, however subtle, these necropolitical investments and interests in death and the production of corpses are what make the necropolitical strategies, policies, and practices outlined in this chapter distinguishable from the often biopolitical, life-oriented, and affirming pretexts and pretences accompanying them. Moreover, as the COVID-19 pandemic is currently revealing and making indisputable, it is necropolitical death manipulation, management, and production techniques which have come to define the contemporary global order and, therefore, its further dissection is essential to better describe local-global patterns of (re/dis)embodiment that power(/knowledge) in the necropolitical mode engenders. To further articulate what the shift to necropolitics entails, during lectures given at the Collège de France between 1975 and 1976, Foucault outlined how power, operating in the sovereign mode in newly established liberal democracies of the 17th century, took on supplementary disciplinary techniques before the emergence of life-oriented and life-affirming biopolitical strategies, aiming to ‘ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order’ (1976: 136) ‘sometime later.’ In History of Sexuality, Foucault (ibid: 260) continues to elaborate on specifically biopolitical strategies, crucially referring for the first time to a darker

Body politics  67 element emerging from within them by detailing how ‘the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence.’ In short, it is this underside which develops out of biopolitics that is necropolitical in character. Indeed, due to being located on an underside of what present themselves as biopolitical institutions and structures through espousing the liberal-democratic norms and values prevailing throughout the international system in the 20th and 21st centuries, necropolitical operations are often obscured (rather than illuminated) by the bodies that enact them due to a desire to save face. Indeed, I describe the necropolitical underside as masked with and by biopolitics and explain the particular dynamics of (in)visibility and institutional anxieties often accompanying necropolitical interventions through the motif of the mask and face. 2.1.2 (In)visible bodies On 29 March 2020, President Trump appeared in the White House’s Rose Garden to brief the press and viewing public on health care with Vice President Pence and members of the US Coronavirus Taskforce. However, within his more structured remarks on COVID-19 testing, treatment, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), and health-care infrastructure development (see Trump, 29/03/2020), Trump seemed to digress, using the occasion to also impress upon the nation his thoughts on a situation at New York’s Elmhurst Hospital Center, saying he had been watching it develop on the television for the past week: I just wanted to say one thing also about what Tony had mentioned. So I grew up in Queens, New York, and right next to a place called Elmhurst, Queens. And they have a hospital that’s a very good hospital – Elmhurst Hospital…. And I’ve been watching that for the last week on television. Body bags all over in hallways. I’ve been watching them bring in trailer trucks – freezer trucks; they’re freezer trucks – because they can’t handle the bodies there’s so many of them. This is in my – essentially, in my community in Queens – Queens, New York. I’ve seen things that I’ve never seen before. I mean, I’ve seen them, but I’ve seen them on television in faraway lands. I’ve never seen them in our country.” In these remarks, Trump gives an account of having ‘seen things’ (‘body bags all over in hallways’ and ‘freezer trucks – because they can’t handle the bodies’) that he has ‘never seen before’ other than ‘on television in faraway lands.’ Interestingly, beyond simply giving an account (Trump explains that he ‘just wanted to say one thing’ but not why he wanted to say it), it remains unclear as to the impetus behind Trump’s interjection. However, Trump’s elucidation is in itself disturbing, and this does work, as he speaks of having had a horrifying glimpse of what I have described so far as the necropolitical underside of a biopolitically life-oriented liberal democracy. Indeed, as I explain in this section, Trump’s 29 March remarks elucidate a defining feature of contemporary necropolitics, which is the global regime of (in)visibility that it engenders. This is what I describe as

68  Body politics the visual necropolitical imperative, wherein the necropolitical work of death is kept as far out of the public eye as possible, often pushed out to faraway lands and the bodies of others. Crucially, with Elspeth Van Veeren (in ed. Blieker et al., 2013: 200) underlining that ‘there is politics beyond the edge of sight,’ I argue throughout this chapter and book that the very invisibility of necropolitical practices to the eyes of some help sustain the killing of others and the necropolitical order itself due to preventing exactly the kind of emotive-affective reaction seen in Trump on 29 March. Moreover, as Trump’s distressed and in themselves disruptive comments about Elmhurst Hospital also demonstrate, the following expansion is aimed at underlining how the visual necropolitical imperative I describe is well beyond the control of even the US president or any global leader and is a truly structural global condition. 2.1.3  The disqualification of death Central to distinguishing power in the necropolitical mode are the dynamics of (in)visibility that can be expected within its domain. Indeed, with necropolitical practices emerging from the underside of biopolitics and increasing in scope and strength, Foucault (2003: 248) noted this from the start, hence linking the ‘the famous disqualification of death’ to the rise of liberal capitalism and indeed biopolitics – which in the late 18th and early 19th centuries saw graveyards moving from the centre of towns and cities to their peripheries and even rituals associated with death becoming ‘a shameful thing’ (ibid). However, 21st-century technology only facilities and ingrains the necropolitical dynamic of (in) visibility described so far with, for example, Henry Giroux characterising contemporary America as having ‘a tightly controlled visual landscape—managed both by the Pentagon and by corporate-owned networks,’ and Auchter (2014) similarly highlighting how dead bodies continue to be treated as pornography and are accordingly blurred out in long-running American true crime programs, including America’s Most Wanted and Dateline in the same way that an explicit or censored image might be. Indeed, as shaded and shady, death and all associated with it is obscured, becoming taboo and leaving the visible landscape in the northern core of the necropolitical global economy cleansed of death. However, meanwhile, the visual landscape has developed unevenly, meaning no such taboo exists in the global south. As Auchter’s (Alphin and Debrix, 2020: 104) research into Ebola discourse reveals that ‘death from disease, is treated as banal in the developing world, while it is considered preventable and extraordinary in the developed world.’ Indeed, as I detail in Chapter 4, even during the peak of the United Kingdom’s first wave, when swathes of the population were dying in excess of normal projections in the global north and south alike, death has gone unseen to my eyes while the preservation and promotion of what I have described as biopolitical masks became glaring with Gediminas Lesutis and Jon Las Heras (18/05/2020) commenting during the COVID-19 pandemic that ‘the [UK] politics of life and heroism are at its most visible.’ Much more than a benign cultural trend, the invisibilisation of the products of necropower (death and corpses) plays a fundamental role in the continuation of

Body politics  69 necropolitics itself; as particular bodies are gradually de-valued and their deaths made through necropolitical policies and practices, they are at the same time kept out of sight and thus Jenna Brager (12/05/2015: par. 6) argues astutely that disappearance in this sense, of the necropolitical creation of disposable classes that are prone to vanishing, exceeds structures of justice and testifies to the law as the cohering of a fiction into a system of truth through repetition and ritual—how humans are made and unmade. Indeed, as the power to make bodies more or less valuable and grievable so that they may be used up after fulfilling specific functions as disposable (body) parts, for a specific price and no more, the necropolitical visual imperative is absolutely key to securing and maintaining a supply chain of working parts. In short, this work must be done in the dark because visibility engenders contest. As the global regime of (in)visibility accompanying and facilitating necropolitics outlined thus far suggests, in the extractive centres of necropower, it is particularly important that the visual landscape remains cleansed of death to maintain such a bloody, literally body-fuelled system. Accordingly, the global visual landscape is incredibly uneven, as Trump’s comments make plain; the ways and means of dying are normally pushed down and away to the global peripheries. Indeed, Trump’s remarks in response to sights at Elmhurst Hospital demonstrate the repercussions of undermining the visual necropolitical imperative as the COVID-19 pandemic has; as in this case, portable morgues appearing on the streets of Queens and bodies piling up in hospital corridors as medical waste led to a televised presidential outburst. As I explain next, with reference to necropolitical theory and a number of similarly disruptive examples, necropower involves and depends on covering over its most cruel and inhumane ways of producing death, which, and as Trump’s remarks demonstrate, makes the COVID19 pandemic an extremely threatening prospect for structures of necropolitical power. Moreover, visual interruptions like Trump’s outburst therefore threaten necropolitical structures by engendering contests around bodily value and grievability – the monopoly of which necropower itself vitally depends on. 2.1.4 Seeing/not seeing soldiers9 Made specifically for the purpose of being used up by war, the case of the American soldier illustrates well the visual necropolitical imperative to cover over the work of death in the global north, as well as the contests that visual interruptions engender. As such, through tracing the case of the shifting (in)visibility of wounded and dead American soldiers, I have previously charted how necropolitical incursions and interventions into processes of soldiers’ (re/dis)embodiment were gradually blotted out from the mid-20th century onwards via updates to army body-disposal policies and repatriation practices working to cleanse soldiers’ deaths and dying from the American vocabulary and vision (see Purnell, 2018). In this case, after the Vietnam War and the caskets of American soldiers being made suddenly glaring visible ‘rolling off planes at Hickam Air Force Base

70  Body politics in Hawaii as if off a conveyor belt’ (Scott-Tyson, 26/02/2009a: par. 4) through the advent of the home television, American soldiers’ were gradually erased. Indeed, coinciding with the time necropolitics arrives at the lexicon of political and international theory, this process sped up with the advent of the GWoT and the 2003 Dover Ban, which legally prohibited the publication and broadcast of images and videos capturing any part of the ritual repatriation of America’s war dead. However, while a blatant example of American soldiers’ erasure, there are a package of lesser-known, more subtle, but no less important necropolitical practices of visual control underlying the Dover Ban, which further reveal the determination of the necropolitical visual imperative within the post 9/11 era. President George W. Bush did not attend the funeral of a single American soldier KIA in Iraq10 and only ever referred to American casualties in general terms,11 not counting and therefore failing to take into account—or account for—the suffering and deaths of American soldiers while even the terminology used by the White House and US Department of Defense to refer to dead American soldiers—the fallen—denies that death has occurred and, therefore, works to further erase death from the public consciousness, as well as eye. As a discursive formation, the term the fallen also works to conflate dead American soldiers, and, in doing so, denies them as unique and grievable persons. Along the same lines, journalist Ann Jones (2013, 60) reports that ‘the word “dying” is never mentioned to the family’ of catastrophically and fatally injured soldiers in military hospitals. These linguistic choices illustrate how dominant contemporary American bodies have worked to elide suffering and dead American soldiers throughout the GWoT. However, it is not only from language that suffering and dead American soldiers have been erased. The logic of dominant contemporary American bodies also materialises as policies and practices working to physically remove from vision and disembody American soldiers killed in action (KIA) – making them disappear completely. For example, in 2003, Vermont senator Patrick Leahy admitted that planes returning wounded soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq to Washington, DC’s Joint Base Andrews (from where they would be taken on to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for treatment) were scheduled to land under the cover of darkness, thus ‘making sure the press does not see the planes coming in with the suffering’ (cited in Buncome 2003, par. 4). Similarly, journalist Ann Jones (2013, 33) finds that at US Army Bagram Air Base, ‘the suffering are carried into the hospital by the back door.’ Here the rescheduling of aircraft and rerouting of ambulances carrying war wounded and dead bodies are acts further exemplifying the necropolitical imperative and determination of dominant bodies to keep socially and politically engendered suffering and death out of sight. Moreover, after the aforementioned 2003 ‘Dover Ban’12 on ceremonial and public broadcast repatriations, a procedure known as the ‘dignified transfer’ took its place. Carried out ‘as quickly as possible’ (Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations 2017, par. 3), during dignified transfers, it is not bodies but the remains of the KIA that are collected and sealed inside a human remains pouch before being placed inside a transfer case and transfer vehicle (Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations, 2017: par. 3). Providing another example of American statecraft working in line with the visual necropolitical imperative to keep socially and politically constructed suffering and death out of sight, policy updates made within the

Body politics  71 move from the Dover ceremony to the dignified transfer (ibid) further reveal shifts in lexicon – from body to remains, from body bag to human remains pouch, from memorial ceremony to dignified transfer, from casket to transfer case, and from hearse to transfer vehicle – materialising as a ritual finalising the erasure of dead American soldiers from the public’s field of vision, as well as the official narrative of war. However, even the necropolitical visual imperative is not without vulnerability. Indeed, during the GWoT alone, suffering and dead American soldiers have time and again forced moments of politics because of being known, counted, and making other bodies feel differently. Moreover, through the Dover Ban’s partial revoke in 2009, the parameter of what can(/not) be seen by the American public’s eye was successfully renegotiated by subordinate yet challenging bodies, including military families and CSOs demanding and, indeed, taking the right to grieve each of the KIA in public. In the case of dead American soldiers, challenges to the visual necropolitical imperative represented in this case by the Dover Ban’s 2003 reissue and extension include the 15 March 2004 protest march by a coalition of CSOs, including Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for Peace, and Iraq Pledge of Resistance. These groups had gathered in Dover, Delaware, for the purpose of marching from the AFB to the White House via the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The coalition stated the intention of their march as ‘a memorial procession for mourning and truth to pull back the veil, honour and mourn the dead and acknowledge the wounded’ (see MFSO, 11/03/2004: par. 2, emphasis added) while their demand was for the US government to ‘start telling the truth, stop hiding the toll’ (ibid, emphasis added). Jane Bright, the mother of 24-year-old Evan Bright, a soldier KIA in July 2003, similarly told the Associated Press that her personal motivation for joining the march was the belief that ‘we need to stop hiding the deaths of our young; we need to be open about their deaths’ (cited in Chase, 23/04/2004: par. 9, emphasis added). In these enunciations, (in)visibility is repeatedly evoked and described as the coalitions’ motivation. Indeed, aimed at pulling back the veil, the groups are articulating a request for what I have described as the necropolitical underside to be made visible. As a final example of contest at the very edge of the necropolitically engendered field of vision and again in relation to dead American soldiers, just a month after the CSOs’ march, on Sunday 18 April 2004, the Seattle Times published a photograph of flag-draped coffins in breach of the Dover Ban. Taken and shared with the press by Tami Silicio, an American citizen, resident of Seattle, and an aircraft worker employed at the time by Maytag Aircraft (a private military contractor [PMC] to which the US Army outsource the responsibility for the repatriation of suffering and dead American soldiers). Indeed, the photograph had been taken during a 12-hour night shift spent preparing a Maytag cargo plane loaded with the bodies of 20 dead American soldiers for its flight from Kuwait International Airport to Dover, Delaware’s AFB. Barry Fitzsimmons, the Seattle Times journalist with whom Silicio shared her photograph, later disclosed how Silicio had been fully aware that the publication would breach the Dover Ban but that she had been motivated to get the image published regardless (and for no monetary compensation) by a feeling that ‘it was wrong to hide the deaths of so many of our young

72  Body politics soldiers’ (cited in Irby, 30/04/2004: par. 9), adding that she ‘wanted genuinely to help the grieving families find closure’ (ibid). Silicio was subsequently fired by Maytag Aircraft on 21 April 2004 and responded in a follow-up Seattle Times article within which she expressed her dismay and defended her good intentions – how she hoped ‘the photo would help families of fallen soldiers understand the care and devotion that civilians and military crews dedicate to the task of returning the soldiers home’ (cited in Bernton, 22/04/2004: par. 9), adding ‘I try to watch over their children as they head home’ (ibid). Here, evocative of the CSOs’ justifications for their protest march, Silicio speaks of a similar moral objection to the Dover Ban and the underlying necropolitical visual imperative on the grounds of its invisibilisation of those KIA. As these contests make plain, regardless of the bottom line and the visual necropolitical imperative it engenders, different bodies value different bodies differently. However, all the while, bodies continue to churn mostly invisibly through the machineries of necropolitics described in this chapter. Given the introduction to necro(body)politics thus far provided, it was unsurprising yet ominous that as the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United Kingdom in March 2020, COVID-19 patients were to be moved, treated, and likely die in newly repurposed out-of-town convention centres renamed NHS Nightingale Hospitals, including London’s ExCel Centre. Perched on London Docklands, this now vast convention centre is geographically remote from the city centre and sits on top of London’s historic pandemic dead, as during the plague, victims arrived by river to be dumped into ‘plague pits’ on mass in this area.13 However, being sent here without and out of the sight of even their families, there is a risk that – in line with the typical necropolitical (in)visibilities briefly described – those stricken with COVID-19 would slip out of the public eye and disappear completely. The text of the United Kingdom’s Coronavirus Bill passed into law on 25 March 2020, further demonstrates the UK government operating in line with the necropolitical visual imperative at the pandemic’s outset. More precisely, the bill’s instructions for ‘managing the deceased with respect and dignity’14 include limiting the possibility for a coroner to investigate a death, removing the need for a jury in the case of suspected COVID-19 coroner inquests, and removing the need for a second confirmatory medical certificate for a cremation to take place. Indeed, as I feared at the time and the research presented in this and the following Chapters confirms, such necropolitical measures paved the way for the further brushing under and away of COVID-19 deaths outside of the public eye while also working to limit the scrutiny of fatalities produced by bodies’ necropolitical exposure to the power of death and, therefore, to safeguard necropolitics itself. However, before going on to explore the necropolitics of COVID-19 pandemic in more detail, the below subsections explain the motif of mask and face re-appearing throughout my research as well as the particular anxieties and contradictions coming to define contemporary necropolitics. Crucially, it is these traits which I suggest offer up potential for meaningful resistance to power in the necropolitical mode. 2.1.5  The mask and the face While researching ways, means, and patterns of contemporary (re/dis)embodiments, I have time and again found contradictory biopolitical versus necropolitical

Body politics  73 logics coming to shape dominant – for example, military and government – bodies’ policies and practices. I have even found bodies in formal positions of comparative and absolute subordination – for example, regular citizens, lowly ranked ‘privates,’ and Camp Delta detainees – able to manipulate and resist often violent methods of (re/dis)embodiment by playing on and into such contradictory characters’ behaviours. For this reason, I began to think of dominant bodies as wearing biopolitical masks over their necropolitical faces. However, as time went on, I saw these being disturbed and slipping off all the more often, and as the COVID19 pandemic hit, I wondered if they would now be removed for good. This is a question I return to throughout this book. However, in this section, I further detail my arrival at this masked metaphor and outline its utility for the further rethinking of the local-global politics of bodies. There is substantial literature on the social-political construction and functions of the face but less exists in IR. However, Jenny Edkins has explored not only face politics but also the possibility of living within a politics effaced and concluded that ‘perhaps we already do, & it is only our dominant contemporary politics that pretends & makes us believe we cannot’ (2015: 171). In her book, Edkins is drawing foremostly on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of faciality and the politics of ‘dismantling the face’ (1980: 188), while in the concluding lines of his book The Order of Things, Foucault, too, contemplates effacement and its centrality to the ‘death of man’ – ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.’ These are important contributions, to which questions posed through this chapter and tackled more directly in Chapter 4 respond. Indeed, the necropolitical invisibilities detailed earlier involve the removal of dead bodies and, indeed, the faces of the dead from public sight. However, for further understanding of the face-mask politics occurring under conditions of necropower, Erving Goffman’s Facework (1967) is most useful when thought through in conjunction with OST, introduced in Chapter 1, as keeping one’s biopolitical mask in place seems to be a contemporary fixation amongst dominant bodies. Explaining that ‘a person may be said to have, be in, or maintain face when the line he effectively takes presents an image of him that is internally consistent’ (Goffman, 1967: 6), Erving Goffman’s Facework details how (ontological) insecurity-induced anxiety from an inconsistent image results in two basic kinds of facework: (1) the avoidance process described as ‘the surest way for a person to prevent threats to his face is to avoid contacts in which these threats are likely to occur’ (1967: 15) and (2) the corrective process that happens when an actor ‘fail[s] to prevent the occurrence of an event that is incompatible with the judgements of social worth that are being maintained, and when the event is of the kind that is difficult to overlook’ (ibid:19). And, indeed, dominant actors I describe as wearing biopolitical masks over their necropolitical faces have through acts to be discussed most certainly both avoided and attempted to correct images of death making becoming visible to the public eye. However, with Goffman’s face theory highlighting that ‘the phrase “to lose face” seems to mean be in wrong face’ (ibid: 6), it is important to remember that what the dominant actors are attempting to save through the avoidance and corrections discussed next is not only their faces but also the masks which cover and indeed facilitate the continued operation of necropolitical death making, literally under

74  Body politics the guise of more socially acceptable life-oriented biopolitics. Indeed, in saving the mask, these actors also save the faces underneath and are able to perpetuate their necropolitical deeds without sanction. 2.1.6 Anxious bodies To illustrate my understanding of contemporary necropolitical facework in practice, the Camp Delta detainment facility within NSGB houses bodies that are directly exposed to violently disembodying practices and during the GWoT came to work as sites through which dominant bodies’ anxieties violently played out. Moreover, with the dominant bodies wielding power over Camp Delta detainees reorienting themselves around the necropolitical control of death and ways of dying while at the same time espousing an increasingly hollow biopolitical discourse of care and protection, their behaviour facilitated my characterisation of necropolitical bodies as donning precariously placed biological masks. For example, from the camp’s 2002 inception through the peak of the GWoT and the years it was most densely populated, JTF-GTMO could be seen making determined efforts to live up to Camp Delta’s biopolitical mission statement, once emblazoned on the roadside sign at the camp’s entrance, to ‘protect, preserve, and promote life’ (see Leopold, 13/05/2013). Indeed, JTF-GTMO’s standard operating procedure (SOP) and the Bush and Obama presidencies consistently dictated and aimed to ensure that Camp Delta detainee’s bodies should be left unmarked by physical violence while the term ‘enhanced interrogation’ is used by JTFGTMO to describe ‘Category II’ techniques known as ‘stealth technologies’ for how they leave the body unmarked.15 These include the use of stress positions, hooding, sleep deprivation, clothing removal, exposure to extreme temperatures, forced shaving, and the induction of stress through aversion (such as fear of dogs) and led former Camp Delta detainee Shaker Aamer (cited in Calahan, 13/02/2012) to explain that JTF-GTMO ‘destroy people mentally and physically without leaving marks’ and recall begging his captors to ‘please torture me in the old way’ (ibid). Within the camp’s SOP,16 it was also detailed that JTF-GTMO should work to prevent detainees from dying in ways that include self-harm, suicide, near suicide, mass suicide, and acute acts of suicide, which JTF-GTMO describe as ‘asymmetrical warfare’ (cited in Risen and Golden, 11/06/2006) and countered with what naval medics on base describe as ‘suicide prevention’ (cited in Hamblin, 21/05/2013) measures, including the restriction of detainees’ use of items such as prayer caps, toothpaste, Styrofoam cups, and even copies of the Koran after three detainees killed themselves in 2006. Such preferences for invisible torture methods and obsession with death prevention within the space of Camp Delta demonstrates why I describe contemporary institutions and actors engaged in necropolitical processes of (re/dis)embodiment as wearing biopolitical masks over their necropolitical faces, as, in contrast to distinctively sovereign and or disciplinary bodies, contemporary actors (who are for me defined by their increasingly necropolitical character) rely on and sustain themselves through the erasure of violence and death while having an extremely tight grip on ways of dying within the populations of bodies under their control.

Body politics  75 On top of the aforementioned contradictory behaviours, Faiz al-Kandar, Camp Delta detainee #552’s striking provocation that ‘the US must take off its mask and kill us’ (cited in McGregor and Dyer, 29/03/2013) makes plain why I came to describe dominant bodies exemplified by JTF-GTMO as having necropolitical faces normally hidden on the underside of their biopolitical masks. However, the identity crises brought on by creeping necropolitical tendencies are of most relevance towards this chapter’s aim to characterise body politics because of its direction of travel towards more blatant forms of death making without the restraint afforded by efforts to keep the once treasured biopolitical mask in place. As the cases discussed so far demonstrate, while the exposure of necropolitical practise and its deadly consequences is possible, necropolitical bodies work hard and quickly to cover themselves back over. Indeed, it is imperative to do so given how necropower itself is gleaned from and depends on the use and using up of bodies in extractive exploitative and, ultimately, inhumane fashion. However, as time goes on and especially since the arrival of COVID-19, the question is whether the mask can survive at all.

2.2 Death is hard work On top of the visual necropolitical imperative detailed so far along with the motif of mask and face framing contemporary necropolitics, logics of bodily (e)valuation, commodification, and use accompany necropolitics, feed into patterns of local-global (re/dis)embodiment, and are, therefore, the focus of the remainder of this chapter. In particular, the following pages begin to use the disruption and visual exposures engendered by the COVID-19 pandemic to build on the necropolitical theory introduced so far. In the very same rose garden COVID-19 briefing discussed in the previous section’s introduction to the visual dynamics engendered within necropolitics, wherein Trump felt the need to tell the American public about seeing death overspilling into the corridors and parking lots of a Queen’s hospital, the president made another important observation. Indeed, after giving an account of seeing the freezer truck mortuaries and body bags at Elmhurst Hospital, he goes on to describe how they’re pulling up to take out bodies, and you look inside and you see the black body bags. You say, ‘What’s in there?’ It’s Elmhurst Hospital; must be supplies. It’s not supplies. It’s people. I’ve never seen anything like it. Equally relevant to describing features of contemporary necropolitics, in this second part of Trump’s digression, the president crucially refers to his initial failure to realise that he was watching human body disposal on television, having mistakenly assumed the black body bags were carrying medical ‘supplies.’ In this section, I explain why his mistake is first understandable and also telling of what I describe as another necropolitical imperative in the form of a process of disembodiment wherein particular bodies become reduced to body parts and, therefore, unknowable as human and are treated accordingly. Indeed, in life, these parts may be and often are highly valued for their functions in the service of

76  Body politics other bodies. However, upon their expiry, they become immediately worthless and are disposed of accordingly. As I explained in Chapter 1, becoming a nobody (dehumanised), and in this case a body part, is an outcome of the process of (re/ dis)embodiment enabled and facilitated by the precariousness of embodied subjects and discursive-emotional strategies of exclusion. However, in this section, I continue to fill in knowledge of the process of (re/dis)embodiment by explaining how power in the necropolitical mode also contributes by (e)valuating which bodies become reduced to which parts of other bodies. Towards this, in the following subsection, I draw out specific logics informing the necropolitical (e)valuation process and what Mbembe (13/04/2020b) refers to as the scale determining which bodies become reduced to (body) parts indistinguishable from ‘supplies’ to be used and used up only to then become waste and, accordingly, ‘dumped as trash’17 and conversely which bodies will retain a higher value for longer as human bodies in themselves and, therefore, be afforded more (human) dignity in both life and death. 2.2.1  Division of bodies Both biopolitics and necropolitics depend on socially and politically constructed biologically defined dividing practices within which processes of bodily evaluation and valuation determine life and death, and in this section, I delineate between them. However, before doing so, it is first pertinent to explain that I use the term (e)valuation from this point onwards because of how bodies’ financial values are determined according to a process of evaluation, involving specific and intensely political criteria outlined in this chapter. Biopolitical and necropolitical ways of evaluating bodies are not the same and yet coexist – both informing patterns of (re/dis)embodiment, with necropolitical logics coming gradually to gain dominance and becoming paramount. To be absolutely clear on the subtle distinction between biopolitics and necropolitics, necropower is distinguishable from biopower because of the intentional death making via the reduction and use of bodies that it entails and relies on. This stands in contrast with biopower, which, defined by Foucault as the power ‘to take life and let live’ (1976: 136, emphasis added), is aimed at those highly valued human bodies produced as worthy of life that become the primary target of state interventions. For instance, the Holocaust is produced and justified exactly through a typical biopolitical discourse demanding ‘the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal)’ (Foucault, 2003: 255) and a positively defined biopolitical goal ‘to make life in general healthier: healthier and purer’ (Foucault, 2003: 255, emphasis added). The advent of necropower, however, leads to a tandem system of bodily (e)valuation, wherein dehumanised bodies, reduced to the status of functional (body) parts and treated badly and, indeed, inhumanely are highly valued as pure energy and a raw material to be used up completely in the service of other bodies, which exist and are shielded further up the ‘endoskeleton of the world’ (see Brand, 04/07/2020) by those parts beneath. In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben picks up on this distinction, noticing the occurrence of what he called thanatopolitics (meaning, literally, the politics of

Body politics  77 death) within an overtly and overarching biopolitical scene. Here inside the concentration camp, Agamben notes, ‘Corpses were produced, corpses without death, non-humans whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production’ (1998: 28, emphasis added). Indeed, inside Auschwitz, while functioning according to, in this case, genocidal biopolitical imperative to protect the ‘good’ race, those ‘bad’ bodies interned were also being simultaneously used up on an industrial scale by being worked to death18 in the very service of those ‘good’ bodies. This is the core of necropolitics upon which I expand further next. With necropolitics involving the using up and eventual wasting of bodies reduced dehumanisingly to parts, much work goes into defining those inferior bodies who may become parts highly valued for their service on an industrial scale. Crucially, it is through (e)valuation and transformation of bodies into parts that necropower informs the local-global patterns of (re/dis)embodiment outlined in Chapter 1. Indeed, as Khaled Khalifa titled his 2016 novel, within which the plot pivots entirely around a dead body, ‘death is hard work,’ and, to be more precise, producing corpses is an extremely laborious task underlined and facilitated by the facets of (re/dis)embodiment already introduced (precariousness and emotional politics). However, in this section, and towards further outlining of the complex process of (dis/re)embodiment, I draw out specifically necropolitical aspects within it. These are processes of bodily (e)valuation and accounting which inform wider, societal, and cultural dynamics of grievability and (in)visibility and in doing so enable the further (ab)use of and extraction from bodies reduced to parts. To explain contemporary bodily evaluation practices and how these lead to present-day (dis/re)embodiments, during the 1975–1976 Society Must Be Defended lectures, Foucault (2003: 255) provides that the dividing practice informing biopolitical bodily evaluation is racial, explaining how ‘the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls.’ Following this, biopolitics has been used as a lens through which to make sense of genocides, persecutions, and atrocities, including the Holocaust, with, for example, Giorgio Agamben describing Nazi Germany as ‘the first radically biopolitical state’ (1998: 148). Furthermore, Agamben’s description of bare life, typified by those populating the Nazi-run concentration camps (‘the most biopolitical space ever realised’ (ibid: 171), provide a more contemporary interpretation of biopolitics crucially demonstrating how technology allows for machineries of power to further tighten their grip of and indeed to enter bodies as a means to intervene into life and death. As Agamben (1998: 165) explains, The hospital room in which the neomort, the overcomatose person, and the faux vivant waver between life and death delimits a space of exception in which a purely bare life, entirely controlled by man and his technology, appears for the first time. And since it is precisely a question not of natural life but of an extreme embodiment of homo sacer…what is at stake is, once again, the definition of a life that may be killed without the commission of homicide.

78  Body politics Here, despite Agamben’s problematic reference to the ‘natural’ life implicitly sexist default use of masculine pronouns, I have included the description because of how it articulates a level of bodily control unseen before and facilitated by technological advances because it is these same and other technologies discussed in the following section that facilitate necropolitical, as well as biopolitical practices. 2.2.2 Global necro-body politics Building on such early bio-necropolitical theory, within IR, there is vast literature applying particularly the biopolitical paradigm to 20th- and 21st-century events, including (but not only19) the Holocaust,20 the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,21 offand on-shore detention practices aimed at refugees and asylum seekers from the global south to the global north,22 and the GWoT23 because of how each is produced and sustained by rhetoric and practices aimed at protecting the health of good populations and their ways of life.24 Towards this positively defined aim, common to the cases of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, case of asylum seekers and refugees from the global south to the global north, and GWoT – and making them exemplars of biopolitical struggles – are biologically racially defined exclusionary practices targeted at those identified as bad, (re)making them as biologically defined threats to humanity. As the paradigmatic example, Nazi discourse persistently constructed Jews as ‘parasitic’ and ‘infectious,’ while more recently, Israeli Defence Force reserve Brigadier General Efraim Eitam has stated, ‘the State of Israel today faces an elusive threat, and elusive threats by their nature resemble a cancer’ (cited in Grayham, 2003), and Guantánamo Bay detainees were described by former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers (cited in Sheppard, 2008) as likely to ‘gnaw through hydraulic lines at the back of a C-17 to bring it down.’ Such dehumanising and, therefore, exclusionary violence (excluding the object from the category of human) plays directly into processes of (re/dis)embodiment explained in the previous chapter by making their targets less ontologically secure and more precarious. However, what remains the same is the positive orientation of these biological strategies towards the defence of life while operations gaining traction on the underside are overlooked. As the selection of works cited so far demonstrate, a great deal of attention has been paid to the work involved in maintaining a positively defined, life-oriented (bio)politics revolving around strategies of population cultivation, management, and administration and the defence of particular bodies at the expense of others. However, at the same time, and leading me to define them as contemporary formations of necropolitics, former biopolitics have evolved and reoriented themselves around the negatively defined work of more active corpse production. Indeed, this poses a problem for social-political-international theory because with so much attention given to biopolitical strategies and comfort found in the biopolitical paradigm, the subtle encroachment of necropolitical strategies has been overlooked and, hence, Rosi Braidotti’s (2013: 128) assertion that death is ‘under examined as a term in critical theory and as established practice in socio-political governance and international relations’ with a consequence of this

Body politics  79 being that ‘death as a concept remains unitary and un-differentiated, while the repertoire of political thought around Life and biopower proliferates and diversifies.’ Meanwhile, within IR and the subdiscipline of security studies, Jessica Auchter (2016: 1) has highlighted the same, urging scholars to ‘think about the global dead as an analytical category.’ Towards redressing the imbalance between biopolitical and necropolitical theory, in the following pages, I explain that there are many, indeed proliferating, internationally, socially, and politically constructed ways of dying. These include execution, murder, exposure, and neglect and feed directly into the processes of (re/dis)embodiment which I aim to further demystify and illustrate in this chapter. Indeed, under conditions of necropolitics, bodies are made to die in all manner of ways but never from natural causes. As I have already described, COVID19 works to speed up what are socially and politically constructed but normally slower deaths caused by what Lauren Berlant (2007: 754) describes in relation to the contemporary American poor as slow death: ‘the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.’ Therefore, drawing and building on Berlant’s notion of slow death and in particular thinking through the implications of such a virally induced speeding up, in the next section, I bring Sara Ahmed’s thesis on ‘use’ (2019) into the conversation to expand on the logic and methods of contemporary dividing practices informing life and death in a time of pandemic and in particular describe local-global patterns of (re/dis)embodiment occurring as a result of necropolitical (e)valuations assigning bodies with uses and entailing particular ways of being used up as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. 2.2.3  The (ab)use of bodies More than 9,000 miles away from the Arizona Honeywell face-mask factory visited by President Trump on 5 May and discussed at the chapter’s outset, on an industrial estate just outside of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, is another factory involved in producing PPE during the COVID-19 pandemic. This one is owned by Top Glove, the world’s leading rubber glove manufacturer, and part of the UK NHS’s PPE supply chain, and it similarly operates according to the necropolitical logics unravelled in this chapter. Featured recently within a UK Channel 4 News item revealing the ‘shocking conditions in PPE factories supplying UK,’25 the bodies used for producing 366% profits since the pandemic’s outset inside this 24-hour Top Glove factory are those of migrant workers shipped in from Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Nepal, already under debt bondage,26 to work 12-hour shifts six days per week and 111 hours of monthly overtime on a basic wage of GBP1.08 per hour – the legal Malaysian minimum. With the increased demand for rubber gloves during the COVID-19 pandemic, glove manufacturers have been designated key workers by the Malaysian government. However, factory workers are housed in ‘cramped and squalid’ Top Glove hostels with no fire escapes, while a Malaysia trade union has warned that the substandard accommodation is a potential breeding ground for a spread of COVID-19, especially after mass outbreaks of the disease in migrant worker hostels in neighbouring Singapore (see Miller,

80  Body politics 16/06/2020). The Channel 4 News piece makes it known that the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has been working with Top Glove for years. However, in line with the necropolitical visual imperative, it took a global pandemic to expose the United Kingdom’s role in the necropolitical exposure of such vulnerable workers to ways of dying by hostel fire or overwork and modern slavery in this case. Towards further unravelling local-global processes of (re/dis)embodiment, what else does the Top Glove factory tale reveal? In this section, I will explain firstly how bodies in, to quote Trump, ‘faraway’ lands, end up being exploited in the service of multinational conglomerates where they are reduced to and treated as parts put to work in the service of profit and the industrially necropolitical machine of global capitalism. In this case, as working parts, Top Glove employees do their (body) part while exposed directly to COVID-19 – the very thing they are working to produce equipment to protect other bodies from. In turn, these other bodies, elsewhere and of a higher value given they are at minimum GBP8.21 hourly wage,27 work as parts of the United Kingdom’s NHS. In fact, during the pandemic, the monetary value of each part of the United Kingdom’s NHS was made public when the government announced on 27 April that GBP60,000 would be paid out for every ‘death in service’28 caused by the coronavirus. Of course, with the NHS ravaged by cuts and given the death toll of NHS workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, these bodies, too, had already been discounted and were being exploited, used, and used up in the service of other bodies of a higher value in turn. And so it goes on, all the way up the bodily comprised global endoskeleton. Indeed, as I explain next, every body and every body part has a value and a use and will be used up accordingly, hence Mbembe’s (13/04/2020b: par. 6) mid-pandemic warning: ‘Soon, it will no longer be possible to delegate one’s death to others.’ In light of this warning and as a means to further unpack what I have argued here, the remainder of this chapter is intended to unravel contemporary necropolitical logics of bodily (e)valuation informing (re/dis)embodiment via the division of bodies into useable (body) parts serviceable until death. 2.2.4 Becoming body parts Necropower is the power to not only draw up what Mbembe (2015: 18) calls ‘the great chart of species, genders, races, and classes’ but to then divide those species, genders, races, and classes according to their use unto death. However, this cannot be done by whim and depends on the logic underlying what have been referred to so far as dividing practices. In the contemporary international system, necropolitical dividing practices are informed by a hierarchy of bodies and associated uses that are raced, classed, gendered and which respond to violent neo-colonial, liberal capitalist economic demands. To further explain specific logics of bodily (e)valuation informing contemporary processes and patterns of (re/dis)embodiment and in particular how and why bodies become reduced to and used as body parts and what is done with exhausted and expired body parts, in this section, I return to Mbembe’s theses titled Necropolitics (2003, 2019) and Critique of Black Reason (2015) and place Ahmed’s Wilful Subjects and What’s

Body politics  81 the Use? (2019) into the conversation as a means to trace the expansion of necropolitical logics from the archetypal practice of slavery through to present-day methods informing the division of bodies, their uses, and, ultimately, the ways for using and using up every last body. Lower down the global endoskeleton, bodies are made less grievable as persons and, given the ontological insecurity described in Chapter 1 and visual necropolitical imperative introduced earlier, it becomes possible for such bodies to go largely unseen, become used, and used up as parts in the service and maintenance other bodies before being discarded as waste. I have developed this understanding primarily from descriptions Sara Ahmed provides in What’s the Use? (2019: 11), including how some individuals come to be treated as the limbs of the social body as being for others to use (or more simply as being for.). If the workers become the arms, the arms of the factory owner are freed. If some are shaped by the requirement to be useful, others are released from that requirement. Towards unravelling the necro(body)politics determining which bodies tend to get reduced to, used, and used up as (body) parts and, therefore, become disembodied in the service of other bodies, Ahmed’s Wilful Subjects (2014), which precedes What’s the Use? (2019), is littered filled with stories about bodies that become known as body parts and used and used up according to their function. Indeed, in What's the Use. Ahmed returns to the relation of individual bodies to collective bodies through the notion of ‘the social body’ (2014: 100–101), showing how some bodies can be reduced to parts because of their deviance or perceived uselessness by referring to odd parts, singled out for sticking out like a sore thumb or being mouthy and, accordingly, ‘reduced to the speaking part as being reduced to the wrong part’ (2014, 154). Towards further describing the body politics of becoming a part and how particular bodies are selected for the reduction to parts, Ahmed also refers to the figures of the ‘handmaiden’ (ibid: 111) and ‘footman’ (ibid) to demonstrate that some bodies within society can be literally reduced to and become knowable for their functions as body parts in service of others. However, not all parts require a bodily title, thus Ahmed goes on to exemplify the use of bodies as parts with the factory worker. Indeed, with most relevance to the factory vignettes used throughout this chapter as a means to think through contemporary necro(body)politics, Ahmed explains how the factory worker becomes but a part of ‘the industrial machine’ (ibid: 109) and accordingly reduced to the useful part of hand or arm, underlining that ‘the worker’s hands must be handy,’ and the historical redundancy of armless factory workers, disfigured by dangerous industrial machinery (ibid) and, indeed, describing the history of industrial capitalism itself as ‘a history of arms that are used, overused arms, including arms that are missing, that have been lost in service to the industrial machine, is a history of how some are used to benefit others’ (Ahmed, 2019: 95). Asking then ‘who become the arms?’ (ibid: 111), the examples of the handmaiden, footman, and factory worker and their historical demographics demonstrate that the kinds of bodies reduced to these particular body parts have a

82  Body politics notably gendered part to play and belong to the lower or ‘service class’ (ibid: 111–112). However, in addition to being classed and gendered, the question of who becomes the arm and, therefore, who will be disembodied to be used up in the service of another body is, of course, like the dividing practices discussed so far, also profoundly racialised. Indeed, towards outlining how bodies are selected for particular uses and accordingly used up, Ahmed discusses the European colonial project at length, describing it as a project ‘justified as using what is unused’ (Ahmed, 2019: 47, emphasis original). Indeed, Ahmed’s reading emphasises how the European coloniser’s narrative of discovering unspoilt lands and lazy and idle natives facilitated the putting to work of bodies by force and unto death in the case of slavery. Moreover, and again unfitting with the tendency of death makers to mask themselves with a layer of biopolitical rhetoric, Ahmed explains how in the case of European colonialism, ‘the extraction of use from bodies by defining others as bodies to be used was justified as a mission to improve humanity: to become an arm is to become body, to offer brawn and brute strength; to become arm as to become biological’ (Ahmed, 2019: 95). Returning to explicitly necropolitical theory, Mbembe uses the European colonial practice of slavery as the paradigmatic example through which to showcase the dreadful potential of the necropolitical method, noting how while being used, the slave is ‘kept alive but in a state of injury, in a phantom-like world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity’ (2003: 21). As the very epitome of necropolitical disembodiment, the slave is reduced beyond the status of (body)part to become pure energy to be expended in the service of others and, of course, in the service of profit. As Mbembe (14/12/2018: par. 13): This living flesh has an economic value that can be, as suits the occasion, measured and quantified. A price can be attached to it. The matter produced from the brow sweat of slaves also has an active value insofar as the slave transforms nature, converts energy into matter, is itself at once a material, an energy-giving figure. Herein lies a crucial and apparent contradiction of necropolitics as, again, the use of the slave for the accumulation of immense profit exemplifies how the dehumanised and disembodied parts equate to an extremely high value in the eyes of a necropolitical actor within the capitalist economy from which the necropolitical mode emerges.29 Indeed, even, and especially, the value of human bodies – afforded legal, political, and civil rights and protections – and eminently grievance as bodies ‘that matter’ cannot compete with that of the slave’s. With no legal minimum wage to pay and no maximum working hours per week to be worked, the overheads are low, and the yield is high. As Mbembe (2019: 166) explains, The slave owner could extract labour from slaves for a relatively reduced cost, since this labour was unpaid. He could also, now and again, sell slaves to a third party. The slave’s assignable and transferable character made him a private good open to a monetary evaluation or market exchange. (Mbembe, 2019: 166)

Body politics  83 As a prominent feature throughout this chapter and understood as a central component within dividing practices determining contemporary patterns of (dis/re)embodiment, racialisation and racism are also absolutely central within Mbembe’s theses, which use the example of slavery as typifying the necropolitical method and demonstrate the centrality of the principle of race (2013: 55) to necropolitics. Described as ‘a spectral form of division and human difference that can be mobilized to stigmatize and exclude, or as a process of segregation through which people seek to isolate, eliminate, or physically destroy a particular human group,’ the principle explains how such horrific practices of reduction, use, and abuse become normalised within a necropolitical order. However, in his Critique of Black Reason (2013), Mbembe demonstrates how the principle of race has been used to gradually extend the category of expendable bodies, deemed suitable for being exposed to the power of death and used up in service, outwards to encompass not only the slave but also all black men30 before including all of subaltern humanity31 and, finally, engulfing everybody. Thus, towards more precisely articulating the nature of the shift engendering the increasing prevalence of necropolitics, in the time of coronavirus, Mbembe (24/04/2020a: par. 7) has gone as far as to conflate neo-liberalism with necropolitics – speaking during the pandemic of ‘neoliberalism which we should call necroliberalism.’ However, in line with the capitalist division of labour, with this gradual expansion comes more division of bodies for specific uses. For example, with reference to the category of ‘black’ bodies, Mbembe (2013: 15 and 18) details at length how within this category, bodies were then subcategorised and arranged hierarchically according to use and value: The Black condition incorporated a range of contrasting states and statuses: those sold through the transatlantic slave trade, convict laborers, subsistence slaves (whose lives were spent as domestics), feudal slaves, house slaves, those who were emancipated, and those who were born slaves…. The Blacks on the plantation were, furthermore, diverse. They were hunters of maroons and fugitives, executioners and executioners’ assistants, skilled slaves, informants, domestics, cooks, emancipated slaves who were still subjugated, concubines, field-workers assigned to cutting cane, workers in factories, machine operators, masters’ companions, and occasionally soldiers. As classed, raced, and gendered, the experience of being used and used up is extractive and exploitative and in this way works to make a profit while materially (re)embodying those profiting too. This occurs as the exploitative reduction and use of another provides the exploitative user with ‘freedom from function’ (ibid: 112), enabling increased health, prosperity, and rest time and in turn materially (re)embodying those extracting service from and using others as parts. As Ahmed describes it, ‘Some bodies will become arms, some bodies will employ others as arms’ (ibid: 108). Given the necropolitical character and tendencies laid out in this chapter, during the ‘first wave’ of COVID-19-induced deaths in the UK, the using up and wasting of particular bodies by their necropolitical exposure to the power of

84  Body politics death (and, indeed, the coronavirus) was entirely predictable with a disproportionate amount of those highly valued as parts defined as ‘key’ workers in the service of profit for others being used up first. For example, in June 2020, garment factory workers in Leicester, England, were blamed for the COVID-19 outbreak which led to the United Kingdom’s first ‘local lockdown’ being put into place on 4 July, as it was reported by CSO Labour Behind the Label (cited in Bland and Campbell, 30/06/2020: par. 1) that ‘some garment factories in Leicester stayed open as normal throughout the coronavirus crisis and ordered workers to continue to report for duty even when they were sick.’ However, as the United Kingdom’s most ethnically diverse city with 40% of the city’s population identifying as British Asian,32 Leicester is home to 10,000 garment workers trapped in conditions of modern slavery earning GBP3 per hour, and in this way, they live lives and die deaths more similar to those of the Malaysian Top Glove employees mentioned at this section’s outset than to mine, despite our geographical proximity. Indeed, such an outbreak and the placement of blame on the very workers economically pressured to continue working through the lockdown in unsafe conditions demonstrates that patterns of (re/dis)embodiment in the contemporary international system and the local-global necropolitical bodily supply chain are not as straightforwardly defined as an extractive-exploitative north-south relation. Meanwhile, other bodies in circles closer to mine were initially freed up from commutes and able to work from home and used their newfound leisure time to exercise and bake. Indeed, I found myself freed up to write this book and was throughout the spring and summer of 2020 serviced by others who, for example, I paid to deliver food to my door and take on the risk of COVID-19 exposure for me. Indeed, at such a time of sped up and exaggerated necropolitical exposures, as the body of the user is freed up and preserved, the material extraction involved in being used wears the part down and away ever more rapidly too. In this way, the parts being used and used up through their labour in both the time of COVID-19 and the time prior more slowly and subtly have a secondary function as coming to literally stand in for the part of the other and playing a role in the others’ at least temporary emancipatory relief from service and in this way literally buying them time unto death, which, of course, comes to all in the end and comes increasingly quickly in a time of pandemic. Described thus far, intersectional racialised, gendered, and classed dividing practices work to disembody humans and put them to work as functional parts in the service of other bodies. Due to the extractive and exploitative nature of the necropolitical exchange and to free up and preserve the bodies of others, parts are gradually used up and they expire. In a time of COVID-19, expiration dates are being brought forwards as, for example, rundown workers in overcrowded factories are pushed towards the edge and beyond legal social distancing and PPE requirements, as the previously detailed Top Glove and Leicester cases demonstrate. Valued highly in life as parts to which they have been reduced and their reduction to which in the eyes of others enables their use in the first place, upon death – and explaining the initial confusion President Trump experienced upon seeing bodies being treated as discarded medical ‘supplies’ at his Queen’s neighbourhood hospital – parts become instantly disposable, treated as waste, and,

Body politics  85 unless others demand differently, dumped as trash. Having served their purpose and other bodies in life, in the end, wasted parts are treated as such – ‘excreted (as a form of waste)’ for Michelle Yeats (2011: 1679). 2.2.5 Human capital stock On 26 May 2020, as US deaths from COVID-19 pushed 100,000,33 a White House economic adviser, Kevin Hassett, appeared live on CNN to declare that ‘our human capital stock is ready to go back to work’ (cited in Rupar, 26/05/2020). Causing immediate outcry, this deeply impersonal and dehumanising phrase went ‘viral’ with those offended by the term highlighting its connotations with slavery and white America’s history of keeping and counting particular humans as chattel.34 However, in other circles, Hassett was defended, for example, by Slate’s Jordan Weissman (28/05/2020), who described what happened as a technocratic slip up, stating, ‘Econo-speak made him sound a bit like a callous dork,’ and economist Gray Kimbrough (26/05/2020), who tweeted, ‘Totally normal way for an economist to refer to people’ as a caption to the CNN clip. Upon hearing the phrase myself, I thought immediately back to research into the body politics of the GWoT within which I discovered that former US Army general Hugh Shelton had similarly described American soldiers as ‘our most precious resource’ (cited in Shields, 03/11/2003: par. 1) in 2003. I found the our in both men’s inflections particularly jarring, and this setting of the already dehumanising language, especially if ‘normal,’ left me extremely unsettled on both occasions. To explain why, in this section, I continue to unravel the necropolitical influence on contemporary patterns of (re/dis)embodiment by expanding on technological changes facilitating humans becoming stock. In sum, these changes result in what can be generally described as domain bodies gaining the ability to zoom in to see, count, and account at the microscopic level and, therefore, to increasingly lose sight of the human person appearing as unique and grievable to others. Within contemporary neo-liberal capitalist necropolitics, people of all races and genders are eventually wasted, having become numbers and statistics because of an insatiable drive to quantify, evaluate, extract, use, and commodify every last living and dead thing. Towards explaining the reduction of bodies to parts and beyond during the industrial, capitalist, European colonial period, and, increasingly, ever since, it is worth underlining the role of technology in facilitating the expansion of necropolitical modes of disembodiment. Indeed, specific late-modern economic and technological changes enable bodies to be counted and accounted for and extracted from and used up from the microscopic level upwards. For example, Nikolas Rose explains that within what he calls ‘molecular politics’ (2001: 1), bodily matter is ‘extracted like a mineral, harvested like a crop, or mined like a resource’ (2007, 39). However, there is an appreciation of how the targets of power have become ever smaller units than whole bodies. For example, Rosemary Shinko (2010) notes that ‘bodies which were once the target of disciplinary power have now been reduced, along with all forms of life, to their most minute biological components’ (2010: 12–13), Patricia Clough (2008: 10) describes ‘the ongoing investment of capital and technoscientific discourses

86  Body politics in the molecular level of the body,’ and Joseph Pugliese (2013: 1) remarks upon ‘the virulent reach of the instrumentalizing logic of the market into every recess of life.’ In this way, necropower and, indeed, necropolitically defined structures and institutions can be said to have taken a posthuman and thus inhumane turn by seeing, counting, reaching into, and extracting from what remain visible and known to one another as unique and individual human beings. Within IR, this most virulent reach of contemporary necropower into every bodily recess and the bodily recesses of every body has been written about for better understanding the logic informing national security practices, particularly during the GWoT and what Melinda Cooper (2006) has described as this conflict’s biological turn wherein she argues that ‘conceptual exchanges’ between the life sciences and military and government bodies lead to notions of pre-emption and emergence determining US military strategy in the early 2000s. Agamben similarly highlights the political consequences of technologies entering the body for the purpose of security, himself refusing to enter the US after the introduction of the US Department of Homeland Security’s post-9/11 package of border management policies. This package made it mandatory for fingerprints to not only be taken as part of the visa application process but also kept on permanent file, and for Agamben (2008: 201), this illustrates that American politics had gone ‘one step further in what Foucault called the progressive animalisation of man which is established through the most sophisticated techniques.’ Indeed, through this technique, every body entering America through the scheme is reduced to a body part, in this case the finger, and is as such (re)made as a purely biological object of security. 2.2.6 Losing value Towards understanding and revealing contemporary formations of necropolitics, I have previously studied the treatment of American soldiers, finding them to be valued extremely highly – as no less than what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton described as a ‘most precious resource’ to be used and used up as fuel within the GWoT, only then to be quite literally dumped as trash after expiry and made invisible in line with the necropolitical visual imperative outlined in the chapter’s first section. Indeed, anthropologists Caroline Marvin and David Ingle (1999: 20–21) have described how, in relation to the American soldier, ‘the social is quite literally constructed from the body, and from specific bodies dedicated and used up for the purpose,’ while the treatment of American soldiers during the GWoT reveals their value, use, and disposability further. For example, shot down while carrying 30 American soldiers, including 15 Navy SEALs, an August 2011 Chinook downing in Wardak, Afghanistan, became the deadliest single American loss since Operation Enduring Freedom began in October 2001. In this case, and much like the bodies of those killed on 9/11 that Edkins (2011: 19) describes as going missing because of the intensity of the impact and heat causing an obscene ‘conflation of boundaries’ (including body and building, flesh and object), the Chinook’s crash landing left the dead bodies of those on board indistinguishable from one another and the rest of the debris. As Jones (2013:

Body politics  87 168) explains, ‘Their bodies were so conjoined in death with the wreckage of that Chinook that, as the President later explained to their families, the remains of individual men could not be separated out and returned in their own personal flagdraped coffins.’ However, the Washington Times reported soon after that without familial consent, all bodily remains salvaged from the crash site were incinerated in bulk on the orders of ‘senior US military officials’ (see Kuhner, 09/08/2013: par. 6). The mass incineration of suffering and dead American soldiers and body parts from the Chinook crash was not, however, an isolated incident. Rather, between 2004 and 2008, 976 dead soldier parts belonging to 274 persons were incinerated at the Charles C. Carson Center for Mortuary Affairs before being passed from the US Army to a PMC, who dumped them in a Virginia landfill (see Jones, 2013: 19). The US Army’s employment of a PMC’s work in this case to distance a dominant body from its necropolitical work as a means to save its biopolitical face(mask) and after the emergence of this particular ‘scandal,’ the US Army took up the alternative practice of dumping body parts at sea. However, demonstrating the unwillingness to spend any more than necessary on used up parts, three years later, the Washington Post reported on findings that the US Army had continued to incinerate and dump the remains of the KIA in landfills without even a PMC to act as an intermediary (see Whitlock and Jaffe, 09/11/2011). Moreover, and further demonstrating how those highly valued as functional parts and a ‘precious resource’ are treated as waste after expiry, on their return to American soil (and despite the Dover Ban’s partial lift in 2009), there were no memorialising Dover ceremonies held for the 30 KIA in the downed Chinook, and the media were banned from attending or covering these soldiers’ repatriations entirely. Turning back to the COVID-19 pandemic becoming somewhat of a death trap, on 25 May 2020, news broke that globally, we in the United Kingdom now had the highest death toll per capita of the population.35 In the case of COVID-19, necropolitical dynamics as outlined in this chapter are seemingly shaping global responses, as the factory-focussed examples included in this chapter alone begin to illustrate. However, far beyond factories, in the UK case upon which this book’s pandemic reflections are focussed, those valued highly – because of their function as parts in service of other individual and collective bodies, including the NHS – have been clapped on in their service during the pandemic by the PM and cabinet members who enthusiastically encouraged the wider British public to join in what became a hollow national gesture performed weekly as a means to give thanks for carers’ service on the ‘front line’ during the United Kingdom’s first wave. However, nurses – including second-year nursing students – likened further to soldiers through being problematically (see Enloe, 2020) ‘called up’ to ‘serve’ at the ‘front’ were being simultaneously discounted through not only their low pay but also by having their lives cheapened further because of not being afforded PPE and then being supplied faulty equipment. Indeed, after being used up in service and dying of COVID-19, these same (body) parts have been actively uncounted in government statistics and disappearing in death as nurses killed by COVID-19 through commission within UK DHSC’s internal systems.36 Meanwhile, on 11 April 2020, I would hear the same necropolitical rhetoric used by General Shelton to describe soldiers put to use in the service of the GWoT used again, as at the peak of the United Kingdom’s

88  Body politics first wave of COVID-19 pandemic, Health Secretary Matt Hancock, member of Parliament, referred to PPE as a ‘precious resource’ (cited in Stewart and Campbell, 10/04/2020) as demand for this non-human good was also peaking.37 Towards explaining the apparent disjuncture between the high value of bodies as parts and accompanying body uncounting, it seems institutions, including the United Kingdom’s NHS in its current state, will simply not afford the expense entailed were nurses to be counted, accounted for, and appropriately maintained and serviced – in terms of their own bodily health. Indeed, with exploitation occurring all the way down the global necropolitical chain of body parts and bodies outlined in this chapter, such counting and accounting – for adequate PPE, for example – would come as a cost too high to bodies accustomed to using and using up the bodies of others as a means only to their ends. However, what remains to be seen, and what I move on to explore in the chapters which now follow, is the extent to which those being used up can and will make themselves visible and known against necropolitical imperatives and in doing so become wilfully disruptive to the flow of the necropolitical bodies described in this chapter and within which their use is so vital.

Notes 1 See https://www.honeywell.com/en-us/company/about-us. 2 See Mason (06/05/2020). 3 On 4 November 2018, Rose tweeted, ‘Just so ya know… GNR like a lot of artists opposed to the unauthorized use of their music at political events has formally requested r music not b used at Trump rallies or Trump associated events.’ 4 See the World Health Organization (05/05/2020). 5 Lauren Berlant (2007: 254) defines slow death as ‘the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.’ 6 Find the original, untranslated article here: https://gauchazh.clicrbs.com.br/politica/ noticia/2020/03/pandemia-democratizou-poder-de-matar-diz-autor-da-teoria-danecropolitica-ck8fpqew2000e01ob8utoadx0.html. 7 I am using and include in this chapter’s bibliography the English translation published 24/04/2020 and available at http://autonomies.org/2020/04/achille-mbembethe-necropolitics-of-a-pandemic/. 8 In the United Kingdom, government policy decisions meant care homes were exposed to COVID-19, and patients infected were returned to care homes to ‘shield’ hospitals from the virus. 9 A previous iteration of this section appears within my International Political Sociology article titled “Grieving, Valuing, and Viewing differently: The Global War on Terror’s American Toll” (see Purnell, 2018). 10 See Milbank (2005). 11 See DiMaggio (2015). 12 The Dover Ban is a US Department of Defense directive that states, ‘There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein or Dover AFB, to include interim stops’ (see Purnell, 2018). 13 For an interactive map of London’s plague pits. See https://www.historic-uk.com/ HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/LondonPlaguePits/. 14 See UK government (26/03/2020): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ coronavirus-bill-what-it-will-do/what-the-coronavirus-bill-will-do#contentsof-the-bill.

Body politics  89 15 See ‘The Torture Documents’: https://www.therenditionproject.org.uk/documents/ torture-docs.html. 16 See https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Camp_Delta_Standard_Operating_Procedure. 17 Here I am referencing Jenna Brager (12/05/2015: par. 14) who argues that as resistance to necropolitics, ‘that which is dumped as trash emerges to haunt us, demanding justice.’ 18 Inside Auschwitz, prisoners dug coal, produced armaments and chemicals, and built and expanded industrial plants. 19 The biopolitical frame has also been applied to understand airports (see Salter, 2006 and Adey, 2009), borders (see Amoore, 2006), and wider contemporary security (see, for example, Campbell, 2005) and surveillance practices (see, for example, Bell (2006) and Lyon (2007). 20 See, for example, Musolff (2010). 21 See, for example, Parsons and Salter (2008). 22 See, for example, Perera (2002) and Bailey (2009). 23 See, for example, Reid (2005 and 2006), Neal (2006), Jabri (2006), Dillon (2007), El-Khairy (2010). 24 See, for example, Johnson (2002) and Jackson (2005). 25 See Miller (16/06/2020), and many thanks to Thomas Gregory for making me aware of this Chapter 4 investigation. 26 Within the news item, Johnathan Miller (16/06/2020) explains that Top Glove factory workers pay recruitment fees of up to $5,000 to agents in their home countries and become trapped in poverty. 27 See Doward (07/04/2019). 28 See https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-guarantee-on-death-in-service-benefits-for-frontline-health-and-care-staff-during-pandemic. 29 Mbembe (2019: 165) makes clear that ‘capitalism operated by taking and consuming what could be called biostock, at once human and vegetal.’ 30 Mbembe (2015: 6) describes the figure of ‘The Black Man’ as ‘despised and profoundly dishonored, is the only human in the modern order whose skin has been transformed into the form and spirit of merchandise—the living crypt of capital.’ 31 Mbembe states in Critique of Black Reason (2013: 4) that ‘the systematic risks experienced specifically by Black slaves during early capitalism have now become the norm for, or at least the lot of, all of subaltern humanity.’ 32 See UK government (2015), URL: https://www.leicester.gov.uk/media/183446/ cyp-jsna-chapter-one-setting-the-context.pdf. 33 By 26 May 2020, 98,218 COVID-19 deaths had been recorded (see the World Health Organization’s US country page: https://covid19.who.int/region/amro/country/us). 34 Searching for tweets posted between 26 and 31 May 2020, including the exact phrase human capital stock, demonstrates the viral nature and overwhelmingly negative response to Hassett’s remark (see https://twitter.com/search?q=Human%20 Capital%20Stock%20%22Human%20Capital%20Stock%22%20 until%3A2020-05-31%20since%3A2020-05-26&src=typed_query). 35 See Our World in Data’s ‘Coronavirus Data Explorer’: https://ourworldindata.org/ coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=latest&deathsMetric=true &dailyFreq=true&perCapita=true&smoothing=7&country=ARG+BOL+BRA+CH L+COL+ECU+PER+URY+AUT+BEL+BGR+BIH+BLR+CHE+CZE+DEU+DNK +ESP+EST+FRA+GBR+GRC+HRV+IRL+ITA+NLD+NOR+POL+PRT+RUS+S MR+SWE+DZA+EGY+GAB+LBR+SDN+ZAF+ARM+BGD+BHR+IDN+IND+I RN+IRQ+ISR+JPN+PAK+PHL+TUR+CAN+DOM+HND+MEX+PAN+ALB+SG P+GIN+USA. 36 See Cockburn (03/04/2019). 37 In some cases, demand for PPE increased by 1,000% during the spring of 2020 (see Diaz et al.,, 17/04/2020).

90  Body politics

Bibliography Adey, Peter. 2009. ‘Facing Airport Security: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Preemptive Securitisation of the Mobile Body,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol.27: 274–295. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2008. ‘No to Biopolitical Tattooing,’ Communication and Critical/ Cultural Studies, Vol. 5(2): 201–202. Ahmed, Sara. 2019. What’s the Use? Croydon: Duke University Press. Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations. 2017. ‘Dignified Transfer.’ URL: http://www.mortuary.af.mil/library/dignifiedtransfer/. Alphin , Caroline and Debrix, Francoise. 2020. Necrogeopolitics: On Death and DeathMaking in International Relations. London and New York: Routledge. Amoore, Lisa. 2006. ‘Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror,’ Political Geography Vol. 25: 336–351. Auchter, Jessica. 2014, ‘Bloody Bodies: The Circulation of Images of Death,’ Paper prepared for presentation at ISA 2014 Annual Conference, Toronto. Auchter, Jessica. 2016. ‘Paying Attention to Dead Bodies: The Future of Security Studies?,’ Journal of Global Security Studies, Vol. 1(1): 36–50. Bailey, Richard. 2009. ‘Up Against the Wall: Bare Life and Resistance in Australian Immigration Detention,’ Law and Critique, Vol. 20(2): 113–132. Bell, Coleen. 2006. ‘Surveillance Strategies and Populations at Risk: Biopolitical Governance in Canada’s National Security Policy,’ Security Dialogue, Vol. 37(2): 147–165. Berlant, Lauren. 2007. ‘Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),’ Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33(4): 754–780. Bernton, Hal. 22/04/2004, ‘Woman Loses Her Job over Coffins Photo,’ The Seattle Times, URL: http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2001909527_coffin22m.html Bland, Archie and Campbell, Denis. 30/06/2020. ‘Some Leicester Factories Stayed open and Forced Staff to Come in, Report Warns,’ The Guardian, URL: https:// www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/30/some-leicester-factories-stayed-openand-forced-staff-to-come-in’ Blieker, Roland, Campbell, David, Hutchison, Emma, and Xzarina Nicholson. 2013. ‘The Visual Dehumanisation of Refugees,’ Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 48(4): 398–416. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge, Malden: Polity. Brand, Dionne. 04/07/2020. ‘Dionne Brand: On narrative, reckoning and the calculus of living and dying,’ The Star, URL: https://www.thestar.com/amp/entertainment/ books/2020/07/04/dionne-brand-on-narrative-reckoning-and-the-calculus-of-livingand-dying.html?__twitter_impression=true. Calahan, Paul. 13/02/2012. ‘Letters Raise Fears for last Briton in Guantanamo,’ The Guardian, URL: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/letters-raisefears-for-last-briton-in-guantanamo-6804791.html. Campbell, David. 2005. ‘The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle,’ American Quarterly, Vol. 57(3): 943–972. Cockburn, Harry. 03/04/2020. ‘“They’re Not Even Counting the Nurses’: Health Chief Challenges Matt Hancock on Coronavirus Impact as More NHS Staff Die,’ The Independent, URL: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirusmatt-hancock-question-time-bbc-video-nurses-deaths-a9446076.html.

Body politics  91 Cooper, Melinda. 2006, ‘Pre-empting Emergency: The Biopolitical Turn in the War on Terror,’ Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 23(4): 13–135. Cooper, Melinda. 2008, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1980. One Thousand Plateaus. London and New York: Continuum. Diaz, Daniella, Sands, Geneva, and Alesci, Christina. 17/04/2020. ‘Protective Equipment Costs Increase over 1,000% Amid Competition and Surge in Demand,’ CNN, URL: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/16/politics/ppe-price-costs-rising-economy-personal-protective-equipment/index.html. Dillon, Michael. 2007. ‘Governing Terror: The State of Emergency of Biopolitical Emergence,’ International Political Sociology, Vol. 1(1): 7–28. Dimaggio, Anthony. 2015. Selling War, Selling Hope: Presidential Rhetoric, the News Media, and U.S. Foreign Policy since 9/11. Albany: State University of New York Press. Doward, Jamie. 07/04/2019. ‘This Article Is More than 1 Year Old “Second-Class” NHS Workers Struggle as Pay Gap Widens,’ The Guardian, URL: https://www.theguardian. com/society/2019/apr/07/second-class-nhs-workers-struggle-as-pay-gap-widens. Edkins, Jenny. 2015. Face Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Edkins, Jenny and Pin-Fat, Veronique. 2005. ‘Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 34(1): 1–24. El-Khairy, Omar. 2010. ‘Snowflakes on a Scarred Knuckle: The Biopolitics of the “War on Terror” through Steve McQueen’s Hunger and Kathryn Bigelow’s the Hurt Locker,’ Millennium: Juornal of International Studies, Vol. 39(1): 187–191. Enloe, Cynthia. 2020. ‘COVID-19: “Waging War” Against a Virus Is NOT What We Need to Be Doing,’ Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, URL: https://www. wilpf.org/covid-19-waging-war-against-a-virus-is-not-what-we-need-to-be-doing/. Esposito, Robert. 16/06/2020. ‘The Biopolitics of Immunity in Times of COVID-19: An Interview with Roberto Esposito,’ Antipode Online, URL: https://antipodeonline. org/2020/06/16/interview-with-roberto-esposito/. Foucault, Michel. 1976. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. An Introduction. London\ New York: Penguin Books. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended. London: Penguin. Freeden, Michael. 2011. “The Politics of Ceremony: The Wootton Bassett Phenomenon.” Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 16(1): 1–10. Gelpi Christopher, Feaver, Peter D, and Reifler, Jason. 2006. “Success Matters: Casualty Sensitivity and the War in Iraq.” International Security, Vol. 30(3): 7–46. Giroux, Henry. 2006. ‘The Politics of Disposability,’ Dissident Voice, URL: http://www. dissidentvoice.org/Sept06/Giroux01.htm. Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual. New York: Doubleday. Grayham, Stephen. 2003. ‘Lessons in Urbicide,’ New Left Review, Jan/Feb 2003: 63–77. Hallin, David. 1986. The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hamblin, James. 21/05/2013. ‘Have You Ever Tried to Force-Feed a Captured Human?,’ The Atlantic, URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/ have-you-ever-tried-to-force-feed-a-captured-human/275507/. Irby, Keith. 30/04/2004, ‘Woman Responsible for Coffin Image Reunite,’ Poynter, URL (consulted 28/02/2014): http://www.poynter.org/uncategorized/22494/womenresponsible-for-coffin-image-reunite/. Jabri, Vivienne. 2006, ‘War, Security and the Liberal State,’ Security Dialogue, Vol. 37(1): 47–64.

92  Body politics Johnson, R. 2002. ʻDefending Ways of Life: The (Anti-)Terrorist Rhetorics of Bush and Blair,ʼ Theory, Culture, Society, Vol. 19(4): 211–231. Jones, Ann. 2013. They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars— The Untold Story. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Khalifa, Khaled. 2016. Death Is Hard Work. London and New York: Faber & Faber. Kimbrough, Gary. 26/05/2020. ‘Totally Normal Way for an Economist to Refer to People,’ Tweet, URL: https://twitter.com/graykimbrough. Kimmel, Jimmy. 06/05/2020. ‘I can think of no better metaphor for this presidency than Donald Trump not wearing a face mask to a face mask factory while the song “Live and Let Die” blares in the background.’ Tweet. URL: https://twitter.com/jimmykimmel/status/1257808681791455232?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1257808681791455232&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww. theguardian.com%2Fus-news%2F2020%2Fmay%2F06%2Ftrump-live-and-let-diemask-factory-video Lee, Christopher L. 01/04/2020. ‘The Necropolitics Of COVID-19,’ Africa Is a Country, URL: https://africasacountry.com/2020/04/the-necropolitics-of-covid-19. Leopold, Jason. 13/05/2013. ‘Revised Guantanamo Force-Feed Policy Exposed,’ AlJazeera, URL: https://www.aljazeera.com/humanrights/2013/05/201358152317954140.html. Lesutis, Gediminas and Las Heras, Jon. 29/05/2020. ‘The Necropolitics of Heroism,’ International Viewpoint, URL: http://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article6632. Laterza, Vito and Römer, Louis Philippe. 12/05/2020, COVID-19, the Freedom to Die, and the Necropolitics of the Market, Somatosphere, URL: http://somatosphere.net/2020/ necropolitics-of-the-market.html/. Lester, Nicola. 2015. ‘When a Soldier Dies,’ Critical Military Studies, Vol. 1(3): 249–253, Lyon, David 2007. ‘Surveillance, Security, and Social Sorting: Emerging Research Priorities,’ International Criminal Justice Review, Vol. 17(3): 161–170. Marvin, Caroline and Ingle, David. 1999. Blood, Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mason, Jeff. 06/05/2020. ‘Trump Tours New Face-Mask Factory in Arizona but Does Not Wear One,’ Reuters, URL: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-trump/ trump-tours-new-face-mask-factory-in-arizona-but-does-not-wear-one-idUKKBN22I056. Mbembe, Achille. 2003, ‘Necropolitics,’ Public Culture, Vol. 15(1): 11–40. Mbembe, Achille. 2013. Critique of Black Reason. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 14/12/2018. ‘On Afrofuturism and the “Genealogies of the Object,”’ Opyriot, URL: https://non.copyriot.com/achille-mbembe-on-afrofuturismand-the-genealogies-of-the-object/. Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham\London: Duke University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 13/04/2020. ‘The Universal Right to Breathe,’ Critical Inquiry, URL: https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/. Mbembe, Achille. 24/04/2020. ‘Achille Mbembe: The Necropolitics of a Pandemic,’ Autonomies, URL: http://autonomies.org/2020/04/achille-mbembe-thenecropolitics-of-a-pandemic/. McGregor, Richard and Dyer, Geoff. 29/03/2013. ‘Guantánamo Hunger Strike Intensifies,’ Financial Times, URL: https://www.ft.com/content/d70a7d72-987f-11e2a853-00144feabdc0. Milbank, David. 2005. ‘Out of President’s Sight, Arlington’s Rows of Grief Expand,’ Washington Post, URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2005/06/17/AR2005061701443.html.

Body politics  93 Miller, Johnathan. 16/06/2020. ‘Revealed: Shocking Conditions in PPE Factories Supplying UK,’ Channel 4 News, URL: https://www.channel4.com/news/ revealed-shocking-conditions-in-ppe-factories-supplying-uk. Military Families Speak Out. Statement. 11/03/2004. Military Families Call on Bush Administration: Start Telling the Truth, Stop Hiding the Toll, Bring an End to Iraq War. Online: http://www. commondreams.org/cgi-bin/newsprint.cgi?file=/news2004/031105.htm. Moran, Lee. 24/06/2020. ‘Ex-Trump Aide Sebastian Gorka Boasts About Not Wearing “COVID Burqas,”’ Huff Post, URL: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/sebastian-gorka-coronavirus-masks-trump-aide_n_5ef2f2d2c5b6aa825ac8f878?ri18n=true&guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvLnVrLw&guce_ referrer_sig=AQAAAF2VGQBkQlWCm4YNoQucXLx3O39SOuFx3Sxqbc5uyaliMMxCmHy2cYss2LLGDdUskag6V7jo7xBIRmmPPrHhbRR6utvHhKRcf50-er3tRvbtVqYKxiIIIuIVEuRNDemD0oHG77kEqucJc8aFNDLjvGzxYPX9NufBw5VdGolZcni4. Neal, Andrew. 2006, ʻFoucault in Guantanamo: Towards an Archaeology of the Exception,ʼ Security Dialogue, Vol. 37(1): 31–46. Noor, Poppy. 06/05/2020. ‘Live and Let Die Plays as Trump Visits Mask Factory without a Mask,’ The Guardian, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/06/ trump-live-and-let-die-mask-factory-video. Parsons, Nigel and Salter, Mark. B. 2008. ‘Israeli Biopolitics: Closure, Territorialisation and Governmentality in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,’ Geopolitics, Vol. 13(4): 701–723. Perera, Suvendrini. 2002. ‘What Is a Camp…?,’ Borderlands. Vol. 1(1): 23–39. Pierce, Joseph. 26/05/2020. ‘When @realDonaldTrump refuses to wear a mask, he is making a calculated semiotic move: he marks himself as biologically (somatically) superior to those who “need protection,” i.e. Black, Brown, poor, immunocompromised folks,’ @PepePierce, Tweet. Purnell, Kandida. 2015, ‘Body Politics and Boundary Work Nobodies on Hunger Strike at Guantánamo (2013–2015),’ Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 39(4): 271–286. Purnell, Kandida. 2018, ‘Grieving, Valuing and Viewing Differently: The Global War on Terror’s American Toll,’ International Political Sociology, Vol. 12(2): 156–171. Purnell, Kandida. 25/02/2018. ‘Re-branded and Expanded: Visual Politics and the Implications of Guantanamo’s Make- Over,’ Duck of Minerva, URL: http://duckofminerva.com/2018/02/re-branded-and-expanded-visual-politics-andt!he-implications-of-guantanamos-make-over.html. Purser Brown, Zach. 05/05/2020. URL. ‘They Are Also, Somewhat Inappropriately, Blasting ‘Live and Let Die’ over the Factory Sound System,’ Tweet. https://twitter.com/ zachjourno/status/1257783504202596352. Reid, Julian. 2005. ‘The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: A Critique of the ‘Return of Imperialism,’” Third World Quarterly , Vol. 26(2): 237–252. Reid, Julian. 2006. The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defence of Logistical Societies. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Risen, James and Golden, Tim. 11/06/2006. ‘3 Prisoners Commit Suicide at Guantánamo,’ NYTimes: URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/us/11gitmo.html. Robertson, Hamish and Travaglia, Joanne. 18/05/2020. ‘The Necropolitics of COVID19: Will the COVID-19 Pandemic Reshape National Healthcare Systems?,’ LSE Social Sciences Blog, URL: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2020/05/18/the-necropolitics-of-covid-19-will-the-covid-19-pandemic-reshape-national-healthcare-systems/.

94  Body politics Rose, Axl. 04/11/2018. ‘Just so ya know…GNR like a lot of artists opposed to the unauthorized use of their music at political events has formally requested r music not b used at Trump rallies or Trump associated events.’ Tweet. URL: https://twitter.com/axlrose/ status/1058993598656638976. Rose, Nikolas. 2001. ‘The Politics of Life Itself.’ Theory, Culture, Society, Vol. 18(6): 1–30. Rose, Nikolas. 2007, The Politics of Life. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Rupar, Aaron. 26/05/2020. ‘“Human capital stock”: White House Adviser Kevin Hassett Uses Dehumanizing Term for US Workers,’ Vox, URL: https://www.vox. com/2020/5/26/21270863/kevin-hassett-human-capital-stock-coronavirus. Salter, Mark. B. 2006. ‘The Global Visa Regime and Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics,’ Alternatives: Local, Global, Political, Vol. 31:167–189. Scott-Tyson, Ann. 26/02/2009a. ‘Pentagon to Lift Press Ban on Coffins at Dover,’ The Washington Post, URL: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/02/26/ pentagon_to_lift_press_ban_on.html. Shields, Michael. 03/11/2003. ‘Time to Take the Dover Test,’ CNN International, URL: https://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/11/03/column.shields.opinion.dover/. Stewart, Heather and Campbell, Denis. 10/04/2020. ‘This Article Is More than 2 Months Old NHS Workers Angered at Hancock’s Warning Not to Overuse PPE,’ The Guardian, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/10/ matt-hancock-urges-public-not-to-overuse-ppe. Trump, Donald, 29/03/2020. ‘Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing,’ WhiteHouse.gov, URL: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-briefing-14/. Scott-Tyson, Anne. 24/02/2009b. ‘Pentagon to Lift Ban on Coffins at Dover,’ Washington Post, URL: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/02/26/ pentagon_to_lift_press_ban_on.html. Weissman, Jordan. 28/05/2020. ‘The Actual Problem With Saying “Human Capital Stock”,’ Slate, URL: https://slate.com/business/2020/05/human-capital-stock-kevin-hassett-coronavirus.html. Whitlock, Craig. and Jaffe, Greg. 09/11/2011, ‘Remains of War Dead Dumped in Landfill,’ Washington Post, URL (consulted 28/02/2015): http://www.washingtonpost.com/ national/national-security/remains-of-war-dead-dumped-in-landfill/2011/11/09/gIQAz7dM6M_story.html. Yeats, Michelle. 2011. ‘The Human-as-Waste, the Labor Theory of Value and Disposability in Contemporary Capitalism,’ Antipode, Vol. 43(5): 1679–1695.

3 The body politic

It is Thursday 5 March 2020, and the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister (PM) Boris Johnson is inside London’s Television Centre, sitting on the This Morning studio sofa talking to presenters Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby and the viewing British public about the incoming coronavirus. This Morning has remained a highly popular daytime television programme, airing daily in the United Kingdom for more than 30 years and regularly drawing in over one million viewers. However, aimed at stay-at-home parents and pensioners, let alone the PM. What is he up to? I would’ve thought if I’d known about it previously. On this particular March morning, the PM’s appearance on This Morning, that I have since watched multiple times and re-read the transcript of, triggered almost immediately eye-catching tweets1 that in turn made me aware of the high-profile utterance of a bodily metaphor. Indeed, while discussing a range of policy options available to the government and through which to respond to COVID-19, the PM had told the British public about one that would involve the population having to ‘take it [COVID-19] on the chin.’2 The PM’s comment sparked immediate uproar amongst government opponents. The implication that we should just ‘take it on the chin’ – meaning accept unpleasant events without complaining3 – sounded at best like lazy governance and at worst necropolitically murderous. However, the quote was taken out of context with the PM actually seeming to weigh in against the idea after going over a few options, albeit vaguely, with Schofield and Willoughby during their discussion. What the PM actually said was one of the theories is perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease to move through the population without really taking as many draconian measures. I think we need to strike a balance…. I think it would be better if we take all the measures that we can now. I think that there may be things that we may be able to do. (Cited in Krishna, 10/03/2020: par. 7) As I explained in the previous chapter, necropolitics involves murderous dividing practices wherein some bodies become reduced to and used as parts in the service of other bodies. As Ahmed (2014: 11) has written and I repeat, ‘some individuals come to be treated as the limbs of the social body as being for others

96  The body politic to use (or more simply as being for.)’ In this chapter, I much further explore the relationship between individual bodies and collectives in relation to the body politic while continuing to illustrate the process of (re/dis)embodiment through particular individual and collective bodies – namely, our current PM and the British body politic. Indeed, with specific regard to what happened in the weeks and months following Johnson’s often and above-cited metaphorical misfortune, this chapter describes how words become flesh and how metaphors get fleshed out via their performativity and the force of statecraft to become in this case unwell and outdated individuals and collectives. Marking a progression from my approach in Chapters 1and 2, the following descriptions and analyses are focussed more tightly on the UK COVID19 pandemic’s ‘first wave’4 of the spring and summer of 2020. Indeed, this chapter was devised and written as COVID-19 worked as a catalyst to speed up socially and politically constructed processes of (re/dis)embodiment, along with ways of living and dying in the United Kingdom, and is aimed at investigating which bodies and body parts came under increased pressure as the corona crisis continually threatened to compromise the undisrupted flow of necropolitical order itself. Following directly on from discussions in ­Chapter 2, about how and according to whom particular bodies get reduced and used as parts, the question motivating this chapter is the very one that came into my head on 5 March 2020 as I heard PM Johnson’s chilling comment (about ‘taking it on the chin’) Who will become the chin? Indeed, as a response to this very question, the following pages detail how outdated knowledge about bodies materialises unhealthily – especially in a time of pandemic — by tracing particular discriminatory bodily assumptions through the case of PM Johnson’s own (re/dis)embodiment through the spring and summer of 2020. I also return to the PM's 5 March rhetorical suggestion (that the British people might take it on the chin) to argue that regardless of Johnson’s comment being taken out of context, the British population has indeed taken or more accurately been exposed to the virus in such uneven ways that suggest a certain facing up to previously masked necropolitical characteristics. However, before this, it is necessary to introduce and expand on my understanding of the body politic as a materialising metaphor and socially and politically constructed collective body composed of lively body parts.

3.1 The body politic As a metaphor, the body politic is a rhetorical device used to make political communities knowable and intelligible as a particular kind of human being. In this way alone, the thinking and practise of global politics is already profoundly embodied, with the international system populated by bodies politic and littered with body parts. As Fishel (2017: 25) has already highlighted, ‘one can find bodies in the very words of IR: organs of the United Nations, the family of nations, and head of state.’ To add to the list of limbs we refer to regularly in IR as floating around and acting in our international system, did you know the word parliament

The body politic  97 refers to the feet? Then, of course, there is the public eye and the arm of the army, while, as I explain and problematise in the following chapter, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Kingdom’s NHS has been (re)constructed as the ‘beating heart’ (see Johnson, 12/04/2020) of the body politic and as ‘powered by love’ (ibid). Bodies politic have all of these things and more, and beyond their limbs and organs are uniquely collective and profoundly embodied in the form of human beings. Indeed, as I have described in Chapter 1, collective bodies come into being and stay together while they feel the same, and thus Ahmed (2004: 13) notices how ‘the nation becomes “like the individual”, a feeling subject, or a subject that has feelings.’ The notions discussed even so far demonstrate that thinking seriously about the body politics of the body politic is much more than a word game and really matters because metaphors materialise. Defined by Judith Butler (1993: 2) as ‘that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains,’ as discursive formations, metaphors materialise by way of their performativity. Crucially, and with most relevance to this chapters’ substantive sections, bodies politic as well as individuals can either be in good health or become unwell. As such and as human bodies, that are less obtrusive and ‘absent’5 in health, in times of crisis, bodies politic also come to the fore. President George W. Bush, therefore, informed America that ‘September 11th, 2001…set another dividing line in our lives and in the life of our nation. An illusion of immunity was shattered’, we hear now in a time of pandemic how ‘the coronavirus has brought the US to its knees’6, and of course, as already mentioned that we in the United Kingdom might ‘take it on the chin’ (Johnson cited in Krishna, 10/03/2020: par. 7). 3.1.1 The body politic in/and IR Within the discipline of IR and the overlapping discourses of international politics, it is often said that states are in relationships with one another, and the United Kingdom’s platonic yet special relationship with the United States has a ‘real existence primarily in the fields of defence and intelligence co-operation’ (Dumbrell, 2009: 64), while friendship7 between states inform ‘scaled-up’ constructivist enquiries into state identity, norms, and trust in the international system. Indeed, states’ anxieties about maintaining a sense of self and keeping up their appearances on the world stage inform the Ontological Security Theory (OST) literature I have engaged with in Chapter 1, that is the identity-centred concerns of what I have referred to as dominant bodies comprising the machineries of the formal state – the executive branches, government departments, and militaries, for example. Moreover, as discussed in Chapter 1’s overview of existing work on emotions in IR, it is the case that states come to be understood as having feelings too, with, for example, Fierke (in Shall and Gregory, 2015) and Paul Saurette (2006) exploring the effect of German and American humiliation in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles and 9/11, respectively, and Emma Hutchison (2010) investigating the role of

98  The body politic trauma in (re)constituting Australian national identity and informing foreign policy after the Bali bombing. However, acknowledgement of the material (re/ dis)embodiment and thus ontological (in)security of these collective bodies at work as bodies has been significantly overlooked. States are often made like people and even unthinkingly rhetorically embodied, but personifying the state is not the same as taking seriously the metaphoricity of the body politic as I do in this chapter. As Alexander Wendt has explained, within our discipline, authors’ do not really think of their primary units of analysis being embodied. As Wendt (2004: 289) puts it, Most IR scholars…state personhood is a useful fiction, analogy, metaphor, or shorthand for something else. That something else, what state persons really are, is the behaviour and discourse of the individual beings who make them up. However, even if the state were considered as coming to materially be as a person with a body in a continual process of (re/dis)embodiment, the state apparatus still does not adequately capture the collective body that is the lively body politic. Indeed, the body politic is so much more than the state’s machineries and representatives, meaning while terms are often interchanged, bodies politic are not to be confused with IR’s ‘main actor’ of the state, as bodies politic are composed of lively state- and non-state-affiliated body parts. 3.1.2  Words become flesh Having so far described the ways that collective units comprising the international system are commonly rhetorically (re/dis)embodied, it is worth repeat­ing that the body politic – a collective body composed of lively body parts – should be considered no less imagined or real than bodies of other kinds. ­Similarly, the metaphorical ways of speaking about bodies politic, including those discussed earlier, should be considered as much more than wordplay. Rather, given what I have said about bodies in general in Chapter 1, no body is outside of the social-political, while ontological excess and insecurity are common to every body, meaning bodies politic, too, appear as the performative effect of their interpellations, are always a process, and are always in process. Indeed, it is at this point crucial to underline that rhetorically personifying the state is not the same as taking seriously ‘the power of metaphor’ (Fishel, 2017: 19) – the metaphoricity – of the body politic as I do in this chapter. Indeed, from J. L. Austin’s speech act theory (1962) and the revelation that, as well as doing things with words, words can do things with us, to Judith Butler’s (1993: 2) notion of performativity (ʻthe reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomenon that it regulates and constrains’), it is not particularly novel to consider the material implications of metaphor. Paying particular attention to bodily metaphors, Susan Sontag (1978) devoted the later stages of her life to

The body politic  99 writing about the use and effects of metaphors around cancer and tuberculosis, seemingly trying to escape their power as her own body was consumed by cancer. Looking towards the metaphoricity of bodily metaphors within the international realm, linguist George Lakoff (1991: 1) illustrated his often-cited argument that ‘metaphors can kill’ with examples of how bodily metaphors materialised on the battlefield during Operation Desert Storm, underlining that ‘it is vital, literally vital, to understand just what role metaphorical thought played in bringing us in this war’ (ibid: 25). Within biopolitical literature found in IR and beyond, there is much more widespread attention paid to the work of metaphors within global politics. Moreover, and with specific relevance to my focus throughout this book, with the objects of biopower understood as racially defined and divided populations of bodies, the metaphors of interest within this literature are bodily. As I have already detailed while outlining the biopolitical paradigm in Chapter 2, biopolitical theory has highlighted how enemies are increasingly constructed through the use of metaphors as cancerous or parasitic threats to the health of the ‘good’ bodies, which must be defended (See Foucault, 2003). As a stand-out example of explicitly metaphor-centric and biopolitically informed work, Coleen Bell has directly engaged biomedical metaphors materialising to shape contemporary conflict and conduct in war to interrogate hybrid-warfare (2012a) and counter-insurgency (2012b) discourses operational within the GWoT and argue that ‘challenging metaphors can challenge policy.’ Similarly, as the COVID-19 pandemic gained pace while the United Kingdom was ‘locked down’ on 23 March 2020, Cynthia Enloe (23/03/2020: par. 8) spoke out against the discursive and ‘rose tinted militarisation’ of responses to COVID-19 via the deployment of metaphors in a piece titled ‘“Waging War” Against a Virus is NOT What We Need to Be Doing.’ Conversely, illustrating how medical-military metaphors have travelled both ways (with medical metaphors infiltrating military discourse and vice versa), Mark Harrison (1996: 267) has detailed the ‘metaphors of war abound in professional and lay discourses of disease and medicine: germs are the “unseen enemy”; the immune system, the body’s “defensive shield”; and doctors, “soldiers without weapons” in the “war against disease.” In the case of military medicalisation and the converse militarisation of medical discourse, Melinda Cooper’s research conducted at the height of the American GWoT, reveals how the rhetorical intermingling noted so far is in fact based on ‘growing institutional alliances’ (2006: 14) and ‘conceptual exchanges’ (2006: 114) between biomedical and biotech companies and government and military bodies. As an extreme place and, therefore, a case study so often revealing of how words become flesh and fleshed out, the US response to the 2013–2015 Camp Delta hunger strike enacted within NSGB provides a demonstration of metaphoricity in relation to the interweaving of military and medical discourse thus far explained as, during the hunger strike, JTF-GTMO provided an increasingly medicalised response within the frame of (global) war. For example, with approximately 100 detainees fasting8 and

100  The body politic Pentagon officials reading their hunger strike as ‘asymmetrical warfare’ (cited in Pradhan et al., 06/07/2013: par. 8), in late April 2013, instead of soldiers, the US Army flew 40 Navy medics into Bahía de Guantánamo for the purpose of carrying out the intensely necropolitical practice of ‘suicide prevention’ (cited in Hamblin, 03/05/2013: par. 1) by force-feeding the ever-increasing amount of hunger-striking detainees – despite the practice being declared ‘torture’ by the UN (see Dwyer, 11/12/2014) and ‘medically unethical’ by the World Medical Association. As the literature introduced thus far demonstrates, metaphors matter, socially, internationally, and at the level of life and death itself. Following on from this and my contention that just as medical-military metaphorical intermingling has, the body politic too gets fleshed out with consequences that are a matter of life and death for the bodies comprising it. In the following section, I further expand on my understanding of the metaphorically materialising body politic with direct reference to literature focussing explicitly on the metaphoricity of the body politic. 3.1.3 Long live the body politic! I am not the first one to claim that bodies politic really do live as breathing and feeling and ailing-dying bodies. Indeed, understood as far from metaphorically dead while being able to die, I have developed my lively understanding of the body politic in response to the accounts so far detailed. However, building on these through engagement with interdisciplinary literature discussed in this section, I not only suggest that the body politic lives but also that it is unwell because of the outdated body at its metaphorical source, meaning the materialising bodies politic are unfit for purpose. Indeed, so long has it been neglected, I argue that it is necessary to return to the work of Thomas Hobbes to find the common knowledge body at the source of, informing, and performatively materialising as the body politic of the present. As mentioned above, key to my understanding of the body politic is metaphoricity. Meaning simply that the power of metaphor, this entails that the body underlying the body politic materialises. Thus what is written and ‘known’ about the body in general as common sense plays out at the level of the body politic. Within IR Rosemary Shinko (2010: 17) has made this connection well and explains clearly how particular bodily knowledge comes to matter at this ‘higher’ and collective level of embodiment, stating, The body is the site around which and on which meaning is made and attached. This meaning reverberates throughout the entire body politic and thus the point is to provoke a struggle over the meaning and import of bodily enactments because writing the body is writing the ethico-political history of our present.

The body politic  101 From Shinko’s perspective, the particularities of the body at the source of the metaphor the body politic really matter because the metaphor of the body politic comes to be with material effects according to the particularities of the body on which the materialising metaphor is based. Taking seriously the implications of my claim that the body politic comes to be as a material body and towards investigating further Shinko’s – that meaning attached to the body ‘reverberates throughout the entire body politic’ – there are a number of contributions preceding my study of the specifics of the materialisation of the British body politic during the COVID-19 pandemic that are worthy of mention. In fact, political theory is rife with works making a more than rhetorical connection between human bodies and collective political units (See Musloff, 2010). Moreover, detailed below are a few Englightenment era contributions that demonstrate well how now long outdated knowledge about bodies came to inform political ideas of the day and in this way to become embodied.9 In Coriolanus and Richard II, English Renaissance author William Shakespeare describes Rome and London in bodily terms. However, the two cities are detailed as different kinds of bodies, with London as a more naturally harmonious body given its at the time less diverse population than that of Rome (see Motohashi, 1995). In Coriolanus, Shakespeare also mobilises his ‘background notion of a hierarchy of body members’ (Musolff, 2010: 26) through an insult dished out by the character Senator Menenius who says to the ‘First Citizen’ leader of the citizens of Rome, ‘You, the great toe of this assembly? [….] For that, being one o’ the lowest, basest, poorest, Of this most wise rebellion, thou go’st foremost’ (Act I, Scene VII). In Shakespeare, we thus find references to stability and hierarchy being couched in understandings of the human body from that time leading to diversity as equated with bodily malaise and understandings of lower and higher body parts being translated towards the social strata. Following Shakespeare’s contributions by approximately 50 years, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) presents a ‘radically innovative’ (Musolff, 2010: 31) account of what is referred to as the body politic, which is understood as a body. However, with Hobbes’s understanding of the bodies gleaned from scientific and medical understandings of the day, the body politic within Hobbes’s text is a very particular and now extremely dated body. On Hobbes’s legacy through Leviathan’s literal and particular embodiment, Lauren Wilcox (2015: 19), therefore, argues that ‘in setting up the figure of the sovereign state as a body politic, Hobbes naturalises the boundaries of the political community in the boundaries of human bodies.’ Depicted as the book’s very frontispiece illustrated by Abraham Bosse with the direct input of Hobbes (see Figure 3.1) and discussed at length in the following section because of its reworking by illustrator Ben Jennings with the Leviathan redrawn in the image of PM Johnson during the COVID-19 pandemic (see Figure 3.1), Hobbes describes functional parts of the body politic, including the

102  The body politic

Figure 3.1  Leviathan frontispiece by Abraham Bosse with input from Thomas Hobbes (1651)

joints, nerves, hands, eyes, eares, bloud, muscles, voice, and memory. Moreover, as an exemplar of the then newly emerging social contract theory, which went on to inform the establishment of liberal democracies around the globe, Hobbes describes the collective body as coming and staying together as the result of a ‘covenant’ wilfully entered into by the human parts comprising and indeed enabling the existence of the collective ‘Leviathan’ body without which this body would ‘dissolve’ (Hobbes, 1651: 144; see Figure 3.1).

The body politic  103 In Hobbes’s 1651 detailing of the relation of parts to the body politic, it is particularly interesting that the British colonies and their inhabitants are described as the children of the Commonwealth, with Hobbes (1651: 155) explaining the British colonial project itself as a paternal endeavour involving the procreation or children of a Commonwealth are those we call plantations, or colonies; which are numbers of men sent out from the Commonwealth, under a conductor or governor, to inhabit a foreign country, either formerly void of inhabitants, or made void then by war. As I have outlined in Chapter 2’s introduction to necro-body politics, with the necropolitical era we are now within being established through the European colonial enterprise of slavery, the using up of those expelled from the category of human is necessary and facilitates the fuelling of modern-day Leviathans in the necropolitical mode. With children understood as ‘not endued with reason at all’ (ibid: 30) the infantilisation of the colonised works similarly to exclude and ­legitimise (ab)use. Hobbes also spends a great deal of the text diagnosing malaise at the ‘level’ of the body politic based on understandings of medicine and illness that are now completely discredited and indeed unused within ­medicine by ­referring to ailments including hot blouds wens, biles, apostemes, and even ‘the effects of Witchcraft’ (Hobbes, 1651: 204). Indeed, as a relic from the ­Enlightenment period, the body provided by Hobbes and transposed unthinkingly into the discourses of IR and vocabulary of flippant policymakers, all the while being fleshed out, this body politic is somewhat out of date with implications materialising as unwell individuals and collectives as I illustrate through the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in the following section. 3.1.4 21st-century bodies politic? In contemporary writing and against the backdrop of modern medicine and 21st-century understandings of human bodies and their workings, within the biopolitical paradigm, Robert Esposito (16/06/2020: par. 5) has noted how ­political units behave according to understandings of immunology, stating, ‘There is not one individual or social body that does not have an immune ­system.’ ­Furthermore, as geographers aiming ‘to bridge the gap between political ­theory and geography by paying special attention to the ways the body is used as a space,’ Claire Rasmussen and Michael Brown (2006: 471) have emphasised that ‘politics literally take place’ (ibid: 482) in an attempt to encourage thinking through how the metaphor of the body politic materialises to take up and partition space (and with it bodies). For this they list three ways that the body politic comes to make material effects in physical space, stating, (1) ‘It is usually bounded and bordered, with the point of focus being the area within the border, rather than ­outside of it’; (2) ‘that space becomes a particular place through representations such as that of the king, or a particular polity (America)’ (ibid:

104  The body politic 472); and (3) citing leaders’ medicalised discourse as discussed earlier, arguing that ‘its morphology, its organs, tissues, blood, and so on, trade on naturalistic, ecological assumptions that seek to guarantee the speaker’s truth claims about the polity and its leadership, ­citizenry, bureaucracy, and their interconnections’ (ibid). Indeed, making the overall argument that ‘the metaphor of the body politic is a political geography that links citizenship to particular geographical and normative relationships’ (ibid: 469), Rasmussen and Brown are simply highlighting how the body politic comes to materialise in ways similar to the body as it is broadly understood: as bounded by skin, as individual, and vulnerable to particular health threats. However, taking just one of the three ways Ramussen and Brown demonstrate the body politic’s spacial materialisation – their first point about skin materialising as state borders, for example, demonstrates how particular common knowledge about ­bodies determines the bodies politic coming to populate the international system. Indeed, we know that skin is not an ‘envelope’ (Castaneda in Ahmed and Stacey, 2005: 224) but a highly permeable membrane which becomes a ‘boundary object’ (Bhattacharyya in Hassard et al, 2001: 36) and is fetishised through discursive practices which materialise not only humans but also bodies politic as apparently individual with an intelligible ‘skin’ (Ahmed and Stacey, 2005: 2). Within this book, dualist, Enlightenment thinking about bodies has been outlined, critiqued, and well surpassed through the notion of (re/dis)embodiment. However, it is persistent elsewhere and continues to inform common knowledge and understandings of bodies as bounded, sovereign, rational individuals, meaning bodies politic materialise accordingly. On the implications of this Enlightenment hangover on global politics, while not writing about the body politic as such, feminist IR identifies the ‘man in the state’ (see Brown, 1992) and details how dualist thinking, hierarchically dichotomising the masculine public realm and the feminine private realm has worked to entirely gender the practise of global politics, meaning the bodies politic coming to populate the international system operate as men, which engenders a very particular and intensely masculinised type of IR.10 Meanwhile, Anthony Burke has detailed the legacy of individualism – just one trait of the classical, masculinised, liberal subject – within the international system, arguing that the materialisation of individual states works to make war a ‘passionate ontological commitment’ (2007: par. 34) within power structures, political institutions, and policymaking circles because of the logic that the apparently individual and unitary actors must be defended from others. Burke goes on to provide that the military doctrine of pre-emption and the practices of ethnic cleansing and genocide are all outcomes of such logic. With bodies politic materialising as Enlightenment bodies and personas, it is, therefore, no wonder that the international system is characterised by such violent conflict – a ‘nationalist ontology of war and security’ as Burke describes it. It is inspired by such thinking that I demonstrate next how particular outdated ideas about bodies materialise as an ailed British body politic in 2020. To be more specific, in the following section, I return to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan and take the 1651 frontispiece illustrated with the direct input of Thomas Hobbes

The body politic  105

Figure 3.2  Illustration by Ben Jennings for The Guardian

and recently reworked by illustrator Ben Jennings (see Figure 3.2) as my point of departure to underline how little common knowledge as expressed through public discourse circulating and producing the British COVID-19 response has moved on since Leviathan’s publication. However, while my following empirical study is niche, in this effort, I am primarily building on Stephanie Fishel’s work, which has already intervened in IR to highlight the problems of generally outdated understandings of bodies becoming performative at the level of bodies politic and IR. Indeed, medicine has moved on, meaning at the time of Leviathan’s 1651 publication, human life expectancy in England was just 37.5 years, while in 2020, it is 83.6 and 78.9 for English women and men, respectively (see ONS, 03/03/2020a). In short, Fishel’s point is that ‘we understand more about the human body than political theorists did when they began to imagine political metaphors based on the body.’ However, Fishel argues, where human bodies attended to by contemporary medicine and supported by new technologies now live lives of greater longevity, life remains nasty, brutish, and short for the bodies politic populating the international system. Seeing similarly to me that common knowledge about the body – the source of the metaphor the body politic – has material effects as ‘transformative as well as descriptive’ (2017: 51) of its target, Fishel has opined with seismic foreign, security, and immigration policy implications that given 21st-century knowledge about bodies, we need ‘new metaphors for global thriving’ (Fishel, 2017: 113). For example, Fishel suggests that bodies politic need no longer to try to maintain their sovereignty or hard borders because ‘if a human is a hybrid forum composed of nested sets of complex permeable

106  The body politic bodies, this leads to a new conception of “bodies politic” or a set of evolving and interlocking organic systems within systems’ (Fishel, 2017: 43). Indeed, taking insights from the contemporary life sciences, including that so-called human bodies are rather 90% microbial and only 10% human (ibid: 70), Fishel is providing a 21st-century update to Hobbes’s 1651 effort to (re)construct political community and global politics through bodily knowledge – inviting us to reimagine an international system based on principles of permeability and entanglement rather than individuality and sovereignty. Having thus far revealed the body politics of the body politic and underlined the implications of metaphoricity for performatively materialising bodies politic in the international system, in the following section, I draw and build not only on the metaphor-focussed and body-politic-aware literature introduced above but also intermix this with Ahmed’s lively description of the relation of individual bodies used as body parts to collective ‘whole’ bodies as I begin to zoom in on the UK COVID-19 pandemic’s first wave of the spring and summer of 2020 and the particular embodied experience of PM Johnson. In the following study, the aim is to use discourse surrounding the PM’s diagnosis, hospitalisation, and recovery from COVID-19 as a means to illustrate how the body at the source of the body politic remains outdated, making the body politic an unwell rather than dead metaphor that has been (re/dis)embodied throughout the pandemic and indeed how this is being performatively materialised at the level of the body politic.

3.2 Out of date Metaphors, like bodies, can live and die and the body politic is no exception. Described by Claire Rasmussen and Michael Brown (2006: 470) as ‘a phrase we had forgotten was metaphorical,’ a dead metaphor is one which has become detached from its source to the extent of becoming meaningless, even though and while it is employed within a population’s vocabulary. Running out of time is a good example of a dead metaphor because nowadays, not many people know that the running out in it refers to the running out of sand in an hourglass once it is tipped over to ‘start’ measuring the passage of time. As Andrezej Pawelec (2006) explains, within Anglo-American populations, the metaphor (that one is ‘running out of time’) remains in frequent use, while the majority of its users are unaware of the source because of the wristwatch, stopwatches, and mobile phones replacing the hourglasses as personal time measurement instruments (see Pawelec, 2006). The body politic is not one of these dead metaphors. However, while living, the body politic is unwell and severely outdated. Indeed, with the body remaining a commonly used if misunderstood phenomenon, the body politic is a metaphor that remains very much alive and produces lively bodies politic as bodies. However, with common knowledge about bodies becoming increasingly out of date and indeed appearing to be stuck in the Enlightenment era, the body at the source of the metaphor the body politic, and thus those bodies politic materialising, have become outdated too. Amongst the United Kingdom’s present conservative government, rhetorically invoking

The body politic  107 the metaphorical body politic seems to be common place. For example, in 2019, Number 10 Special Adviser Dominic Cummings argued that a European reformist faction within the Tory party ‘should be treated like a metastasising tumour and excised from the UK body politic’ (cited in Hossein-Pour, 27/03/2019), while PM Johnson deployed it to characterise Parliament during Brexit as ‘a blocked artery at the heart of the British body politic’ (see BBC News, 15/11/2019), referring in the same speech to how said blockage was preventing the democratic delivery of ‘the will of the people’ (ibid). However, these men are not medical professionals and yet speak knowingly of the body and its workings, In fact, they seem to share between them a common (mis) understanding of bodily health that they dangerously and unthinkingly mobilise as they do they work of international politics. I expect they are unaware of metaphoricity: the power of metaphor which in the case of the body politic entails the body underlying the body politic performatively materialising as such. Of course, given their conservative ideology and in particular the functionalist understanding of society as ‘organic’ (see Glickman, 1961), these individuals are somewhat of a soft target for my theory, and they indeed represent an extreme case – not only in their increasingly bodily rhetoric. To demonstrate the further implications of the body politic being outdated and what I have called an unwell (rather than dead) metaphor, in this section, I use the case of British PM Johnson and the British body politic during the COVID19 pandemic’s first wave in the spring of 2020 as an example through which to demonstrate how outdated common knowledge about bodies reverberates much more widely throughout the population and materialises as unhealthy human bodies and bodies politic alike. The above (Figure 3.2) illustration by Ben Jennings – a pastiche of Leviathan’s 1651 frontispiece (illustrated with the direct input of Thomas Hobbes) – was published by The Guardian on Friday, 27 March 2020 to accompany David Runciman’s response to the UK government’s approach to COVID-19. With the original frontispiece supposedly depicting a time of lockdown itself (see Poole, 01/05/2020), Runciman’s analysis of the image and thesis returns to Hobbes, underlining that ‘to exercise political rule is to have the power of life and death over citizens’ and, as I have already outlined in Chapter 2, COVID-19 exactly reveals and speeds life and death making within the current necropolitical order. However, Jennings’s illustration is in itself worthy of consideration in this chapter for two reasons. Firstly, depicting the modern-day Leviathan as an able-bodied, white, man, Jennings’s illustration of LeviathanJohnson, like the one commissioned by Hobbes in 1651, shows how the body politic is literally made up of human bodies. With the population’s different members and sections comprising different anatomical body parts. Thus taking metaphoricity (the idea that metaphors materialise) seriously, as I mentioned at this chapter’s outset, I was rather alarmed when hearing what sounded like Johnson giving an executive order to the British populace during his 5 March appearance on This Morning to ‘take it [COVID-19] on the chin.’ Not realising the quote had been taken out of context, I heard this as a murderous response to pandemic entailing self-mutilation and a body part to be willingly sacrificed,

108  The body politic therefore raising the question, Who becomes the chin? Moreover, as time went on and particular and particularly large swathes of the UK population started dying ‘with COVID-19,’ I realised that regardless of being taken out of context, my question remained pertinent. Indeed, to return to it now and consider exactly which bodies have become the sacrificial chin part, as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads throughout the United Kingdom, it is certainly the case that a significant amount of bodies are being required to be not only used but used up completely through their service of the whole. Indeed, University College London (23/03/2020) predicted at the time of lockdown that between 35,000 and 75,000 deaths would occur in the United Kingdom in 2020. However, with UK excess deaths reaching 65,000 by July, even the highest early prediction looked modest. Given the lack of investment in health and caring services and particularly PPE – the very purpose of which is bodily preservation – those exposed to COVID-19 while being used as nurses and carers were quickly used up in service within institutions failing to prevent their expiration. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the spring of 2020 accordingly saw a disproportionate of NHS workers dying in service and a sum of GBP 60,000 pounds being duly paid out by the government on each occasion. However, the sacrificial chin part was composed not only of nurses and carers. On the further composition of the ‘chin’ part, worthy of note is the toxic masculinity of Johnson’s command (to take it on the chin), as well as the gendering of this body part. A large, prominent, well-defined chin is typically associated with masculinity and, indeed, British men have so far succumbed to COVID-19 in greater numbers than women (see ONS, 23/06/2020b) and seemingly were the ones goaded on to ignore the initially vague social distancing guidelines and ‘take’ the virus on, in, for, and on behalf of other parts of the body politic – the ‘herd’ as Johnson de-humanisingly referred to it (before making an at least rhetorical U-turn on his government’s preferred ‘herd immunity’ strategy on 15 March11). Moreover, with the exception of care work, it is largely masculinised labour that cannot be done from home, forcing, for example, labourers and construction workers to continue circulating right up to and beyond the United Kingdom’s 32 March ‘lockdown.’ In addition, the whom of this apparently disposable chin part is also classed and raced – as the case of Kayla Williams initially hinted. As a 36-year-old black woman from London who died from COVID-19 on 21 March, Williams was a year older than me and 30 miles away in Peckham when she died after calling and progressing through the same NHS 111 callback system at a pace slower than me while her symptoms clearly declined much more rapidly. Williams died before the ambulance arrived and had been told by the NHS telephone operator that she was ‘not a priority’ (see Laville, 25/03/2020) while I, as I explain in Chapter 4, was quickly made one and ‘invited in’ to hospital with clearly far milder symptoms just six days earlier. Indeed, the disproportionate amount of black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) NHS workers sacrificed during the first wave (see PHE, 16/06/2020) continues to demonstrate the particularities of the disposable ‘chin’ part.

The body politic  109 3.2.1 Ruling bodies As the second significant feature of Jennings’s reworking of Bosse’s frontispiece (Figure 3.2), Jennings has depicted British PM Johnson as a quasi-Hobbesian sovereign who is embodying the collective body politic of the population. This piece was published before the PM contracted COVID-19 but in the remainder of this chapter, I use discourse surrounding the PM’s subsequent hospitalisation and ‘fight’ with the virus to demonstrate how dominant constructions of bodies materialise and unhealthy individual and collective bodies and indeed unhealthy bodies politic. Indeed, towards further detailing the fleshing out the body politic, in this section, I present a close examination of the (re/dis)embodiment of PM Johnson focussed on the spring and summer of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and included critical analysis of discourse circulating during the PM’s March–April 2020 contraction of and hospitalisation with the virus. I do this as a means to trace how dominant yet outdated understanding of bodies performatively materialise through Johnson himself and reverberate throughout the body politic towards the (ab)use of other bodies in turn. The PM has been selected as a case here for a number of reasons. Firstly, as PM, Johnson – in sickness and health but especially upon contracting COVID-19 – generates a great deal of discourse revealing of contemporary common (power/) knowledge about bodies. Secondly, as he is the PM, my study on the body politics of Johnson contributes to interdisciplinary literature introduced next which is devoted to theorising the role and significance of the body of the leader to the wider social-political-international dynamics and indeed towards informing the identity and materialisation of other units of analysis – the body politic included. A selection of social, political, and international theorists introduced in this section draw connections between the body of the leader and the metaphorically materialising collective body politic and underline a distinct duality of premier bodies – noting a distance and distinction between the leaders’ fleshy ‘body natural’ and their immaterial yet ultimately sovereign ‘body politic.’ Indeed, because of the confusing use of vocabulary, it is therefore crucial to distinguish between the leaders’ sovereignty-imbued ‘body politic’ and the body politic as a material collective composed of lively (body) parts. Within the literature on the metaphorical yet materialising body politic at the core of my enquiries in the chapter, as discussed earlier, Hobbes emphasised the covenant between the ‘Leviathan’ and population by having artist Bosse’s frontispiece for the book depict the socially and politically contractual transfer of power from population to sovereign. However, as a 1651 publication and with English citizens being exclusively men, the composition of the Leviathan body depicted on Bosse’s frontispiece (Figure 3.1) is gendered accordingly. As J. Ann Tickner (1999: 47) points out, ‘Hobbes’s description of human behaviour in the state of nature refers explicitly to that of adult males,’ which then come to stand in for all of humankind with those left out and set apart from the body politic as written by Hobbes (women) subsumed into the apparently universal but actually very particular masculine political with implications which, discussed earlier, still problematically reverberate around our international system, making for endemically anxious bodies politic preoccupied with the maintenance of their bodily health and securing themselves from perceived threats to it.

110  The body politic Meanwhile, the most well-known effort to highlight and delineate between body natural and politic is perhaps Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies (1957: 6), which traces ‘mystic’ Medieval theological and legal traditions identifying the monarch as simultaneously being a person with a fleshy body natural and an embodiment of the realm as body politic, which, as the ultimate location of sovereign, ‘cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any disability in his natural body.’ Building on Kantorowitcz and taking into account the gendering of sovereignty, Diana Saco argues that, within the Tudor period, it was particularly during the 1558–1603 reign of Queen Elizabeth I that the distance between the monarch’s two bodies (natural and politic) ‘became acute when a female body assumed the royal office and began considering matrimony’ (1997: 291). However, recognising not only a mystic connection but also a certain materialisation of the Tudor monarch’s body natural in the body politic’s cartography, Kate Cregan has conducted a detailed study of the liminal – 35 day – period between Queen Elizabeth I’s 1603 death and burial exposing how Elizabeth’s dead body natural was desecrated by a gang of royal ‘barber-surgeons’ in the run-up to the state funeral, arguing, Even if they treated her body with due care, the indignity and insult offered to the Virgin Queen in the mere fact that her aged body natural was exposed to the sight and touch of an exclusively male audience, is immense. And it makes one wonder if Ben Jonson’s salacious gossip that ‘she had a membrana on her, which made her uncapable of man’ came from one of her dissectors. (Cregan, 2007: 54–55) Through their rumoured acts,12 Cregan goes further to suggest that the gang of barber-surgeons offended not only the ontological dignity of Elizabeth’s human form as ‘no longer sovereign, she reverts to being a woman whose wishes can be ignored’ (2007: 54–55) but also that of the body politic. Indeed, to borrow Shinko’s aforementioned expression, Cregan explains how ‘reverberations’ were felt throughout the body politic as the dissection of the Queen during the liminal period between death and interment, and its connection to both mapping and anatomy, undoes the supposed concomitant inviolability of the boundaries and borders of the state she worked so hard to embody. (2007: 52) In the case of Elizabeth I then, it seems the monarch’s violent dis-embodiment at the hands of the Royal household’s barber-surgeons reverberated and materialised through the very land she had presided over in life as sovereign. 3.2.2 Governing bodies Despite the complexities of contemporary sovereignty and the transformation of systems of local-global governance since the Medieval days of the monarchy

The body politic  111 when the body natural and politic were connected in a more immediate way (see le Fort, 1988), in life and death, more contemporary leaders’ material (re/dis) embodiments play a role in reshaping national identity and have material effects at the personal, local, national, and international levels. For example, within political thought, the desire for and encouragement and iconography of masculine bodily prowess as exemplified by the fascist leader is a well-examined trait of 20th- and 21st-century fascism. As J. A. Mangan (1999 and 2014) has extensively chronicled fetishisation of the intensely masculinised to the point of the macho body being a hallmark of the fascist state and governance. Meanwhile, feminist IR has been most thorough in tracing how intense masculinity, machismo, and gendered discourse circulated through leaders’ well beyond those fascist in kind comes to inform, be projected on to, and, indeed, gender state identity and IR. As discussed earlier, this literature theorises the broad discursive construction of states and indeed international politics writ large as masculinised. However, some attention to the significance of 20th- and 21st-century world leaders’ material bodies within IR and beyond. For example, in a pointed study on masculinity, international politics, and John F. Kennedy’s presidential body, Robert D. Dean, claims that ‘Kennedy identified his own body with the state’ (2002: 47) and ‘cast himself as the embodiment of a national struggle against the Soviets’ (ibid). Here, Kennedy’s own belief in the mystic connection between his natural body and the body politic, combined with internalisation of gender norms and sexism, can be seen to have profoundly influenced the president’s opinion about himself and, indeed, his very embodiment. As Dean’s study provides, Kennedy could not escape a persistent sense of failure and was perpetually at war with this body as ‘paradoxically, his severe, crippling health problems made it impossible to act out fully the cultural script dictated by his own ideology of masculinity’ (ibid). For example, Dean details how President Kennedy went to great lengths to make his body at least look as macho and vigorous as he wanted it and America to be by hiding his physical disabilities and masking his debilitating pain with drugs. For example, Dean details how prior to a 1961 summit meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, ‘Kennedy resorted to a drug-induced manly vigour by receiving, in addition to his regular procaine treatments, injections of “amphetamines, steroids, hormones, and animal organ cells,” administered by Max (“Dr. Feelgood”) Jacobson’ (ibid). Indeed, through the example of Kennedy, the process of (re/dis) embodiment introduced through examples of subordinate and excluded bodies in Chapter 1 can be seen to apply equally to world leaders too. In the case of Kennedy, his continual (re)embodiment was driven by dominant norms about what makes a ‘good’ and ‘strong’ body which were performatively fleshed out by the president himself. Laura Shepherd’s study of the veiled references used by President G.W. Bush’s administration to discursively construct gendered states and a particularly hegemonically masculine and dominant American at the outset of the GWoT similarly implicates the president’s own use of his body, this time through his ‘body language.’ As Shepherd (2006: 23) interprets one public appearance, ‘his body language is supportive and paternalistic, with both hands resting on the shoulders of a firefighter who stands with his head bowed.’ On this particular

112  The body politic wartime president’s literally broader gait, I will never forget being at the time flummoxed when, as a master’s student of IR at King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, Professor Mervyn Frost asked in a seminar on constructivism, ‘Why has George Bush started walking like a cowboy?’ It took me years to realise that Professor Frost had asked this question probably hoping one of his students would make the connection between the subtleties of national identity and collective American memories of the Wild West and open range that Bush was channelling through his very stance through the most intense years of the GWoT.13 Indeed, Marc Shaw and Elwood Watson (2011: 145) have since written about exactly this, describing the ‘shoot ’em up cowboy masculinity of the Bush Administration.’ Similarly, in a study of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s statesanctioned and publicly circulated holiday photographs, Andrew Foxall claims that ‘images of Putin serve as a cultural product that connects the viewer, through the body of Putin, to the scale of the nation’ (2013: 142). Crucially, making a more than mystic connection between Putin’s natural body and the body politic Foxall underlines the performativity of photographs of Putin’s body at the ‘level’ of the body politic, arguing that ‘this bridging of scale, from the individual body to the body politic, is necessary for the construction of a territorially bounded state occupied by a cohesive nation’ (ibid). With the performance, projection, and, indeed, performativity of hypermasculinity coming to define these Western, white, male leaders’ (re/dis)embodiments, the election of President Barack Obama saw the emergence of a different kind of more tempered masculinity, as Obama skilfully used his black body to his advantage, allowing him to ‘“make it” in mainstream US politics’ (Cannen, 2014: 56). Emma Cannen’s study of Obama’s use of the body reveals the complex interplay of racism and masculinity leading to this president’s nuanced bodily style, arguing that being differently embodied than his presidential predecessors, ‘Obama has mastered the negotiations necessary for an African American politician…and consciously constructs and performs a contemporary, hybrid presidential masculinity, that is demilitarized and characterized by a post-hip-hop ghetto-style cool.’ In what follows, my study of PM Johnson (re/dis)embodiment and (ab)use of his body natural through the COVID-19 pandemic aims to build on these rich contributions to determine not only how the PM’s understanding and internalisation of racialised and gendered hierarchies inform his performative performances as PM but also how outdated knowledge of bodily workings not only materialise through Johnson’s own actions but also reverberate around the body politic and materialise through the bodies of those comprising it as parts, (re/dis)embodying them in turn as well as the body politic.

3.3 The English patient Boris Johnson once referred to himself as ‘a mere toenail in the body politic’ (cited in Fixter, 16/11/2005). I didn’t realise immediately but later worked out that he was paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, wherein Shakespeare mobilises his ‘background notion of a hierarchy of body members’ (Musolff, 2010: 26) through an insult dished out by the character Senator Menenius, who says to the

The body politic  113 First Citizen of Rome ‘You, the great toe of this assembly? [….] For that, being one o’ the lowest, basest, poorest, Of this most wise rebellion, thou go’st foremost’ (Act I, Scene VII). Johnson had used his ‘toenail’ comment to downplay criticism that he was too much, combining politics and journalism by sitting as MP for Henley upon Thames and being lined up for a front-bench position while still editing The Spectator magazine. However, coming now to write about Johnson’s bodily relation to the body politic, the remark seems relevant. Certainly, as PM, Johnson’s public and globally facing body and image are imbued with state power – coming to symbolise the formal institutions of the state he presides over as PM. Moreover, as the COVID-19 pandemic went on, Johnson’s outdated logic about his own body would come to reverberate around the body politic writ large with longer and stronger reverberations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, intensive care unit (ICU) nurse Jenny McGee describes experiencing the certain distance, theorised earlier, between PM Johnson’s ‘body natural’ being treated by her in St Thomas’ Hospital’s ICU ward and the one she would hear about on the car radio while listening to the news on her way home from her shift reporting: When I got in the car after work each night and I could hear things about Boris Johnson on the news that was very surreal because I thought ‘wow! I've been looking after him!’ but I really wasn’t fazed by looking after Boris Johnson. (Cited in Schofield, 23/04/2020: par. 14) As a further reminder of the unique significance of the PM’s bodily health during the pandemic and beyond at the time of PM Johnson’s COVID-19 hospitalisation, the strength of the British pound sterling initially fell against the Euro as ‘news of his hospitalisation unnerved investors’ (see Halo Financial, 06/04/2020) and lost significant value against the US dollar after 10 Downing Street broke the news that the PM had been moved into the St Thomas’ Hospital ICU (see Dawson, 06/04/2020). However, the relation between PM Johnson’s body natural and the immediate material ‘health’ of the body politic are not what I am attempting to trace in this section. Indeed, for once I rather agree with Johnson and see his individual contribution to (re)shaping the body politic as rather more subtle and ‘toenail’ like. In what follows, I am taking the case of PM Johnson’s body, his attitudes towards it, and wider public discourse circulating around it during and following his April 2020 hospitalisation with COVID-19 to demonstrate how out-of-date knowledge about bodies contributes to processes of (re/dis)embodiment by materialising as not only unhealthy human bodies but also an unhealthy body politic. In this way, I could have chosen any body. However, given the significance and prominence of leaders’ bodies in (re) shaping national identity and IR relations as the literature reviewed suggests, it goes along with the discourse on bodies generated by Johnson’s high-profile COVID-19 diagnosis; his (re/dis)embodiment through the pandemic provides a case in point through which to fulfil my dual aims to trace the role and significance of the body of the leader to wider social-political-international dynamics and, indeed, towards informing the identity and materialisation of other units of analysis – the body politic

114  The body politic included. In short, through the remainder of this chapter I argue and demonstrate that common knowledge about Johnson’s body is of the outdated kind at the source of the metaphor of the body politic and becomes material because of the metaphoricity discussed at this chapters’ outset. Moreover, understood as far from neutral given what I have claimed throughout this book – that bodies are contested sites of global politics – the remainder of this chapter is devoted to providing greater detail on how, by whom, at the expense of whom, and in the service of whom parts of the body politic have been fleshed out during the COVID-19 pandemic. 3.3.1 Bodies brought down My impression of PM Johnson is unique, because, like every body, Johnson is ontologically and existentially in excess of himself as, to repeat Edkins’s (2011: viii) argument, ‘who people are is very bound up with who they are in relation to others.’ For Matthew Sweet for example, ‘Boris Johnson is the most corporeal of Prime Ministers’ (08/04/2020, par. 1), and I agree. Johnson is eminently bodily. Writing the day after the PM’s ICU admission, Sweet goes on and I quote at length (ibid): We know his appetites and frailties. He drinks, and sometimes ruins sofas when he drinks. He fucks. He touches himself. He’s always touching himself. It is his most visible form of promiscuity. His fingers thresh at his hair. His belly resists the restraint of the trouser belt and the tucked shirt. His torso struggles inside his suit, like the Rhinoceros in Kipling’s Just So stories who can’t rid his itchy skin of cake crumbs and burned currants. This discomfort may be confected: it is mysteriously undetectable in that young man in the Bullingdon Club photo, lounging on the steps in Peckwater Quad. I don’t particularly care for PM Johnson or anything he stands for, but when I heard he had been transferred into St Thomas’ Hospital’s ICU on 6 April, I was concerned. For the three nights he would spend in the ICU, I felt on edge – as if Johnson surviving or succumbing to the virus would have a significance beyond the addition of one more to the tally of survivors or victims. The updates from Number 10 were curt and daily: The Prime Minister’s condition is stable and he remains in intensive care for close monitoring. He is in good spirits. (07/04/2020) The Prime Minister continues to make steady progress. He remains in intensive care. (08/04/2020) Of the 177 people who responded to my local COVID-19 survey as the dust began to settle in July 2020, all but 15% felt something about the PM’s

The body politic  115 hospitalisation. Concern was the most common feeling amongst respondents and that 48% felt the same as me – concerned – when the PM went into hospital. The second and third place feelings in common were worry (20%) and sadness (15%), respectively. Certainly, if nothing else, the PM’s is a body that matters and that has been made eminently grievable through being eminently humanised discursively. Indeed, quite unlike those described in the previous chapter as becoming no-bodies and dis-embodied as humans via repeated and performative practices of exclusionary violence, Johnson has been constructed as highly valuable and uniquely grievable person and remained so in the eyes of those in my local community through the pandemic. Certainly, over the years, our current PM has made quite an impression on me. During Johnson’s 2008– 2016 London mayorship, there was a period when I lived only half a mile away from him in Angel, Islington. During that time, I would often pass him on Pentonville Road or Upper Street as we both made our respective ways to or away from Central London – him on the original ‘Boris bike’14 and me walking or on the 341 bus, spotting the flash of his white-blond hair sticking out from beneath his safety helmet as he whizzed past, hunched over his bicycle as I stood on the pavement or sat stuck in traffic on the bus. My partner’s story about bumping into Johnson at Kings Cross St Pancras International station while commuting one morning has also informed my image of our now PM – about how Johnson was late and about how the then mayor’s awaiting team greeted their boss with a chorus of ‘Morning Boris!’. Sometimes he’ll add some corporeal embellishments to the story – that Johnson was panting and or sweating as he ran through the station, for example. We do not know Boris Johnson, and yet his ‘body natural’ has made an impression and, while the mediated ‘body politic’ of the leader will be all that the majority of the population have to go on, in honesty, it is those direct encounters which shape my knowledge of him rather more than anything I have heard, seen, or read of him since. There is, however, one more memory of the current PM that stands out far above and beyond the hundreds of news clips, interviews, briefings, and statements that I have glossed over in the years following my 2008–2009 N1 London residence. Aired in early 2008, this one memory precedes even my encounters with Johnson’s ‘body natural’ by a few months. It is an episode of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? starring the man himself. For those unfamiliar, Who Do You Think You Are? is a long-running, genealogy-based documentary series ‘in which celebrities trace their ancestry, discovering secrets and surprises from their past.’15 During Johnson’s episode, I was immediately struck by how he comes across as seemingly unselfconscious. It made for such refreshing viewing to watch someone who clearly cared so little about how they were coming across or looking in the way that vain, manicured, buffed or half-starved, and pristinely groomed celebrities especially often do. Within the episode, Johnson fondly refers to his late grandmother as ‘Granny Butter’ and travels to Turkey and Germany to trace his ancestors. However, it is not the details of his predictable nigh-on blue blood line that captivates me but the way words fall unthinkingly out of his mouth: ‘Someone’s got their tits in the ring!’ he exclaims at one point while trying to understand the reason for an unlikely marriage within his family tree.

116  The body politic It is the way his body almost overflows his clothes and spills onto the kitchen table in his elderly father’s home. It is his unrestrained and unthinking gestures made with an abandon that can only be afforded by the most privileged, the most entitled of white, upper-class, English men. However, with Johnson having been brought down by COVID-19, in the following section, I present an analysis of discourse circulated by world leaders, British establishment figures, and the press and echoing around the body politic to further draw out how the outdated body at the source of the body politic materialises as unwell individual and collective bodies during the COVID-19 pandemic. 3.3.2 Sick days It is late in the evening of Sunday 5 April, and despite my phone being permanently set to no notifications, somehow, news literally flashes up to inform me that PM Johnson has been admitted to St Thomas’ Hospital in London with COVID19 symptoms. We found out nine days ago that he had tested positive for the virus and would be self-isolating in Number 10 Downing Street while continuing to work ‘thanks to the wizardry of modern technology’ (Johnson, 27/03/2020: par. 5). He had announced it personally in a video self-filmed at an unflattering angle and showing his face looking reddened and puffy with the virus. Then the following evening, on Monday 6 April, another announcement comes, this time in the form of a statement by Number 10 Downing Street. This one informs us that ‘over the course of [Monday] afternoon, the condition of the prime minister has worsened and, on the advice of his medical team, he has been moved to the intensive care unit at the hospital.’ As mentioned earlier, PM Johnson tested positive for COVID-19 during the morning of Friday 27 March but continued to work from home while self-­ isolating, explaining in his video announcement that ‘I can continue to lead the national fight back against coronavirus’ (see Johnson, 27/03/2020). Just hours before testing positive, PM Johnson had even been out on the steps of Number 10 Downing Street, flanking the front door with the Chancellor Rishi Sunak both dressed in suit and tie to partake in the weekly national ‘clap for carers’ at 8 pm, while a day previous, Johnson led what would be his last in-person national coronavirus briefing in a breathy and curt speech to a live audience of journalists inside Number 10. Even after testing positive on Thursday 2 April – just four days before he would find himself on an ICU ward – Johnson had again appeared, this time alone and emerging only briefly and well distanced from a gang of awaiting photographers but still dressed in his suit and tie at 8 pm sharp to perform a solo clap for carers and give ‘thanks to our wonderful NHS’ (cited in Clifton, 02/04/2020), although this time only for exactly one minute before retiring – turning slowly to close the heavy front door, his movements visibly laboured but crucially not yet ‘defeated’ by the virus. During the pandemic, it is important to underline that the same discourse and (mis)information about ‘strong,’ ‘working,’ and ‘healthy’ bodies have not only been espoused by ruling Conservative Party members and allies. Rather, it exists and indeed shapes dominant bodies throughout contemporary society – being fleshed

The body politic  117 out as needlessly precarious and vulnerable human bodies in turn. For example, the members of the non-party political British Army are no different in their commitment to dualist ideas about what makes a good, healthy, and strong body. Indeed, as critical military studies and feminist IR literature will tell you, the contemporary British Army relies on and projects militarised masculinity even while incorporating women and other kinds of bodies further into the various corps16 of the British Army’s present structure. Given the well-noted militarisation of the initial pandemic response17 in the spring of 2020, the British Army too quickly mobilised to ‘fight’ the coronavirus, weighing in with advice not on traditional military matters but with advice on and techniques for bodily improvement by strengthening. Indeed, before the 23 March UK lockdown had even been announced, Warrant Officer Class One Glenn John Haughton OBE MSM (23/03/2020) tweeted out a photograph of some dumbbells – his home gym apparently – saying, ‘That’s my #homeworkout set up for later…. What phys are you going to do today? Strong mind strong body strong heart #stayhealthy.’ To which I replied (23/03/2020) enraged while others tweeted back pictures of their own ‘set ups,’ ‘No. It is time to rethink what a strong body looks like. Commands to stay healthy are not going to work…bodies that “fail” will not be at fault here. Rather, bodies have been/are going to be failed by uncaring systems treating them as disposable, as waste.’ 3.3.3 Well wishes In the days following the PM’s hospital admission, well wishes began to fly in, with US President Trump (07/04/2020: par: 3) already describing Johnson in the past tense as ‘a really good friend. He’s been really something very special. Strong. Resolute. Doesn’t quit. Doesn’t give up.’ French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted (06/04/2020) to bid the PM ‘a speedy recovery at this testing time.’ Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom and by now standing in for Johnson, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab MP took it upon himself to reassure the nation, saying (cites in Schofield and Honeycombe-Foster, 07/04/2020: par. 7) ‘I’m confident he’ll pull through because if there’s one thing I know about this Prime Minister: he’s a fighter.’ The PM’s aged father then weighed in, citing Boris’ character, rural upbringing, and past active use of his body as an indication that he would be able to endure and recover from COVID-19 divulging (cited in Bhatia, 07/04/2020: par. ): Boris is not just a classicist but a countryman and that will give him a lot of strength at this time. He is not just ‘rus in urbe’ but ‘rus in rus,’ meaning he is a countryman to boot…. Ours was not a household that had dinner parties, we were not hunting, shooting…. Boris was there, mucking in at all times. A part of the very person he is, optimistic, determined, resilient, came from this Exmoor valley. Here, Johnson Sr links his son’s body to the very land of England, suggesting that Boris’s rural upbringing makes him superiorly embodied to his urban counterparts and even those urbanites claiming to be of country stock – the rus in urbe. In doing so, Johnson Sr, along with the other noted well-wishers,

118  The body politic demonstrate their devotion to machismo. However, their ideas about a correlation between hard work, fighting, and determination and COVID-19 recovery simply does not exist. PM Johnson did not give statements from hospital, finally having some time off from work and presumably physically unable to work any longer. However, looking back, Johnson’s persistent handshaking, with even hospitalised COVID19 patients during spring 2020, which continued even after the government’s own appointed UK Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies issued guidance against the greeting ritual – only reconfirms the PM’s steadfast belief in at least keeping up appearances of strength. We cannot know whether he felt truly comfortable shaking hands on these occasions but only that he wanted to be seen doing it and indeed heard bragging about it afterwards, telling the press, ‘I can tell you I am shaking hands continuously I was at a hospital the other night where there actually a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody you’ll be pleased to know’ (cited in Mason, 05/05/2020: par. 4). Moreover, in the absence of any statement from the ailing PM, others attempted to speak for him, with his biographer Sonia Purnell revealing he has a weird attitude to illness. He was intolerant of anybody who was ill. Until now, he has had a very robust constitution. He has never been ill until now, and this will be a huge shock to him. His outlook on the world is that illness is for weak people. (Cited in Mendick and Yorke, 06/04/2020) Former SoS for Work and Pensions and current backbencher Sir Iain Duncan Smith (cited in O’Carroll, 06/04/2020) released a similarly telling statement upon hearing the news, saying, ‘I know him very well so I am deeply saddened really that it should come to this. He has obviously worked like mad to try and get through this but it’s not good enough so far.’ Indeed, those claiming to know the PM project the same misguided bodily and indeed medical knowledge onto the PM and, troublingly, they appeared to be correct about the PM’s views, as soon, such outdated ideas about what it means to be a strong, weak, or more or less vulnerable body would begin to shape policy responses to COVID-19 as the UK government attempted to ‘learn lessons’ from the spring and summer of 2020 and to prepare for a possible second wave of the virus in the autumn-winter. Meanwhile, inside St Thomas’, PM Johnson would if conscious be experiencing first-hand what it means to ‘fight’ COVID-19. And certainly finding out that this would be a collective effort requiring Johnson to give up any sense of control to those around him who were keeping him alive. On the realities of life inside a COVID ward, Ricardo Nuila (17/07/2020: par: 7), a doctor of internal medicine, has described exactly how patients are treated and provides particular details on a procedure known as proning: A patient who is proned is flipped from her back to her belly while her breathing tube, I.V.s, and monitors are kept intact and attached…. But

The body politic  119 carefully flipping an unconscious, paralyzed patient can require as many as six people—nurses, assistants, therapists, and sometimes doctors, each gowned in P.P.E.—to coördinate their efforts, as though they are moving a large sculpture. Upon being discharged, the PM duly concedes that he did, indeed, like all bodes, require substantial support from others to recover from COVID-19 and references what may well have been his own proving by nurses in the St Thomas’ ICU, saying ‘the reason in the end my body did start to get enough oxygen was because for every second of the night they were watching and they were thinking and they were caring and making the interventions I needed’ (cited in BBC News, 13/04/2019). Quite. As I have explained throughout this book, the notion of the independently sovereign body is a naive fiction – inexcusable and rather dangerous for those in positions of power and influence to be espousing and bringing into being through policy and practice. Rather, bodies rely existentially and ontologically on one another to first be and then to be healthy. However, with even the PM emerging from ICU unchanged and even more steadfast in his commitment to outdated and discriminatory logic, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the sheer persistence of outdated bodily understandings, clung onto within policy circles and circulating throughout the population as a means to (mis)explain a threat posed to human bodies with no immunity against COVID19 irrespective of their machismo and muscle mass. Moreover, certainly within the UK context, I am concentrated, such bodily (mis)understandings – attempting to force independent, sovereign, strong Leviathan bodies into existence through the British population – are accompanied by a moral dimension wherein responsibility, like agency, is located in the apparently rational, bounded, individual who as the sole master of their body can then be blamed for having failed to stay strong. 3.3.4 Reverberations In the post-peak lull of the United Kingdom’s first wave of COVID-19 in June and July 2020, the outdated bodily logic introduced earlier continued to prevail even, especially as it was found to have failed. For example, by mid-July, the United Kingdom had been found to have the highest excess death rate in Europe, and more than 45,000 deaths had been attributed to COVID-19 in the United Kingdom. However, coming to form the centrepiece of the UK government’s response to the first wave of the pandemic was not a relief package for the fledgling NHS or measures to tackle inequality (given how the virus exacerbated and afflicted the most deprived British communities severely) but a host of interventions into the bodies of those comprising the body politic aimed at exactly (re/dis) embodying the British populace in the image of the now slimmer and hegemonically and militarily masculinised PM. Where before Johnson had seemingly not cared much about his appearance, declaring ‘I’m fat!’ as a speaker at an event about body positivity in 2006,18 on his release from hospital, the PM seemed for the first time to have become body

120  The body politic conscious. Claiming in a post-hospitalisation interview with the Mail on Sunday to be ‘fit as a butcher’s dog’ (cited in Sibley, 28/07/2020), Johnson went as far as asking, ‘Do you want me to do some press-ups to show you how fit I am?’ before getting down onto his carpeted office floor to prove that he was over the virus and back to full strength by doing some press-ups.19 As the first wave continued to recede, Johnson’s personal experience and, indeed, body came to provide the blueprint for a flagship government policy launched on Monday 27 July but hinted at the Friday previous in Johnson’s interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg to mark the PM’s first year in office. While reflecting on his ‘battle’ with COVID-19, he explains the logic behind the Better Health strategy to Kuenssberg (cites in Shaw, 27/07/2020): One thing by the way that I think did make a difference and for me and for quite a few others is the issue of frankly being overweight…and that’s why we need to tackle our national struggle with obesity…. If we’re fitter and healthier and we lose weight we’ll be better able to not only individually withstand the virus but we’ll be better places to protect our NHS and that’s why we’re bringing forward an obesity strategy…. We will bounce back stronger than before. Johnson’s logic here is unchanged, seeing that he failed to defeat the virus on his own because he was not fit and strong enough. Indeed, his experience has worked only to re-embody by further masculinising and making the PM more macho. The official launch of the Better Health strategy the following day saw Johnson describing his body in detail in a promotional, apparently mid-dog walk, filmed video released on Twitter through the @BorisJohnson ‘personal’ prime ministerial account rather than through @Number10 or a government department account or platform (see Johnson, 27/07/2020). ‘I’m more than a stone down…. I’m only about five foot ten’ he provides and indeed this launch was framed very much as a personal and paternal message and instruction from the PM to the public and saw the UK executive moving from conservatism towards a more typically fascist fixation on the body of the leader with this newfound machismo and message (see Mangan, 1999, 2014). To provide more details, the Better Health strategy involves the UK government issuing guidance for restaurants to begin listing the calories contained in each item listed on the menu, as well as banning sweet displays at store checkouts, ‘buy one, get one free’ promotions on crisps and chocolate, and ‘junk’ food adverts being shown on TV and online before 9 pm.20 Measures aimed at individuals are listed on the public facing Better Health website and include a host of resources and services, such as online fitness programmes and classes, as well as free and paid apps for members of the public to download, including Couch to 5K, a food scanner enabling packages to be scanned in store to reveal calories inside each item before purchase, a body mass index calculator, and various links to weight-loss company sites and apps, including Weight Watchers and Slimming World.21 On top of this, the government has specifically asked the ‘overweight’ British public to lose five pounds to save the NHS 100 million pounds. Reverberating quickly through other elite bodies, during the week of the Better Health launch, members of the cabinet appeared in public and were made visible

The body politic  121 following Johnson’s advice to work on their bodies, with, for example, Health Secretary Matt Hancock doubling down on the PM’s performance of press-ups for a photo shoot and multitasking by jogging while being interviewed by The Sun newspaper.22 By the end of the week, in a move criticised for being ‘biased’ to the point of pro-Conservative Party political propaganda, the BBC released a Marvel-style cartoon trailer featuring Chancellor Rishi Sunak flying through the air as Superman, with an inflatedly muscular body bulging beneath a Lycra jumpsuit (see Perring, 01/08/2020) while British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver appeared to give interviews on the merits of the Better Health strategy, saying, ‘The cost of ill-health in society…is an economic conversation. Having a fitter, healthier more agile Britain is absolutely more profitable’ (see Channel 4 News, 27/07/2020). Crucially, in the weeks following the Better Health launch, a rumour began to circulate through the British press about a ‘government report’ suggesting that in the case of a second wave of COVID-19, obese people should be confined to their homes in ‘hotspot’ areas (see Bickerton, 09/08/2020). Indeed, whether true or not, even the suggestion works to further securitise particular bodies – obese ones in this case – while further pressuring the collective obese part to become lighter. Indeed, the discursive production of the obese as a threat to the NHS and campaign of social pressuring by dominant bodies (mis)informed by outdated knowledge provides a case exemplary of the socially and politically informed process of (re/dis)embodiment described throughout this book. With the Better Health strategy being launched only after I began to research and write this chapter, and it transpiring that Johnson’s body natural had indeed inspired a programme of state interventions aiming to re-embody the population, my effort to trace the role of common knowledge about bodies and the significance of the body of the leader towards informing the materialisation of other bodies was only made easier through the misguided body-centric policies outlined earlier. In this case, outdated knowledge about Johnson’s body and comprising the source of the body politic can be seen to have been exactly translated and been forced upon the British nation in the form of a campaign of ‘fat shaming’ and pressuring to lose weight in order to fulfil their moral responsibility to stay healthy and not use the NHS. However, the underlying aim of the Better Health strategy – at the level of the body politic itself – is to keep the next wave of COVID-19-infected bodies out of hospital beds and indeed to keep them from pressuring the NHS. In the following chapter, I duly investigate the pressuring of particular body parts during the pandemic to reveal further violent dis- and re-embodiments emotionally facilitated during the pandemic. With the case of PM Johnson alone illustrating the consequences of an outdated and indeed unwell body lying at the source of the body politic, the United Kingdom’s not unique experience of the onset of COVID-19 demonstrates that apparent ‘Leviathan’ bodies materialising through such thinking are outdated and unfit for the purpose of facilitating good, supported lives and any local, national, let alone global thriving. With specific reference to the COVID-19 outbreak and responses to it globally, this is extremely pertinent, as outdated ideas about what it means to be a strong, weak, and/or vulnerable body, and thus body politic continues to circulate and shape policy responses to the pandemic as it endures.

122  The body politic As immunologist Samantha Le Sommer (30/03/2020) attempted to clarify in the face of common explanations for why some bodies ‘catch’ the virus on 30 March: Immunoscense & ‘weak’ immune systems aren’t the same thing…this idea of a ‘weak’ immune system is a myth, its ‘dysfunctional’ immune system. From the PM’s very own (re/dis)embodiment through the spring and into the summer of 2020 – through his diagnosis, hospitalisation, and discharge, to the pressups performed in public by a lighter Johnson telling the British public to ‘lose 5 pounds’ in preparation for a second wave of COVID-19 and the launch of the UK’s Better Health strategy – what the responses to COVID-19 discussed in this chapter reveal is twofold. Firstly I have demonstrated that the persistence of outdated bodily metaphors used within policy circles to (mis)explain the threat of COVID19 are acutely problematic at the level of the bodily health of the individuals – as bodies, including the PM’s, have been placed in danger by attempting to work on and through COVID-19 with a false sense of immunity conflated with exaggerated masculinity facilitating this. However, secondly, this chapter has also underlined how the outdated and unwell body at the source of the metaphor – the body politic – forcibly materializes, as an apparently strong and independent body politic that the COVID-19 pandemic reveals is actually inherently vulnerable and precarious – unable and ill equipped to cope with COVID-19 and accordingly facing economic, social, and political crises of an entirely new order. In light of the inadequacies and ill health of the body politic forcibly materialising during COVID-19, it is perhaps more important than ever to return to Michel Foucault’s observation (1980: 58), that ‘one needs to study what kind of body the current society needs’ – especially as the COVID-19 death toll continues to climb, and during the second wave those bodies deemed responsible for their own infection (the overweight) are being threatened with house arrest in the name of protecting the NHS and facilitating the continued flow of capital via the circulation of bodies deemed healthy and strong according to what has been found to be severely outdated criteria. Moreover, as the UK’s not unique experience of the onset of COVID-19 demonstrates, the apparent ‘Leviathan’ bodies materializing through such thinking are outdated and unfit for the purpose of facilitating good, supported lives and any local, national, let alone global thriving. To continue detailing the fleshing out of this materialising metaphor during the spring and summer of 2020, in the following chapter, I zoom in to the level of embodied experience, showing how the human bodies comprising the (body) parts of our unhealthily outdated body politic ‘took’ COVID and how the manipulation, containment, and suppression of emotions and bodies were absolutely vital for keeping some bodies going at the expense of others throughout the pandemic’s first wave.

Notes 1 See search results for tweets containing the phrase ‘take it on the chin’ made 5 to 6 March 2020: https://twitter.com/search?q=take%20it%20on%20the%20chin%20 until%3A2020-03-06%20since%3A2020-03-05&src=recent_search_click. 2 For a full transcript of the interview, see Krishna (10/03/2020).

The body politic  123 3 The Cambridge English Dictionary provides the meaning of the phrase as ‘to accept unpleasant events bravely and without complaining’ (https://dictionary.cambridge. org/dictionary/english/take-it-on-the-chin). 4 At the time of writing (late August 2020 ), the end of the United Kingdom’s ‘first wave’ of COVID-19 remains in question (see, for example, Anderson et al., 03/08/2020). However, I am describing the first wave as having peaked in April–May 2020 before receding through the summer, as this is what has been reflected in dominant discourse and in the data released to the World Health Organisation by the UK government (see https://covid19.who.int/table). 5 See Leder (1990). 6 On 23 June, Dr Robert Redfield told a US congressional hearing that ‘one little virus’ had exposed the paucity of the US’s public health infrastructure and “brought this nation to its knees”’ (see Walker, 24/06/2020) 7 See, for example, International Politics’ Special Issue on Friendship in International Relations’ (eds. Oelsner and Vion, 2011). 8 The Miami Herald ‘Hunger Tracker’ is the most comprehensive data on the Guantánamo hunger strikes: https://media.miamiherald.com/static/media/projects/ gitmo_chart/. 9 See Musloff’s chapter titled “Political Metaphor and Bodies Politic” in eds Urszula Okulska and Piotr Cap’s Perspectives in Politics and Discourse (2010). 10 See, for example, Enloe (1990), Peterson (1992), and Tickner (1999). 11 See Johnston (15/03/2020). 12 There are conflicting accounts of what happened to Elizabeth’s body during the 35-day period between her death and interment, with Lady Elizabeth Southwell claiming the Queen’s body was not only disemboweled but also burst open before finally being interred (see Loomis, 1996). 13 I attended King’s College London during the 2008–2009 academic year, and my thanks to Professor Frost for granting permission for me to include this detail. 14 Bikes for hire around London became known colloquially as ‘Boris Bikes’ because of how Johnson – a keen cyclist – launched the scheme in 2010 during his mayoralty. 15 See https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007t575. 16 Meaning literally ‘a body of people engaged in a particular activity,’ the word corps is also used by the British Army to refer to its main subdivisions consisting of two or more divisions (see https://www.army.mod.uk/who-we-are/corps-regiments-and-units/). 17 See, for example, Enloe (23/03/2020), Giroux and Filippakou (22/04/2020), and Rythoven (05/04/2020). 18 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD_Gl96hzOM&feature=youtu.be. 19 The number of press-ups Johnson completed is unknown. Many thanks to Benjamin Nutt for making me aware of this event. 20 See Brown (27/07/2020). 21 See https://www.nhs.uk/better-health/?WT.mc_ID=Google&gclid=CIq5ka6q9-oCFRVj Gwod2F0BnA. 22 See Sabey (25/07/2020).

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The body politic  125 Dumbrell, John. 2009. ‘The US–UK Special Relationship: Taking the 21st-Century Temperature,’ The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol. 11: 64–78. Dwyer, Devin. 11/12/2014. ‘Force-Feeding at Gitmo: Obama’s ‘Torture’Debate,’ABC News, URL: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/force-feeding-gitmo-obamas-torture-debate/ story?id=27531783. Enloe, Cynthia. 1990. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases. Berkley\Los Angles\London: University of California Press. Enloe, Cynthia. 23/03/2020. ‘COVID-19: “WagingWar”Against aVirus Is NOTWhatWe Need to Be Doing,’ Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, URL: https://www. wilpf.org/covid-19-waging-war-against-a-virus-is-not-what-we-need-to-be-doing/. Esposito, Robert. 16/06/2020. ‘The Biopolitics of Immunity in Times of COVID-19: An Interview with Roberto Esposito,’ Antipode Online, URL: https://antipodeonline. org/2020/06/16/interview-with-roberto-esposito/. Fishel, Stefanie. R. 2017. The Microbial State: Global Thriving and The Body Politic, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fixter, Alyson. 16/11/2005. ‘Boris: Times Report ‘Fanciful,” Press Gazette, URL: https:// pressgazette.co.uk/boris-times-report-fanciful/. Foucault, Michel. 1980. ‘Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977,’ New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended. London: Penguin. Giroux, Henry and Filippakou, Ourania. 22/04/2020. ‘Militarization in the Age of the Pandemic Crisis,’ E-IR,URL: https://www.e-ir.info/2020/04/22/ militarization-in-the-age-of-the-pandemic-crisis/. Glickman, Harvey. 1961. ‘The Toryness of English Conservatism,’ Journal of British Studies, Vol. 1(1): 111–143. Gray, Harriet. 2015, ‘The Trauma Risk Management Approach to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the British Military: Masculinity, Biopolitics and Depoliticisation,’ Feminist Review, Vol. 111(1):109–123. Halo Financial. 06/04/2020. ‘The British Pound Has Started on a Softer Tone This Week Following News That the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson Was Admitted to Hospital,’ Halo Financial, URL: https://www.halofinancial.com/coronavirus/ pound-sterling-falls-boris-johnson-remains-hospital?av_sc_blog_page=2. Hamblin, James. 03/05/2013. ‘Have You Ever Tried to Force-Feed a Captured Human?,’ The Atlantic, URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/05/ have-you-ever-tried-to-force-feed-a-captured-human/275507/. Harrison, Mark. 1996. ‘The Medicalization of War – the Militarization of Medicine,’ Social History of Medicine, Vol. 9(2): 267–276. Haughton, Glenn. 23/03/2020. ‘That’s my #homeworkout set up for later…. What phys are you going to do today ? Strong mind strong body strong heart #stayhealthy,’ Tweet, URL: https://twitter.com/SEAC_Defence/status/1242044713223565314. Hossein-Pour, Anahita. 27/03/2019. ‘Vote Leave Boss Dominic Cummings Blasts Tory Eurosceptics as ‘Metastasising Tumour’ in Call for New Brexit Party,’ Politics Home, URL: https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/vote-leave-boss-dominic-cummingsblasts-tory-eurosceptics-as-metastasising-tumour-in-call-for-new-brexit-party. Hutchison, Emma. 2010. ‘Trauma and the Politics of Emotions: Constituting Identity, Security and Community after the Bali Bombing,’ International Relations, Vol. 24(1):65–86. Johnson, Boris. 12/04/2020. ‘Boris Johnson Coronavirus Speech Transcript: Announcement After Release from Hospital,’Rev, URL: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/boris-johnson-coronavirus-speech-transcript-announcement-after-release-from-hospital.

126  The body politic Johnson, Boris. 27/03/2020. ‘PM Video Message on Coronavirus: 27 March 2020,’ Gov.uk, URL:  https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-video-message-on-coronavirus27-march-2020. Johnson, Boris. 16/04/2020. ‘Prime Minister’s Statement on Coronavirus (COVID-19): 16 March 2020,’ Gov.uk, URL: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-statementon-coronavirus-16-march-2020. Johnson, Boris. 27/07/2020. ‘Losing weight is hard but with some small changes we can all feel fitter and healthier. If we all do our bit, we can reduce our health risks and protect ourselves against coronavirus – as well as taking pressure off the NHS. Our Better Health Strategy https://nhs.uk/better-health/,’ Twitter, URL: https://twitter.com/ BorisJohnson/status/1287649130655997959. Johnston, John. 15/03/2020. ‘Matt Hancock Insists “Herd Immunity” Not Part of Government’s Plan for Tackling Coronavirus,’ Politics Home, URL: https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/matt-hancock-insists-herd-immunity-not-part-of-governments-plan-for-tackling-coronavirus. Krishna, Rachal. 10/03/2020. ‘Here Is the Transcript of What Boris Johnson Said on This Morning about the New Coronavirus,’ Full Fact, URL: https://fullfact.org/health/ boris-johnson-coronavirus-this-morning/. Kuenssberg, Laura. 07/04/2020. ‘Coronavirus: Boris Johnson Moved to Intensive Care as Symptoms Worsen,’ BBC News, URL: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52192604. Lakoff, George. 1991. ‘Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf,’ Peace Research, Vol. 23: 25–32. Laville, Sandra. 25/03/2020. ‘London Woman Dies of Suspected Covid-19 after Being Told She Was “Not Priority”,’ The Guardian, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2020/mar/25/london-woman-36-dies-of-suspected-covid-19-after-being-toldshe-is-not-priority. Le Sommer, Samantha. 30/03/2020. ‘Immunoscense & “weak” immune systems arn’t the same thing. Cytokine storms can occur in anyone, this idea of a “weak” immune sytem is a myth, its “dysfunctional” immune system. The only people who really have “weak” immune systes are those with severe genetic immunodeficencies,’ Tweet, URL: https:// twitter.com/curexcomplex/status/1244636092848123904. Loomis, Catherine. 1996. ‘Elizabeth Southwell’s Manuscript Account of the Death of Queen Elizabeth [with Text].’ English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 26(3): 482–509. Macron, Emmanuel. 06/04/2020. ‘I send all my support to Boris Johnson, to his family and to the British people at this difficult moment. I wish him a speedy recovery at this testing time,’Tweet, URL: https://twitter.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/1247266635569823746?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1247266635569823746%7Ctw gr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.euronews.com%2F2020%2F04%2F07%2Fcoronavirus-world-leaders-wish-boris-johnson-a-speedy-recovery. Mangan, J. A. 1999. Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon – Global Fascism. Oxon\New York: Frank Cass Publishers. Mangan, J. A. 2014. Shaping the Superman: Fascist Body as Political Icon. London\New York: Routeledge. Mason, Rowena. 05/05/2020. ‘Boris Johnson Boasted of Shaking Hands on Day Sage Warned Not To,’ The Guardian, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/ may/05/boris-johnson-boasted-of-shaking-hands-on-day-sage-warned-not-to. Mendick, Robert and Yorke, Harry. 06/04/2020. ‘The Inside Story of Boris Johnson’s Coronavirus Battle,’ The Telegraph, URL: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ politics/2020/04/06/inside-story-boris-johnsons-coronavirus-battle/. Musolff, Andreas. 2010. Metaphor, Nation, and the Holocaust: The Concept of the Body Politic. New York\Oxon: Routledge.

The body politic  127 Nuila, Ricardo. 17/07/2020. ‘To Fight CoronavirusYou NeedAnArmy,’The New Yorker, URL: https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/to-fight-the-coronavirus-youneed-an-army?utm_social-type=owned&utm_brand=tny&mbid=social_twitter&utm_ source=twitter&utm_medium=social. O’Carroll, Lisa. 06/04/2020. ‘Iain Duncan Smith, a Friend and Colleague of the Prime Minister, Has Said He Is “Shocked with the News,”’ He Has Told the BBC,’ BBC Coronavirus Live blog, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/apr/06/ coronavirus-live-news-boris-johnson-admitted-to-hospital-as-trump-again-touts-hydroxychloroquine?page=with:block-5e8b86348f08c35a1d11b2b6#block-5e8b86348f08c35a1d11b2b6. Oelsner, Andrea and Vion, Antoine. 2011. ‘Special Issue: Friendship in International Relations,’ International Politics, Vol. 48: 1–9. Office for National Statistics. 03/03/2020a. ‘Life Expectancy at Birth and Selected Older Ages,’ ONS, URL: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/ birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/lifeexpectancyatbirthandselectedolderages. Office for National Statistics. 23/06/2020b. ‘Deaths Involving COVID-19, England and Wales: Deaths Occurring in May 2020,’ ONS, URL: https://www.ons.gov. uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/ deathsinvolvingcovid19englandandwales/deathsoccurringinmay2020. Okulska, Urszula and Cap, Piotr. 2010. Perspectives in Politics and Discourse. Amsterdam\ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Pawelec, Andrzej, 2006. ‘The Death of Metaphor,’ Studia Linguistica, Vol. 123: 117–122. Perring, Rebecca. 01/08/2020. ‘BBC Shamed: Corporation Apologises and Immediately Removes Rishi Sunak Article,’ Express, URL: https://www.express.co.uk/news/ uk/1317274/bbc-news-rishi-sunak-bbc-video-twitter-uk-economy-bbc-impartiality. Poole, Thomas. 01/05/2020. ‘Leviathan in Lockdown,’ London Review of Books, URL: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2020/may/leviathan-in-lockdown. Pradhan, Alka, Eiler, Kent, and Hawkins, Katherine. 06/07/2013. ‘Force-Feeding — Guantanamo’s Shame,’ Los Angles Times, URL: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/ la-xpm-2013-jul-06-la-oe-eiler-gitmo-hunger-strike-20130707-story.html. Public Health England. 16/06/2020. ‘COVID-19: Understanding the Impact on BAME Communities,’ Gov.uk, URL: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ covid-19-understanding-the-impact-on-bame-communities. Rasmussen, Claire and Brown, Michael. 2006. ‘The Body as a Spatial Metaphor,’ Citizenship Studies, Vol. 9(5):469–484. Roy, Eleanor Ainge, 24/04/2020. ‘New Zealand Nurse: I Treated Boris Johnson Like Any Other Patient,’ The Guardian, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/24/ new-zealand-nurse-i-treated-boris-johnson-like-any-other-patient. Sabey, Ryan. 25/07/2020. ‘FIT FOR PURPOSE Matt Hancock Works Out with The Sun as He Vows to Get Britain in Shape,’ The Sun, URL: https://www.thesun.co.uk/ news/12225924/matt-hancock-works-out-britain-in-shape/. Saco, Diane. 1997. ‘Gendering Sovereignty: Marriage and International Relations in Elizabethan Times,’ European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 3(3), 291–318. Saurette, Paul. 2006. ‘You Dissin Me? Humiliation and Post 9/11 Global Politics,’ Review of International Studies Vol. 32(4): 495–522. Schofield, Kavin and Honeycombe-Foster, Matt. 07/04/2020. ‘Dominic Raab Says He Is Confident That “Fighter” Boris Johnson Will Beat the Coronavirus,’ Politics Home, URL: https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/dominic-raab-says-he-is-confidentthat-fighter-boris-johnson-will-beat-the-coronavirus. Schofield, Kevin. 23/03/2020. ‘Coronavirus: Nurse Tells of His Pride after Boris Johnson Thanked Him For Saving his Life,’ Politics Home, URL: https://www.politicshome.

128  The body politic com/news/article/coronavirus-nurse-tells-of-his-pride-after-boris-johnson-thankedhim-for-saving-his-life. Shaw, Marc E. and Watson, Elwood. (eds) Performing American Masculinities: The 21st Century Man in Pop Culture, pp. 134–152. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Shaw, Neil. 27/07/2020. ‘New Food Laws Unveiled on Monday in Bid to Cut Obesity,’ Essex Live, URL: https://www.essexlive.news/news/uk-world-news/new-food-laws-unveiledmonday-4366617. Shepherd, Laura. 2006. ‘Veiled References: Constructions of Gender in the Bush Administration Discourse on the Attacks on Afghanistan post 9/11,’ International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 8:1: 19–41. Shinko, Rosemary. E. 2010. ‘Ethics after Liberalism: Why (Autonomous) Bodies Matter,’ Millennium – Journal of International Studies, Vol. 38(3): 1–23. Sibley, John. 28/07/2020. ‘“Fit as a Butcher’s Dog,” UK PM Does Press Ups To Show Coronavirus Recovery,’ Reuters, URL: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-johnson/fit-as-a-butchers-dog-uk-pm-does-press-ups-to-show-coronavirus-recovery-idUSKBN23Z0FB. Sontag, Susan. 1978. ‘Illness as Metaphor,’ US and Canada: McGraw Hill and Ryerson. Stubley, Peter. 12/04/2020. ‘Coronavirus: Boris Johnson Praises NHS as Country’s Greatest National Asset after Saying ‘He Could Have Gone Either Way,’ The Independent, URL: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-boris-johnson-health-news-hospital-nhs-video-tweet-a9461616.html. Sweet, Matthew. 08/04/2020. ‘How Boris Became the Body Politic,’ UnHerd: URL: https://unherd.com/2020/04/why-we-need-boris-to-get-better/. Tickner, J. Ann. 1999. ‘Searching for the Princess? Feminist Perspectives in International Relations,’ Harvard International Review, Vol. 21(4): 44–48. Trump, Donald. 07/04/2020. ‘Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing,’ Whitehouse.gov, URL: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-briefing-21/. University College London. 23/03/2020. ‘UK Strategy Likely to Cause 35,000– 70,000 Excess Deaths, Says Study,’ UCL News, URL: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/ headlines/2020/mar/uk-strategy-likely-cause-35000-70000-excess-deaths-says-study. Van Rythoven, Eric. 05/04/2020. ‘What’s Wrong with the War Metaphor,’ Duck of Minerva, URL: https://duckofminerva.com/2020/04/whats-wrong-with-the-war-metaphor.html. Walker, Tim. 24/06/2020. ‘First Thing: Coronavirus Has Brought the US “To Its Knees”,’ The Guardian, URL: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/24/first-thingcoronavirus-brought-us-knees?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=twt_gu&utm_medium&utm_source=Twitter%23Echobox=1592995446. Welland, Julia. 2013. ‘Militarised Violences, Basic Training And The Myths Of Asexuality And Discipline,’ Review of International Studies, Vol. 39(4): 881–902. Wendt, Alexander. 2004. ‘The State as a Person in International Theory,’ Review of International Studies, Vol. 30(2): 289–316. Wilcox, Lauren. 2015, Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations. New York\Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4 Conflicted bodies

It is Thursday 12 March 2020 and the last time I will see my students in person this academic year. I am on campus to lead a seminar but the class is somewhat hijacked due to distress amongst the students about the incoming coronavirus. Teresa Brennan (2004: 1) was right because I ‘felt the atmosphere’ the second I walked into the room. To provide some context, it is our first week back from spring break, during which a lot of our highly international student body travelled home – returning for classes this week having visited places already at an accelerated stage of the pandemic and transferring through international airport terminals all over the world. I’ve been very busy, and until today, ‘coronavirus’ has been something happening elsewhere to other people, only entering my life via the social media feeds it was beginning to clog up as I scrolled mindlessly on my daily commutes and in the supermarket queues. Before March 12th, I had been able to blissfully ignore the pandemic and remain unaffected by Tweets about #coronavirus and bottles of hand sanitizer innocuously appearing around campus buildings as the COVID-19 began to make its way around the world and work as a catalyst to speed up socially and politically constructed ways of dying under the contemporary conditions of global necropower outlined in Chapter 2. However, being located and somewhat sheltered in a town in one of England’s home counties – Surrey – for the duration of the United Kingdom’s ‘lockdown,’ after this date, the pandemic seemed to affect me in ways that others in my immediate vicinity could not fathom, and that unfathomability is in part what motivates this chapter and my investigation into the emotional landscape engendered and embodied during the first wave of COVID-19 in the spring and summer of 2020. Indeed, as events unfolded and the British population took on an increasingly uneven ‘emotional-viral-load’ (Madrell, 2020) with the virus revealing the extent of and entrenching pre-existing classed, raced, and gendered health inequalities, I began investigating the question, how does COVID-19 feel? The research presented in this Chapter follows on from my previous study into the contested grievability and visibility of American soldiers KIA during the GWoT (see Purnell, 2018) as I noticed emotional fault lines and dynamics similarly coming increasingly to shape bodies and politics throughout the first wave of COVID in the United Kingdom. However, as a departure from previous methodological approaches taken, this chapter is embedded in my everyday embodied experience and describes my (re/dis)embodiment through the spring and summer

130  Conflicted bodies of 2020 while, nonetheless, exploring how local-global, social-political processes introduced in this book play out, in, and through bodies and the parts of lively bodies politic at every turn. Moreover, since ‘theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin’ (Ahmed, 2017: 10), it only follows that I should begin with the skin which I can get closest too and even ‘under’: my own. As the final aspect of rethinking the body in global politics done throughout this book, getting closer to and under the skin of particular bodies in this chapter allows me to draw on and illustrate the co-constitutive relation between emotions and bodies and garner an everyday and more situated understanding of how the (re/dis)embodiments enabled and prevented by the social-political construction of ‘atmospheric walls’ (Ahmed, 15/09/2014) work to move (body) parts of the body politic further out of touch and in turn to maintain necropolitical body dividing and management techniques. More than this, digital and auto-ethnographic research intermixed with more pointed critical discourse analysis and survey findings allows me to continue to think through the relationship between individuals and lively collective body parts of the body politic that, reoriented during the COVID19 pandemic, ‘come to be treated as the limbs of a social body, as being for others to use’ (2019: 11). Through this triangulation of methods, I am also able to paint a picture of a localised sensorial-emotional produced landscape and patterns of affectively motivated (re/dis)embodiments, bodily (re)orientations, and conflicts engendered by local-global forces and responses to COVID-19. In summary, considering my embodied self as ‘a site of scholarly awareness and corporeal literacy’ (2001: 706), the following pages begin with an appraisal of my own unique angle of arrival into the pandemic, as well as analysis of the particular vantage point from which I experienced it and wrote this book before I present studies on the sensorial-emotional particularities of the pandemic via discussions on the absences and (in)visibilities of the pandemic and homing in on aspects of what I describe as an ever-sharpening emotional landscape carved out over the spring and summer of 2020. Towards this, the following pages progress in four stages and particularly draw and build on Ahmed’s short 2014 piece titled “Atmospheric Walls” (15/09/2014) to consider (1) affective angles of arrival into the first wave of COVID-19 in the spring and summer of 2020 and the socialpolitical construction of atmospheric walls during it; (2) forces working to move (body) parts of the politic further out of touch; (3) particularities of the harsh emotional landscape divided by ever-heightening affective walls – namely, containment of grief facilitated by a numbing by numbers and the instruction to stay alert; and (4) the pressuring of (body) parts through the weekly ‘clap for carers’ and discursive (re)construction of an NHS ‘fuelled by love.’ I conclude this chapter by considering the capacity of subordinated parts to become wilful and reshape the emotional landscape and as such their capacity to interrupt the circulatory flow of dominant bodies operating in the necropolitical mode.

4.1 Angles of arrival The COVID-19 pandemic looks and feels different to every body depending on each and every one of our unique vantage points and the angle from which we

Conflicted bodies  131 arrived into it. Indeed, being an event understood as speeding up local-global patterns of life and death and exaggerating normally more subtle dynamics, divisions, and inequalities, it would be unwise to generalise about the emotionality of the pandemic as our affective situations – how much anxiety or grief we felt – through this period depended on our position along the local-global, raced, classed, and gendered endoskeleton’s supply chain of bodies. Moreover, as I argue throughout this chapter, the emotional landscape became acutely sharpened through the pandemic, meaning that, from part to part of the body politic, the atmosphere felt very different. Rather than generalise, through the following pages, I sketch out the emotional landscape of the pandemic considering the (re/dis)embodiments facilitated before homing in on particular conflicts engendered within it by acute emotional disparities. However, before doing so and as an auto-ethnographer, it is also absolutely vital for me to expand on my angle of arrival into and affective situation through this landscape in the spring and summer of 2020. Ahmed has written (15/09/2014: 4) that ‘what we may feel depends on the angle of our arrival. Or we might say that the atmosphere is already angled; it is always felt from a specific point’ and building on this, in this section, I explore my own particularly angled arrival into the spring and summer of 2020’s first wave of COVID-19, my literal point of view, affective (re)orientation through it, and how this corresponded to the angles of bodies in my vicinity while considering the social-political construction of atmospheric walls working to keep particular emotions and bodies contained or in circulation during this period. To provide further contextualisation of the unique situation from which I produced this work, on March 23, I was officially locked down in a one-bedroom rented flat in the south-east of England. To be more specific, I was located in the county of Surrey, in the commuter and green ‘belt’1 town – Chertsey – where I was born and by chance moved back to, just in time for the pandemic (See Purnell, 29/04/2020). Chertsey is an obviously divided town, where half of the residents speak with ‘common’ English accents and half sound ‘posh.’ The former are those from ‘round here’; the latter moved in, having come from elsewhere – buying up properties in the town for the just about manageable commute and less than London house prices, normally after tiring of the city itself. I fit in to neither and both of these categories. As reflected in my survey’s results, retail, hospitality, and other service industries provide employment for many in the town, while public sector and key worker jobs are rarer.2 As a state school-educated, first-generation student, and working-class academic3, I like to think I can ‘code-switch’4 seamlessly between the two operating local dialects, but in all honesty, I probably don’t sound right ‘doing’ either. Since my return to this town in 2019, I have felt somewhat out of place. However, from a research perspective, being located in between as the pandemic plays out, I find my, albeit limited, access and visibility into two coexisting social groups to be an advantage. Throughout the spring and summer of 2020 I felt a lot of things. However, not being an impartial or passive observer and in order to further orient my angle of arrival into the pandemic, it is necessary to detail my unique vantage point as author and somewhat unwitting participant ethnographer through the spring-summer first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

132  Conflicted bodies To provide some detail on the specifics of the part of England within which I found myself locked down and sitting out the pandemic in, it is a rather extreme part. For example, Chertsey (the town I live in) borders Virginia Water, the first ‘million pound town’ (see Power, 18/02/2020) outside of London, where house prices now average almost GBP 1.5 million. During his enforced stay in Britain, General Augusto Pinochet chose a residence inside Virginia Water’s private Wentworth Estate (see Buncombe et al., 02/12/1998) – and became the next-door neighbour of one of the United Kingdom’s most beloved television hosts Bruce Forsyth (as local rumours had it). Other residents have included Sarah, Duchess of York; Sir Elton John; Sir Cliff Richard; Diana Dors; and golfer Sir Nick Faldo, while Andy Murray is a member of the town’s Wentworth Club – known for its tennis courts and the golf course where a friend of mine growing up once caddied for Sean Connery. My hometown, Chertsey, is rather more modest. Demographically, as part of the Runnymede borough, the people who live in Chertsey are predominantly UK born (81.3%), English speaking (91.1%), and Christian (63.4%). Economically, it is a prosperous town, with an above-average level of employment (78.2% compared to the 71% national average), mean house price of £510,001 coming in at nearly 60% higher than the national average of £300,560, and only 12.0% living in social housing compared to the 18.2% national average. Finally, and with particular relevance to the pandemic, the people of Runnymede enjoy above-average levels of ‘health and wellbeing’ (with 51.3% in ‘very good’ health compared to the national average of 47.6%) and with males and females living on average to 82.1 and 84.6 years, respectively, compared to national averages of 78.4 and 82.2 years, respectively, while a nationally normal percentage (13%) of the population work in human health and social care.5 As I explained in the introduction’s methodology section, this book was half written when the pandemic struck and derailed the original plan for this book, as I no longer felt able to write about anything else, with COVID-19 making the connections I had been writing about for years – between everyday embodied experience and global politics – finally and absolutely, undeniably explicit. In the following section I continue to detail my angle of arrival into the pandemic while sketching the emotional landscape materialising before my eyes as autoethnographer through the spring and summer of 2020. 4.1.1 Discordant It is as if there is a protective wall around this town, shielding us from the virus and everything that comes with it. Only, this wall is not made of bricks but rather it is an affective wall; and it only provides some bodies with protection. Social distancing quickly became a thing of the past here, or maybe it never really got going, and I’d get looks of bemusement and irritation for even attempting to maintain it as the weeks and months went on,6 as if I should know better that we didn’t need to bother with those kinds of things. Busy roads, building works, group cycle rides, kayaking, swimming, pleasure boating, picnics, paragliding, and partying – in public and private space – are all things I witnessed in my vicinity during even the height of the English ‘lockdown’ from 23 March to 10 May 2020.7 Walking around Chertsey, even during this most extreme phase and, indeed, throughout the spring and summer of 2020, you could

Conflicted bodies  133 have been forgiven for thinking you had dreamt up the COVID-19 pandemic. Sometimes, on early morning walks through the sun-baked meadows or along the winding River Thames, I would allow myself to believe it, for just a moment. Meenal Viz, an NHS doctor, said something similar in April (cited in Cadwalladr, 20/04/2020: par. 1), about her trip to Central London made to protest unsafe working conditions after a similarly pregnant and 28-year-old nurse died of COVID-19: It was such a stark difference, standing there in the sunshine. You know the people making decisions are there inside these beautiful buildings. But we are seeing life and death. We are fighting for aprons. Outside, you can believe that everything is OK. I even probably fooled myself – but then you come home and it’s another 800 dead. It’s why I had to do this now. Unlike Viz, I do not have to enter a hospital’s acute care ward and ‘fight for aprons’ to pay my bills. I do not have to be near or see the COVID-19 dying and dead, and, with Ahmed writing that ‘an atmospheric wall can be the effect of a habituation’ (15/09/2014: par. 24), I can easily understand how it would be possible for me to slip into the habit of enjoying a life of denial here in Chertsey. To provide some more detail on the situation from which I simultaneously experienced the COVID-19 pandemic and wrote this book, and towards explaining why I felt so jarred throughout this process, for the six months it took to finalise this manuscript, I worked at a desk in my flat's front room or sitting outside on the building's front lawn overlooking a main road and 24-hour service station that stayed open throughout the pandemic. Ambulances would drive past frequently as the road links two local NHS Trust hospitals. They also stopped to refuel there, sometimes at the same time as the private ambulances – you see a lot of these in Surrey, and the private ‘paramedics’ are dressed like butlers in white shirts with black waistcoats, a detail that truly disturbed me when I noticed it. However, during my at the time government sanctioned daily exercise and in lieu of the gym, I made a new habit of pacing laps around a meadow just a two-minute walk away, and during my peak-pandemic workouts, I would look on in disbelief at scenes taking place as the COVID-19 deaths peaked at over 1,000 per day, as they did for 22 days in a row from 2 to 23 April 2020 (see Pyman, 20/06/2020). Swarms of people lined up daily through the hottest days of our frequent heatwaves, sunbathing on deckchairs and mats brought from home and placed along the banks of the river, with groups huddled under umbrellas to catch some shade or gathered round speakers pumping out music while children zipped through the crowds, splashing down into the river to cool off, all while smoke from portable barbecues would sting my eyes as I looked on. It was an unpleasant and surreal experience you could call ‘uncanny’ and seemed to exactly exemplify something that James Duesterberg (20/05/2020: par. 2–3) said in May 2020 about the look and feel of things in a time of pandemic: It is a mood, an atmosphere: everything looks fine, and yet something is wrong, off, uncanny. People and animals, houses and trees, strike us as so many pasteboard masks and mechanical dolls. It is hard to describe it, but it radiates out of the screen when you watch David Lynch.

134  Conflicted bodies Although I considered it risky and irresponsible behaviour, it was not so much what was going on around me but the feelings of social dislocation and alienation during the spring and summer of 2020 that were most unpleasant and which motivate this chapter. A young family walked past my window cooling off with ice creams bought from the service station in the early days of the lockdown while cases and deaths rose rapidly on a hot day in early May. Sweat-soaked cyclists yelled at me, again in early May, to ‘calm the fuck down!’ while I was physically trapped within inches of a swarm of more than ten of them clad in dripping Lycra while an ambulance with sirens blaring tried in vain to get past on the narrow bridge they had clogged up. At times like these, I would question my own sanity, sometimes returning to the flat shaking but knowing what I had experienced was ‘a type of psychological abuse aimed at making victims seem or feel “crazy,” creating a “surreal” interpersonal environment’ (Sweet, P, 2019: 851). This is known as ‘gaslighting,’ and it was not only me experiencing it – something that again reassured me of my own sanity through this time. For example, I instantly related to Melissa Johnson’s 3 August tweet asking, Can someone please confirm for me that I am not crazy, there is actually a pandemic going on, and eating inside restaurants is unsafe? Because everyone in my family thinks I’m overreacting and I am starting to wonder about myself. Similarly, two days before the UK government finally fell into international line as COVID-19 reached western Europe and enforced a nationwide pub closure (see Stewart and Walker, 20/03/2020), I remember writing to decline one mid-week, lunchtime pub invitation ‘because we’re all working from home now,’ saying ‘I think you are crazy but hope I am the crazy one and overreacting!’ However, where gaslighting is understood as an intentional act, I am in no way suggesting that those around me were doing anything to me on purpose. I doubt if they even noticed me looking on from a distance. They were just getting on with their days and, indeed, the expansive emotional disjuncture between them and I and what our divergent moods allowed or prevented us from doing motivated me to write this chapter and, as always, I quickly found solace in Ahmed’s words while trying to overcome my perplexity with the divergent affective situations in my locale. We were discordant bodies out of tune. As Ahmed describes it (15/09/2014: par. 6), Attunement does not simply happen; there is a history at stake, or a timing, often experienced as a having been here before, even in the mode of anticipation (anticipation is often an attention to a before, a before can be an affective lodge) in how we become responsive to some things and not others; how we learn to be affected and not affected by what and who we encounter. In this conception of affective attunement, Ahmed underlines the histories which angle bodies as they arrive at the present. Indeed, our personal histories, traumas, and memories are all embodied and we carry them with us, hence Jessica Auchter’s (2015: 16) reminder that ‘we’re all of us haunted and haunting.’ What’s more, the repetition of a previous experience or trauma will work to trigger the

Conflicted bodies  135 memory and our affective-embodied reactions accordingly. As Auchter (2014: 17) describes in more detail: Haunting derives etymologically from the French hanter, meaning to frequent, resort, or be familiar with… The original meanings of haunting places an emphasis on iteration, the repetitive return to a place such that the place becomes familiar, which itself blurs the temporal relationship to the place. Stan Papoulias’ (06/04/2020: par. 1) account of his affective-embodied experience of COVID-19, provided in the form of a blog-post at The Polophony on 30th April 2020, is certainly haunted. Indeed, Papoulias’ below testimony speaks of the resurrection of his younger body in 1970s Athens as he describes how: with each movement, Covid-19 lockdown London is undone and that other place-time, which is always here too, sharpens to life. Athens, the seventies. For twelve years, between the age of six and eighteen, from the cusp of childhood to the end of adolescence, the same ritual ended our family visits to my gran – first weekly, later monthly. Smelling rough olive oil soap and surgical spirit as I stood arms akimbo and legs spread wide in our small bathroom, like a caricature Vitruvian man as my mother methodically disinfected me. As Papoulias’ re-embodiment by haunting demonstrates, every body arrives differently. Towards reflecting on my own anxious disposition through the first wave and to further make my auto-etnography reflexive, I therefore began thinking about my own arrival and looking back at my deeper, embodied history of trauma to consider my own potential hauntings. Of course, as an international political sociologist specializing in the politics of emotion (Purnell, 2018) and (re/dis)embodiment (Purnell 2015), the pandemic provided an example par excellence through which to push forward understanding of the relation between bodies and emotion and I was therefore acutely and academically tuned in to it from the start. However, further sharpening my angle of arrival, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived are a series of unfortunate and unfortunately tragic, traumatic events occurring since 2015 combined with my abrupt affective entry into the pandemic on 12th March 2020. Returning to 12 March and to provide more context on my angle of affective arrival into this pandemic, as I walked into the seminar room that afternoon and ‘felt the atmosphere’ (Brennan, 2004: 1), I was accosted by two students who were supposed to be presenting some group work. They hurriedly told me that some of their group members were unable to contribute because of being unwell and ‘quarantining’ in a wing of the main building on campus with a number of other students. I remember seeing anxiety flick across their eyes as they told me how more and more of their friends were coming down with something, how they were worried the ‘quarantined’ part of the building was not secure enough. By this point, I too was becoming anxious but tried not to show it. Ahmed has talked about anxiety and describes it as ‘sticky,’ saying ‘rather like Velcro, it tends to pick up whatever comes near. Or we could say that anxiety gives us a certain kind of angle on what comes near’ (Ahmed, 15/09/2014: par. 4). Indeed, as anxiously oriented into the pandemic, I came to think that I had an

136  Conflicted bodies emotional head start compared to friends and family but assumed they would soon catch up. However, as I further explain in this chapter, I’m not sure if they ever did, while the anxiety I picked up in mid-March continued to provide my angle through daily life during the spring and summer of 2020. Returning to my affective entry and initial orientation as the novel coronavirus took hold of the British population, my angle of arrival was about to become sharper still, as that weekend, I recieved a message. Skim reading while out for a walk only the keywords went in…writing from hospital…positive for COVID19…test on arrival. Calculating the dates and cross-referencing with my diary, it turns out my last contact with this person was when they would have been contagious. I’d been feeling run down for a few days but carrying on as normal, but within an hour of receiving the message, I decided to ‘self-isolate’ following NHS’s advice. That evening, I went downhill surprisingly quickly, and after being on and off the phone with the NHS ‘111’ service and progressing through their callback system with relative ease, they decide to send an ‘on-call duty doctor’ out to check me over, and I was warned the doctor might look intimidating outfitted in Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). However, at around 3 am I was awoken not by a knock on the door but by the on-call duty doctor ringing my mobile to tell me that because I was a suspected COVID-19 case, he had refused to examine me because of not being supplied with any PPE and being asthmatic. I was also informed that because of his refusal, a local hospital had agreed to examine me there instead. Asking if I would like to take some time to think about the ‘offer’ before accepting, he told me my ‘ticket’ would remain ‘open’ for a few hours, so I could just call back and arrange to be ‘taken in.’ On top of these recent and directly COVID-related events are historic ones nonetheless angling and working towards the sharpening of my affective entry into the spring and summer of 2020. Indeed, by March 2020 I was anxious and jumpy – had begun to think and expect the worse after the very sudden deaths of not one but two (all) of my siblings in law, my mothers’ diagnosis and deterioration with lung disease (COPD), and my younger brother’s diagnosis with an ‘underlying’ and life shortening heart condition. With all this happening since 2015, I think the trauma has not only made me acutely aware of the always close proximity of death but prevented me from feeling invulnerable. In particular, with my mother, immediately classified as ‘extremely vulnerable’ and instructed to ‘shield’ by the UK Government when the COVID-19 pandemic arrived but living in a multigenerational household with my brother – a pub manager working behind a busy and unventilated bar throughout much of the pandemic – it is no exaggeration to say that I imagined what remains of my small family being wiped out by COVID-19. Indeed, with trauma having its etymological root in the Greek word trayma meaning pierced or perforated and implying bodily disruption and damage, I think being traumatised and having become haunted by these things made me more sensitive and able to ‘pick up’ what others around me could not during the pandemic, especially given the height of the atmospheric walls dividing parts of the body politic throughout this time. The experiences detailed so far brought the local-global body politics of the COVID-19 pandemic literally home to me while revealing the subtle – but no less

Conflicted bodies  137 social-political – (re/dis)embodiments of others sped up with the onset of the pandemic: a more thorough COVID-19 testing8 programme already up and running in a contacts’ home country alerting me to my own potential exposure; an asthmatic body made vulnerable through the lack of PPE while working in the service of the hollowed-out NHS, becoming wilful by ‘being willing not to go with the flow, but also being willing to cause its obstruction’ (Ahmed, 2010: par. 33) and in doing so disrupting that collective body’s flow and excerpting pressure on other parts – namely, those working in the Accident and Emergency Department I was invited into; and a family made vulnerable through their own classed and gendered (re/dis) embodiments. Indeed, this unique angle of arrival into the pandemic informed my ongoing emotional trajectory through it, working to widen what I had first mistaken as an emotional head start between myself and what felt like every body in my immediate vicinity at points and goes to illustrate that ‘even when atmospheres are shared, they are angled’ (Ahmed, 15/04/2014: par. 6). With angles of arrival into the pandemic so coming to dictate bodily movements, activities, and or the confinements of bodies through and in space during the United Kingdom’s lightly policed and largely self-regulated ‘lockdown,’ in the following section, I continue to trace the social-political construction of atmospheric walls and the wider emotional landscape and embodied feelings encouraged and prevented during the COVID-19 pandemic through analysis of the ways bodies and collective body parts lost touch in the spring and summer of 2020.

4.2 Out of touch I still don’t know anyone who’s even had it so, in my eyes it doesn’t really matter. (Cited in Kindred, 26/06/2020) In the time of COVID-19, the denial of touch has become a form of torture for particular individuals and has knock on effects at the levels of community and body politic. Indeed, in this section, I move on from discussing localised discord to individual and collectively rebounding sensory denial that has been used as a health security measure within this pandemic with a series of affective implications including the containment of grief, the further heightening of atmospheric walls coming to segregate parts comprising the body politic during the pandemic, and further sharpening the emotional landscape regulating the circulation of bodies within and comprising this lively but increasingly discordant collective. As I described in Chapter 1 in relation to emotions and bodies, there is a reason behind our colloquialisms – that we emotionally touched or found somebody’s speech touching, for example, or say that somebody has made an impression on us. As Ahmed (2014: 6, emphasis original) has urged, the press that we refer to is a physical pressing and compressing of the body meaning ‘we need to remember the press in an impression.’ Indeed, in being touched and impressed upon, bodies are made materially different, and it is accordingly that I have underlined the role of emotions in the process of (re/dis)embodiment within this chapter and book. With

138  Conflicted bodies emotions and bodies understood as mutually constitutive and affective atmospheres capable of intensifying to the point of touching by making material impressions on bodies and, therefore, playing an important role in (re/dis)embodiment and the social-political (re)orientation of populations, the profound affective-socialpolitical consequences of bodies losing touch during the pandemic are explored throughout this section. Moreover, given Ahmed’s inspiring argument (ibid) that ‘emotions work to shape the surfaces of individual and collective bodies,’ in what immediately follows, I lay out the broad implications of losing touch as individual embodied beings and a collective body politic during the pandemic. I have thus far described the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst responsible for speeding up and exacerbating existing inequalities and social cleavages. In this way, and unlike its medical namesake, I have not yet described the virus itself as being particularly socially-politically novel. However, through the lens of (re/dis) embodiment, there is at least one qualitative change that the virus has engendered and which has had profound effects on individuals and collective bodies. The so-called novel coronavirus or, more accurately, policy responses to it, including social distancing guidelines, bans on mass gatherings, and – to a lesser extent – the closure of schools, places of worship, and workplaces, has worked to (re/ dis)embody individual and collective bodies by forcing bodies apart and indeed to come apart, and as a result, bodies and body parts of collective bodies have literally and irreplaceably lost physical touch, engendering the construction of atmospheric walls working to segment the affective atmospheres intensifying within parts of the body politic during the pandemic. From social distancing measures, to restrictions on public gatherings, to the peak ‘lockdown’ instruction to stay home, policies to guard against the coronavirus aim to keep the ‘R-rate’9 down and, therefore, to increase human security. However, being forced apart and out of touch with one another is also very distressing. As NHS palliative care doctor Rachel Clare writes in the Guardian Newspaper (30/05/2020), Everything about this is wrong. The physical barriers between us. The harsh and jarring words that conceal rising panic. The glaring need – that can’t be met – to rip off the masks and gloves and shake hands, sit down, read each other’s expressions and begin, inch by inch, to cross the gulf that divides us. Of course, as Clare writes, the most acute distress has been experienced by those no longer here to describe what it is like to die in a hospital or care home COVID ward and therefore as a biohazard accordingly cut off without and beyond the touch of family and friends in your final days, hours, and moments on this earth. The horror is simply unimaginable. For those unable to provide that comfort, the loss of touch in these moments is something that will need to be grieved, on top of the loss of those dying during the pandemic. As Dr Nigel Kennea (cited in Roxby, 01/05/2020: par. 4) explained in July, because of COVID restrictions, ‘the most harrowing thing is knowing that many said goodbye to their loved ones in an ambulance.’ Moreover, in a time of coronavirus, those mourning the dead are then, in turn, denied the

Conflicted bodies  139 touch of comfort as funerals have been banned and social distancing measures have been applied, nonetheless, to mourners. How then to grieve the COVID-19 dead? especially when ‘there has been no national moment of silence or day of mourning no collective call to pause & grieve together’ (Cep, 14/05/2020: par. 1)? Rather than public rituals and gatherings – the bereaved dressed in black and overspilling from the pub, like they did before, news and mourning of the dead circulates and is contained within social networks where it echoes around the online chambers inhabited by those particular communities paying the highest price. Moreover, and while this Chapter is based on my rather localized case study speaking to the case of the UK during the first wave of COVID-19 in the spring-summer of 2020, it is by no means my intention to suggest that containment of grief within parts of the body politic is not something unique happening in the UK. On the contrary, the pandemic is understood as working similarly to exacerbate pre-existing socio-economic and indeed political divisions far beyond as Manuel Capella’s testimony (15/12/2020) from Guayaquil – a most deprived and severely afflicted region of Ecuador – makes clear: During the time of confinement in Guayaquil, social networks allowed us to know – and let others know – what was going on, no matter how painful it was. Many times, this was content that the conventional media of our country kept silent about, while echoing the official discourse by emphasizing the disobedience of the population as the main cause of the infections and deaths. The latter has been described as a misleading and victim-blaming discourse, which ignores underlying structural determinants Indeed, such a containment of grief, has knock-on effects working in its very containment to shield others from the sight, feeling, and, indeed, the very touch of death. In doing so, such affective containment has further sharpened the emotional landscape of the pandemic and so set communities further apart from another, enabling some bodies to keep going, remain unaffected, and to continue circulating while others feel the toll of the pandemic while contained. Beyond the horror of dying as a cut-off COVID case and the new order of inconsolable grief experienced by those left behind, in a time of coronavirus, being forced out of touch has a series of further implications in the form of affective reverberations at the community, regional, national, and international levels. Indeed, losing touch has profound social-political effects that have already reverberated around the body politic, working to further define and sharpen the emotional landscape of the pandemic through the construction of atmospheric walls working to emotionally segregate parts of the body politic as it was re-embodied through spring and summer of 2020. 4.2.1 Let go I opened this book by highlighting a comment made by Achille Mbembe (13/04/2020: par 4) at the onset of the pandemic, that ‘try as we might to rid ourselves of it [the body]…it returns to us now as a horrifying, giant mandible, a vehicle for contamination, a vector for pollen, spores, and mold.’ Now, having

140  Conflicted bodies generally appraised the bodies that have been ‘returned to us’ during the pandemic (in Chapter 1), as well as the politics facilitating their return (in Chapter 2), in this section, I zoom in to explore particular bodies that have ‘returned to us’ and indeed the body that has returned to me by continuing to explore the question of how COVID-19 feels at the level of embodied and sensorial experience finding these too raced, gendered, and classed and feeding into the further heightening of atmospheric walls within communities and the body politic through the spring and summer of 2020. At the level of the individual embodied experience of becoming out of touch, Johanna Mannergren Selimovic (27/05/2020: par. 2) wrote in May 2020 that what she will remember about the COVID-19 pandemic is her embodied and, in particular, tactile experience of how the COVID-19 pandemic literally felt: Raw hands. Itchy face masks. Missing other bodies. Fearing other bodies. At the core of this experience is the universal loss of a web of relations and its nodes: markets, extended families, cafés, shopping malls, choirs, museums. The disappearance of embodied interaction in our lives is thus an intimate loss. What Mannergren is underlining is at once the unusual tactile qualities of the pandemic coupled with a simultaneous losing touch with and, therefore, losing the ability to touch others. At the similarly personal level of my own socially and politically constructed material re-embodiment through the pandemic, what I will remember about the spring and summer of 2020 is the soreness and frustration of handwashing because there has not been a day since March when I have not had an open wound and no sooner than one has finally healed, another one has appeared. I am clumsier in the work from home (WFH) lifestyle it seems; then there’s the itchy insect bites and sunburn – unpleasant consequences of having been liberated from the office and daily hours-long commute and instead taking my laptop outdoors during the many sun-filled days as the riverside flat became stuffy. But of course, I would not describe my re-embodiment through the spring and summer of 2020 as unpleasant. I realise that it was one of immense privilege and of a body let go – from early starts and cramped and claustrophobic commutes – let go from certain pressures I felt before. Moreover, and while anxious, I admit that I have also felt somewhat liberated through this pandemic. I can now go unseen by almost everyone almost all of the time – except when I decide to post a ‘proof-of-life’ picture to Instagram or when I have to Zoom into something or I arrange to FaceTime a student or friend. I get more sleep now; am outside more, so more vitamin D too; and am not alone in seeing the bodily benefits of the pandemic. Indeed, out of the 177 local residents I asked, 46.9% reported exercising more between March and July 2020, and 42.8% said they felt either happier or ‘the same’ through the United Kingdom’s first wave of COVID-19. There are things they have perhaps guiltily enjoyed about this pandemic and which they divulged to me as I thought about (re/dis)embodiments beyond my own. Indeed, what was the best thing about COVID-19 happening? is one of the questions I asked 177 people residing like me in the town of Chertsey in July 2020, when

Conflicted bodies  141 more than 40,000 people had died with COVID-19 in the United Kingdom and yet like me, people here reported finding themselves benefiting bodily during the lockdown. Not a single person wrote that my question was posed in bad taste or suggested I remove the question in either the free-text box for their response or the section provided for respondents to offer feedback on the survey’s content in general. In fact, what I found were others experiencing newfound freedoms, having been similarly ‘let go’ from pressures and schedules, and commutes they were held to ‘before.’ For example, respondents remarked that the ‘best thing about COVID-19 happening’ was the following: Not having to commute into London. Being furloughed (thankfully for only 2 months) was worrying financially, but we coped very well. Not going into London, which is a great stresser for me, has overall made me happier. Of course there have been concerns and worries. (Man, aged 40–50) Enjoyed spending a lot of time at home relaxing!

(Woman, aged 30–39)

Wfh and not having to deal with the M25 twice a day. (Woman, aged 40–50) More money, working from home, no commute, buying a puppy. (Man, aged 30–39) Me time. Time to contemplate. Time to relax.

(Woman, aged 21–29) (Man, aged 70–79) (Woman, aged 60–69)

Pressing the pause button on life and being able to rest and reflect. (Woman, aged 30–39) Having more time at home with my dog.

(Woman, aged 21–29)

On top of the confessions, there is also an offsetting of bodily risk that I have partaken in and indeed benefitted from throughout the pandemic, and in my newfound status as a safely isolating body ‘let go.’ I have come to understand that my bodily seclusion and being freed up comes at the direct expense of that of another who will be exposed and exploited in my place. To provide a mundane and everyday example, as many of us who could afford to did, as a means to avoid

142  Conflicted bodies exposure, I began paying for somebody else to ‘pick up’ and deliver my shopping for me as the pandemic hit in March. Furthermore, over the months that followed, I came to learn that there are a number of individuals who perform this service for me, and over the spring and summer of 2020, I have gotten to know them, albeit from a ‘social distance,’ as they pull up on their moped or in their car and unload and place our shopping bags just inside the front door while I awkwardly hover. Unlike 91.1% of the population of the county of Surrey, these delivery persons do not speak English as their first language and are exclusively not white and, therefore, stand out in this neighbourhood where 83.5% described themselves as ‘White British’ in the United Kingdom’s 2011 census (see ONS, 11/10/2013). In line with the necropolitical theory introduced in Chapter 2, these are bodies now used in the service of maintaining mine and kept me safe and fed at home throughout the peak of the first wave and now well beyond, as I am reluctant to go ‘back’ into circulation at all without an immediate need to. Indeed, we are all complicit in maintaining what was described in Chapter 2 as the global endoskeleton of the world and its hierarchy of bodies and uses. In light of the positively described local re-embodiments, confessions of gaining, and ways of being freed up so far discussed – which themselves begin to reveal the speeding up of uneven (re/dis)embodiments experienced during the spring and summer of 2020, in the following section, I continue to trace the formation of moods informing bodies in the part of England I became physically cut off within, as, indeed, the place (Chertsey, Surrey) provides a case in point through which to demonstrate the violence inherent to the social-political construction of an extreme emotional landscape and atmospheric walls emerging to segregate parts of the body politic during the spring and summer of 2020. 4.2.2 Torn apart To return to implications of ‘losing touch’ and, indeed, to part of Mannergren’s previously cited reflection that ‘the disappearance of embodied interaction in our lives is thus an intimate loss’ (27/05/2020: par. 2), beyond individual (re/dis) embodiments, speaking of ‘intimate loss,’ there is an absent presence of the touch of other bodies, and this ‘works’ at the level of individual but also collective re/ dis-embodiments engendered during the pandemic. Indeed, as individuals going missing as unique persons to the ones who know them, those same individuals simultaneously comprise parts of the body politic as it is re-embodied in turn as bodies (as parts) move apart from one another as they have during the spring and summer’s first wave in the United Kingdom. Within the collective and lively if outdated body politic as described in Chapter 3, the arrival of COVID-19 into our already stratified and segmented body politic worked to set different social groups of people (body parts of the body politic), further apart from one another – physically, visually, and affectively – to the point of cutting parts off from one another and parts accordingly losing touch as atmospheric walls heightened. For example, over the course of the spring and summer of 2020, more privileged bodies – able to WFH for the duration – and the ‘shielding’ over 70, withdrew from public space completely. We might still

Conflicted bodies  143 have interacted with our co-workers, students in my case, and with our friends and families when restrictions allowed, but some of us didn’t feel like it for the reasons already discussed and for the rest of the population there were certainly less opportunities to, for example, make small talk with the barista or bar tender or sit cramped on the tube next to whoever and often close enough to literally smell another body. Indeed in this loss of touch we also lost the ability to become literally affected by one another. Thus, along with lowering transmission of the COVID-19 virus, social distancing and wider restrictions would also limit the transmission of affect. Of course, we still had our digital bodies and mediated meetings and Zoom parties, but it is not the same. The online world I access via my laptop from the safety of home feels flat and yet fatigues me quickly. It is a Twitter feed filled with journalists, politicians, and academics – people who take the pandemic seriously because often they are paid to. It is an Instagram gallery depicting persons as brands trying to sell me the things comprising their lives in order to sustain them. It is Facebook – now mostly filled with ads and ‘old people,’ according to one of my students who made me laugh when they made this comment in class recently. As I have mentioned earlier, the physical setting apart of the population meant chance encounters, and the intermingling of disparate parts was now severely limited. Moreover, there is something about the sight, touch, and smell of a body – in the flesh – that no Zoom call or FaceTime can fully capture. Affect is subtle – as what ‘gives you away: the tell-tale heart; my clammy hands; the note of anger in your voice; the sparkle of glee in their eyes’ (Highmore in Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 118), sometimes you have to be there to pick up on it (affect) and indeed to physically pick it up, to become touched, and to be moved accordingly through the transmission (of affect). Of course, some of this can be transmitted from a physical distance and translates from analogue to digital but not everything, meaning the rest goes missing, and this is what I mean by losing touch. As the pandemic hit, bodies lost touch as they were set literally, viscerally, and, I suggest, violently apart. As a biopolitical theorist appreciating the literal embodiment of collectives as I have done through Chapter 3,10 Robert Esposito too sees a violence in the separation of parts, stating, ‘The immunity system is necessary for survival, but when it crosses a certain threshold, it starts destroying the body it aims to defend. That threshold is crossed exactly when social distancing demands a total rupture of social bonds’ (Esposito, 16/06/2020: par. 6). As I have explained throughout this book, processes of (re/dis)embodiment, who we are, and, indeed, our value and literal worth as bodies and material are inextricably caught up with who we are to others – whose support of us, as persons, not only emotionally but also ontologically and existentially make us who we are. In short, and again as I have explained previously, we are not secure as beings and as bodies unless we are known and counted as such by others. Rather, with embodied subjects exceeding themselves – existentially and ontologically as I described it in Chapter 1 – and persons, therefore, coming into and out of being as a result of ‘a sociality that exceeds us’ (Edkins, 2011: viii), the not only viral but also affective unevenness of the pandemic is a deadly threat to some bodies

144  Conflicted bodies and a saving grace for others with not only how we feel enabling and constraining our own movements through risky or safe space but also how we do or do not feel about other bodies allowing us to carry on in the face of the virus and its (mis) management. Beyond the violence entailed by the scattering of particularly vulnerable parts, and as a further example of the implications of parts of the body politic losing touch during this pandemic and as an example of how ‘well’ death and grief have been contained during the COVID-19 pandemic, as I sit down to finish proofing this chapter, more than 70,000 people have died ‘with’ COVID-19 in the United Kingdom,11 and yet I know none of them. I am not alone in this, in fact. Not knowing anyone who has died of COVID-19 is something I have in common with those around me. I know this because I asked residents of the town I live in, ‘How many people you know have died with COVID-19? And out of the 177 people who responded to my survey on Chertsey COVID-19 Feelings and Impact, 122 (nearly three quarters) of them knew no one that died in the first wave. Moreover, providing a stark contrast to a community in mourning, in the town I live in, there is not a face or even a name of anybody dead ‘with COVID19’ to be seen – neither online nor in public space. I know people have died of it in the county of Surrey, and at the time of finalising this chapter, the government statistics tell me that the number is 1086.12 However, the faces the number refers to have just been kept from my sight. Of course, that invisibility has not happened by chance and is alternatively understood as intensely political and again as contributing to the heightening of atmospheric walls during the pandemic’s first wave. Thus when Nesrine Malik (03/08/2020) speaks of grieving families as a British ‘us’ being ‘untiled by loss’ during the pandemic, she does not speak for ‘us’ all. Malik is speaking from and for specific parts of the body politic, stating, What unites us all is loss, and the inability to seek comfort in each other. Maybe one day, when the pandemic is past us, and this government safely socially distanced from power, other leaders will recognise the extent of Britain’s bereavement and honour it. In the meantime the British public will once again, unsupported and unacknowledged by its government, have to find a way to salve its wounds. (Malik, 03/08/2020) As the un-named man interviewed on the English south coast’s Bournemouth beach said in late June, having flocked there along with thousands of other bodies during yet another heatwave, ‘I still don’t know anyone who’s even had it so, in my eyes it doesn’t really matter’ (cited in Kindred, 26/06/2020). Indeed, while the virus spreads, grief is contained behind an atmospheric wall while also containing other bodies – unwilling or unable to go out to the beach or anywhere else for that matter. Towards thinking through additional mechanisms of affective manipulation working towards the performative materialisation of ever-heightening atmospheric walls and ever-sharpening emotional landscape, in the following section, I return again to my own embodied experience and feelings as the months drew

Conflicted bodies  145 on. To be more precise, as a newfound habit became a ritual performed daily during the ‘lockdown’ and beyond, the following description of me numbing by numbers is considered a further mechanism of pandemic response working in conjunction with the instruction to stay alert to, in this case, contain emotion itself and, in turn, allow bodies to continue circulating through the deadly peak of the first wave. As I will explain, throughout this period, faces of the dead remained elusive, as the (body) parts population comprising the body politic were set apart – not only by atmospheric walls but also by visual blockades while being simultaneously bombarded with numbers and accordingly being numbed. 4.2.3 Numbers and numbness13 It is 5 May 2020, and the United Kingdom’s official COVID-19 death toll has overtaken that of Italy’s, meaning ours just became the second-highest globally with only the US figure remaining higher. However, the United Kingdom’s first SoS Dominic Raab (still standing in for our hospitalised PM) has ‘batted away’ (Honeycombe-Foster and Langford, 05/05/2020: par. 1) the number-pushing Britain into second place by explaining that ‘there are different ways of counting deaths.’ Furthermore, tomorrow, on 6 May, as our official death toll passes 30,000, the British newspapers’ front covers will not state any number, let alone provide pictures of the faces of the dead. On the contrary, the press will rejoice in the rumour spreading fast – that the British lockdown will be eased next week. Accordingly, this section is devoted to examining the (ab)use of numbers in relation to COVID-19 body counting in the United Kingdom during the spring and summer of 2020 and suggests that rather than touching and moving the population, inconsistencies and the mismanagement of counting and reporting techniques facilitated an affective numbing, allowing the continued heightening of the atmospheric walls along the lines discussed so far. I am not someone normally interested in numbers, and yet I write about body (un)counting (see Purnell, 2018). When it comes to the contested production of dead bodies, of course, I realise ‘the numbers’ matter. However, given my antifoundational epistemological approach, my aim has never been to count accurately. Indeed, from my perspective, this is neither desirable nor a possibility because of all the ways of making knowledge (let alone knowledge itself) being laden with power. As Raab’s above remark (that ‘there are different ways of counting deaths’) makes plain, a number can simply be ‘batted away’ by some bodies. Thus rather than try to count properly, as I have explained in Chapter 2, I am more interested in the logics informing the (re)valuation and (ab)use of bodies along the global necropolitical endoskeleton of the world. Indeed, I am more interested in who counts to whom, the logics informing ways of counting, and how bodies being (un)counted are connected to their (un)grievability and the touching and movement of other bodies in turn. As I have mentioned, as the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic gained pace, I was often met with rolling eyes when I dared to mention the numbers in conversation or in defence of my request for those around me to socially distance. It was as if those around me had become both weary and wary of numbers.

146  Conflicted bodies Numbers as targets, ‘good’14 numbers, bad numbers, and ‘shameful’ numbers. And, of course, every day there is a new number to take in as the daily death toll rises, and yet, as I have explained so far in this chapter, I for one felt out of touch with the pandemic, finding the numbers numbing while the continued circulation of those around me suggests a certain affective detachment from the deaths underlying the COVID-19 data as it was released. Finding numbers far too slippery, too intangible, perhaps ironically given my antifoundational epistemological approach, I had been yearning for something more solid throughout this pandemic, but despite this, I found myself looking forward to the UK Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) daily Twitter announcement of the daily official death toll when they began making it at around 4 pm daily after an initial and stressful lack of regularly available and coherent data – presumably caused by the government’s failure to have established counting and reporting mechanisms and ways of communicating these in advance. If there was a delay or it reached the end of the day and I had not checked for the tweet, my anxiety would spike until I had found the number. All along, due to the necropolitical imperatives described in Chapter 2, I also had a horrible suspicion that one day the numbers would disappear altogether. And they finally did on 17 July when the DHSC (17/07/2020) announced that daily death and testing figures would no longer be made available, stating, ‘Data on deaths has been temporarily paused while an urgent review into Public Health England (PHE) data is carried out.’ In the end, a narrative about suspected overcounting (see Ng, 17/07/2020) came to be the excuse for blacking out COVID-19 fatality figures. This, in the country with the highest excess dates rate on Earth during the pandemic, is perhaps understandable given the ontological insecurity engendered by the pressure to keep up biopolitical appearances in the contemporary international system. However, it was finally announced on 12 August that the number of daily dead would reappear but in a new format. There would now be a 28-day ‘cut-off point’ – reduced from 60 days – after which a death ‘with COVID-19’ would be uncounted. With this change in the counting method, 5,000 deaths were immediately erased from the United Kingdom’s official COVID-19 death toll (see Sikora, 12/08/2020). To further demonstrate the chaotic (mis)handling of the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 body count, at the time of writing, the UK government has announced the closure of PHE and its replacement with an outsourced ‘institute’ run not by a virologist, immunologist, or epidemiologist with public health experience but rather by a former head of the UK telecommunications company TalkTalk, who is also married to a Tory MP.15 Of course, the United Kingdom’s independent ONS reports COVID-19 deaths too, but only on a weekly basis, while the United Kingdom’s official figures – the ones reported to the World Health Organization – come from the DHSC-PHE, meaning these are figures of authority with power(/ knowledge) over the others. Indeed, it is no wonder the people around me roll their eyes when I mention the numbers. However, prior to the 17 July body count blackout and even withstanding other changes made by the UK government to ways of counting during the first wave – including and then excluding and then reincluding in a new tiered format the number of people dying in care homes16

Conflicted bodies  147 – locating the number via Twitter or the DHSC’s ‘Coronavirus in the UK’ dashboard,17 and no matter the height of the figure itself, I would feel momentarily calmer but never satisfied. In truth, no number could answer my questions about the pandemic and the ways and means of bodies being consumed within and by it. Indeed, as Jenny Edkins (2011) has written, such quantifications ‘miss’ the person and with it the politics. Within the COVID-19 pandemic, Deborah Raj – a data scientist herself – has spoken of frustrations akin to mine, admitting that ‘when we aggregate, we obfuscate the humanity of those our systems represent & impact’ adding as an explanation for this as ‘partially because we are actually scared of the human hiding within.’ However, disturbed by my very lack of any ability to access and comprehend the pandemic and its devastating effects at exactly the human level Raj refers to – either visually or otherwise – I have come to understand the particularities of the United Kingdom’s handling of the pandemic as working further towards the construction of atmospheric walls keeping parts of the body politic emotionally segregated and, indeed, allowing life, death, and the flow of capital to continue circulating through the first wave. 4.2.4 Staying alert Issued on 10 May 2020, the UK government’s instruction for the population to stay alert provides a further example of affective manipulation working to keep the population affectively segregated during the spring and summer of 2020’s first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The instruction was given in the evening, in the form of a pre-recorded video broadcast simultaneously across the United Kingdom’s main television channels and featured PM Johnson sitting behind a large wooden desk in an otherwise empty palatial room, presumably inside of Number 10 Downing Street. To be precise, the PM announced (Johnson, 10/05/2020a: par. 33) that ‘we are establishing a new Covid Alert System run by a new Joint Biosecurity Centre.’ Moreover, through this briefing, the United Kingdom’s official national pandemic motto and government guidance also shifted from ‘stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives’ to ‘stay alert, control the virus and save lives.’ However, in stark contrast to the terror alert system discussed in Chapter 1, the United Kingdom’s COVID-alert system announced 10 May is much less clear than the red-orange-yellow-green traffic light system used to manipulate a clearly articulated feeling (terror) in the wake of 9/11 – an event already working to align the affective situations of the target population, as I explained in Chapter 1. As PM Johnson explained rather more convolutedly, And that Covid Alert Level will be determined primarily by R and the number of coronavirus cases. And in turn that Covid Alert Level will tell us how tough we have to be in our social distancing measures – the lower the level the fewer the measures. The higher the level, the tougher and stricter we will have to be. There will be five alert levels. Level One means the disease is no longer present in the UK and Level Five is the most critical – the kind of situation we could have had if the NHS had been overwhelmed. (Ibid: par. 34–39)

148  Conflicted bodies Further comparing the United Kingdom’s COVID-alert system to the US Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS) is telling, as without an articulated ­feeling, and the alternative to stay alert, the similarly affectively motivated mechanism works alternatively to keep parts of the body politic apart and, therefore, the world to further heighten the atmospheric walls discussed throughout this chapter. As the GWoT was unleashed, fear came to dominate US politics and society as the feeling of terror became a prominent preoccupation and feature of everyday life – the emotional atmosphere maintained and intensified through the introduction of the HSAS on 11 March 2002 and daily broadcast announcements of the ‘threat level’ by the US Department of Homeland Security. Indeed, HSAS now provides an interesting counterpoint through which to explore the emotional body politics of the United Kingdom’s COVID-alert system introduced 10 May 2020. With the introduction of HSAS, terror became a prominent preoccupation of American consciousness and life as the daily terror threat level established by the Department of Homeland Security was broadcast throughout the body politic. The introduction of this system also saw terror – a feeling – becoming a security issue and securitised, while, with few details provided by Department of Homeland Security beyond the threat level itself (low, guarded, elevated, high, or severe), Butler argues (2004: 76) that the system’s introduction worked to create ‘objectless panics’ throughout the American population. There were not initially any objects for the fear circulating and intensifying in the atmosphere to stick to and thus Americans felt terror but of what or whom they did not know. However, with the potential for the GWoT to be waged against anybody or thing that the victimised American body could be made to feel terrified of, fear would soon be directed towards and stuck to very particular objects – bodies to be more precise. At the same time, other bodies – those which ‘look[ed] Muslim or Middle Eastern’ according to Ahmed (2014: 98) – became sticky and to their surfaces affect/emotion became stuck, meaning post9/11 American body politics became highly racialised, racist, and Islamophobic as fear of evil, inhuman, and alien terrorists permeated the atmosphere in between the bodies comprising the American body politic. The effectiveness of HSAS in manipulating affect and, indeed, intensifying Americans’ feelings of terror comes down to 9/11 producing an initial void of feelings amongst Americans only after which the now well-documented politics of fear took hold as the GWoT was discursively constructed and the HSAS was rolled out. However, rather than working to cultivate and intensify a particularly loaded affective atmosphere throughout the body politic, a command to stay alert given to a population – already set apart in the ways discussed earlier – was also facilitated by the social-political construction of atmospheric walls allowing certain (in)visibilities to prevail with the effects of further sharpening of the angles at which bodies entered and, therefore, further set apart body parts that had by now already lost touch. In the following section, I explore the social-political role of pressure contributing to the further (re)sharpening of the emotional landscape along the lines described thus far, including the United Kingdom’s weekly ‘clap for carers’ and discursive (re)construction of the United Kingdom’s NHS as being ‘powered by love’ during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conflicted bodies  149

4.3 Pressured parts Having made a sharp angle of arrival into the spring of 2020 and as March turned to April and April to May, the faces around me would continue to show no fear, no grief, and no pain. As I explain next through the auto-ethnographic case study of the emotional landscape of my local area during the spring and summer of 2020, I saw and heard anger more frequently as the pandemic moved towards the first wave in April–May 2020, but this remained occasional, and I provoked it every time. Directed towards me, anger surfaced when I requested that others change course, and I once heard raised voices on the pavement outside because of the same conflicted feelings about ‘social distancing.’ However, beyond conflicts about the maintenance of social distance or the lack of it, throughout the spring and summer of 2020, the bodies in my vicinity continued to circulate seemingly unaffected. Of course, and as discussed earlier, the infected and shielded would stay out of public sight and space altogether – only working to heighten the atmospheric walls socially and politically constructed through the pandemic. However, other bodies appeared in public having been forced to – designated key workers by the government and so exempt from stay at home measures or those pressured into working through ‘furlough’ by their employers, who were desperate to keep businesses afloat.18 Through the lens of (re/dis)embodiment and mindful that ‘to be pressed is to be shaped by the force you receive’ (Ahmed, 2014: 56), I suggest that the carrying on of work in some parts during the pandemic was the result of social-political pressure materialising as clapping on and being (o)pressed into service and towards death. In the following section, the NHS’s discursive reconstruction as ‘powered by love’ and the United Kingdom’s weekly ‘clap for carers’ provide prime examples of such oppressive pressing during the COVID-19 pandemic. 4.3.1 Peer pressure For ten weeks in a row, every Thursday at 8 pm, we would be called to action. Television shows would be paused as we were instructed to ‘clap for our carers.’ Every week, we were told to clap louder (see Edmons, 28/05/2020) and more enthusiastically as those valued highly by dominant bodies – because of their functions and uses within the NHS and care homes – were clapped on by high-profile, elite clappers, including the PM, cabinet members, and celebrities who encouraged the wider British public to join in. Indeed, and as mentioned in Chapter 2, like the soldiers I have described as discursively produced as a ‘precious resource’ in life before going uncounted in death, carers have been similarly lauded in service throughout the pandemic. On his discharge from hospital, PM Johnson even referred to NHS workers, in econo-speak, echoing Kevin Hassett’s dehumanising mid-pandemic reference to the American public discussed in Chapter 2 as ‘human capital stock,’ as our ‘greatest national asset’ (Johnson, 12/04/2020). However, in addition to further demonstrating the utter reliance of necropolitical systems on the

150  Conflicted bodies uninterrupted extractive use of human bodies in the service of capital, the performative clapping on and of many towards death in service through the pandemic provides a prime example of the co-constitutive relationship of emotions and bodies on two distinct levels, as it involves the touching, moving, impressing, and, indeed, pressuring of a number of different parts of the body politic: Firstly, dominant bodies can be seen to have mobilised love as a means to touch and move the general public into the act of clapping. Second, the clapping on can be seen to have worked to touch and apply pressure and indeed oppress NHS and care workers who in lieu of living wages and PPE, were pressed into continued service. Within the block on which I lived through the United Kingdom’s spring 2020 ‘lockdown’, strange as it seems, no one could be heard clapping. I could hear the block over the road clapping more loudly as the weeks went by and banging on pots and pans too towards the end of the ten weeks. The cars driving past at high speed on the main road outside, however, honked their horns voraciously from the start. Friends would mention it in the group chat. ‘We’re clapping tonight!’ one announced. The next day, ‘it brought a tear to my eye’ another reported, while others, including me, stayed quiet. I noticed my partner would become anxious as 8 pm approached, start shuffling around the flat, opening the front door at five to, for the purpose of looking to see if anything was ‘going on.’ ‘Should I clap?’ he asked me one week. ‘I don’t want to, I don’t feel comfortable,’ he answered before I said anything. I think he felt pressure to do it, and he later confirmed to me that this was the case, filling me in on his ‘shuffling’ during those evenings and admitting that during the last event on Thursday 28 May, he had briefly stepped outside and ‘feebly clapped’ – after ‘giving in’ to the guilt while feeling increasing anger at having done so given his beliefs that clapping was an ‘empty gesture’ and what carers really needed was PPE to be immediately provided by the government. However, he was not alone in feeling increasingly under pressure during the weeks of being asked repetitively to ‘clap for carers’ as more succumbed to the virus daily. As one ex-colleague and resident of the village just outside of Aberdeen in Scotland living on a street with more enthusiastic clappers tweeted, I do feel there are elements of this weekly national activity that are somewhat Orwellian. Like maybe being paranoid, but I’m pretty sure we were being judged by our street last week for not being out (when we had a pretty tired wee girl trying to get to sleep…)…. I’m fine, and I really like it, or at least the idea. But the mad folk in our street have taken it to new levels of Orwellian nightmare. I’m pretty sure there’s a list of who isn’t out. (@MalcH, 09/04/2020) Here, Malcolm Harvey, even provides his excuse for ‘dipping out’ of a clap (putting his infant child to bed) in his tweet. As if you need an excuse. Meanwhile, others began to speak out – naming the habitual clapping as ‘peer pressure’ and accordingly condoning it. See the following for example:

Conflicted bodies  151 Don’t feel this pressure to clap. I don’t. I live alone and just find it awkward. I show my respect by sticking to all of the rules thereby saving lives, and taking the pressure off the amazing carers. Which is more than I can say for a good few. (@MattieJameson, 30/04/2020) Lets have clapping peer pressure on the NHS and carers whilst they are abandoned again by #notmygovernment where is the communal anger, mourning and pressure on the govt whilst our FL workers are bit busy? (@tassybullah, 14/04/2020) All three of the previous responses to the ‘call to clap’ demonstrate the socialpolitical stakes of clapping/not clapping. At the community level, not clapping could lead to social ostracisation – ‘being judged,’ as Harvey puts it, while Jameson similarly feels the need to provide his ‘excuse’ for not clapping – ‘feeling awkward’ in his case. Finally, Bullah calls out the instruction to clap as a form of ‘peer pressure’ and asks, as I have in this chapter, about the absence of particular emotions in her vicinity – ‘anger and mourning.’ Indeed, in my area, ‘pride’ was the feeling generated instead, touching participants clapping during the first wave with 100% of my local survey respondents reporting feeling it while clapping. With the weekly ‘clap for carers’ revealing the further segmentation of parts of the body politic and the role of pressure in heightening atmospheric walls through the spring and summer of 2020’s first wave of coronavirus, in the following section, I discuss further mechanisms of emotional manipulation through the discursive reconstruction of the NHS as powered by love. 4.3.2 Powered by love Referring once again to the lively body politic described in Chapter 3, upon his release from hospital, PM Johnson (cited in Stubley, 12/04/2020: par. 1) declared that ‘our NHS is the beating heart of this country…. It is the best of this country. It is unconquerable it is powered by love.’ In this section, I consider the discursive production and weaponisation of love deployed against NHS and care workers as a form of oppressive social-political pressure working to (re/dis)embody such parts pressured into service without adequate PPE and to the point of death in some cases – more than 600 at the time of writing (see Bodell, 12/08/2020). Furthermore, I suggest that during the pandemic and in lieu of material incentives, such as PPE or ‘fair’ or ‘decent’ monetary rewards, UK governance through the spring and summer of the first wave, like the GWoT according to Massumi (in Åhäll and Gregory, 2015: 20), increasingly ‘operates in the realm of affect.’ Emerging after the initiation of ‘clap for carers’ and, like the Better Health strategy which, discussed in Chapter 3, placed responsibility on specific members of the public to not use public health services and instead ‘protect’ the NHS, after PM Johnson’s own hospitalisation with COVID-19, the discursive (re)production of the NHS as an institution ‘powered by love’ began in April. On top of clapping, the weaponisation and deployment of love worked to intensify the affective

152  Conflicted bodies pressure being directed towards particular parts of the body politic: NHS and care workers. Indeed, on 12 April, in a short address self-filmed and tweeted out, described as ‘one of the most remarkable pieces of political communication of the modern era’ (Martin, 12/04/2020), Johnson reports back to the public that I have seen the pressure the NHS is under. I have seen the personal courage not just of the doctors and nurses but of everyone, the cleaners, the cooks, the health care workers of every description – physios, radiographers, pharmacists – who have kept coming to work, kept putting themselves in harm’s way, kept risking this deadly virus. It is thanks to that courage, devotion, and that love that our NHS has been unbeatable. (Cited in Stubley, 12/04/2020: par. 12) This is a very particular framing and fascinating given my focus on the social-political emotional pressuring of particular parts of the body politic during the pandemic. First, Johnson describes the NHS as an institution ‘under pressure’ (ibid), going on to give ‘thanks’ to the human body parts put to work in its service, ‘the doctors and nurses…the cleaners, the cooks’(ibid) etc, for alleviating that pressure and making the NHS ‘unbeatable.’ Second, Johnson informs the public audience of the affective situations of NHS workers, describing their ‘courage, devotion, and the love’ (ibid) and how this meant they ‘kept coming to work’ (ibid) through the pandemic. As Ahmed has outlined in relation to the family, with the declaration of love comes pressure: ‘Love becomes a way of bonding with others in relation to an ideal, which takes shape as an effect of such bonding’ (2014: 124). Furthermore, in line with PM Johnson’s government’s instruction, discussed in Chapter 3, for the public to ‘protect the NHS,’ the primary object of Johnson’s rhetoric and concern is the NHS, not the human beings put to work, used, and in more than 600 cases used up in its service during the COVID-19 pandemic to date. Indeed, a rhetorical and political reorientation might have seen the NHS workers themselves placed at the centre and becoming the objects of Johnson’s rhetoric and concern and the NHS (re)constructed as a provider of their security, as a decent employer ensuring safe working conditions in a time of national crisis as a means to ‘protect NHS staff.’ Moreover in his affective appropriation, in a style commonly used to (re)produce the solider as heroic, brave, and, ultimately, sacrificial, the PM constructs NHS workers as ‘courageous and devoted.’ In the case of the social-political construction and, indeed, pressing of the soldier, soldiers are typically constructed as heroes – as valiant, courageous, brave, and fearless ‘warriors’ – to the point of becoming sacrificial in the American case that I know so well (see Purnell, 2018). Indeed, this constructed and performative identity comes to be embodied and applies pressure itself while serving a strategic purpose – not only on the battlefield but also within the homeland and body politic – as through the soldier’s sacrifice, ‘the social is quite literally constructed from the body, and from specific bodies dedicated and used up for the purpose’ (Marvin and Ingle, 1999: 2–21). Through this lens, the sacrificial using up of soldiers and their worship as heroes is exactly what

Conflicted bodies  153 binds the body politic back together at the close of war. However, as pressed into service, the soldier must appear to go willingly as a ‘happy sacrifice’ (ibid: 74–75), while deviation from the role of warrior is not permitted. Ann Jones’s ethnographic work with serving troops and veterans of the GWoT is testament to this, and she reports that, when an American soldier loses the ability to remain ‘unaffected by fear’ (cited in Jones, 2013: 148), they are pathologised through the label of post-traumatic stress disorder, or as one veteran put it, ‘The VA hands you a medical diagnosis and a bunch of prescriptions to shut you up’ (ibid). In the case of COVID-19, the NHS and care home workers can be seen to have taken the place of the soldier – via not only their pressing into continued service but also through the drowning out of their deviations from the role of ‘willing sacrifice.’ For example, we know now that many NHS did not feel courageous or brave but rather desperate, angry, and afraid while being clapped at and indeed clapped over during the peak of the first wave of COVID-19. For example, Meenal Viz, a hospital doctor who took to the streets of London six months pregnant in a solo protest at her working conditions told The Guardian (cited in Cadwalladr, 20/04/2020: par. 6), ‘A lot of people are afraid for their own safety but they’re also afraid of losing their jobs,’ going on to underline that, contrary to Johnson’s affective (re)construction of NHS and care workers as ‘courageous,’ ‘I’m not a warrior. And none of us should have to ‘sacrifice’ ourselves to do our jobs’ (ibid: par. 11). Furthermore, on 28 May, during the last clap for carers, NHS workers ‘took a knee’ while holding signs that said, ‘Doctors not Martyrs’ outside of Number 10 Downing Street as a means to protest their dangerous working conditions (see Hussein et al., 28/05/2020). Finally, by rhetorically foregrounding the pressure on the NHS as institution, Johnson overlooks the pressure those workers were themselves placed under during the pandemic – pressure applied in the form of the weekly national clapping encouraged by his very government while the announcement that there will now be an annual ‘National Clap for Our Carers Day’ every 25 March only further likens the carer to the sacrificial solider who, as hero, the public is accustomed to ‘thanking’ annually through partaking in rituals, including adorning themselves with a poppy and two-minute silence on Remembrance Sunday in the UK setting. 4.3.3 Disruptive parts? In this chapter I have zoomed in to the level of my own affective-embodied experience though the spring-summer 2020’s first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and triangulated this with local survey results and digital ethnography in the hopes of gaining a better appreciation of the mechanisms facilitating the heightening of atmospheric walls within the UK body politic. Finding these to be (1) affective angles of arrival; (2) losing touch; (3) the containment of grief; and (4) the pressuring of (body) parts. Moreover, as an empirical endeavor aimed at responding to the question of how covid-19 feels while contributing to knowledge in the co-constitutive relation between emotions and individual

154  Conflicted bodies and collective bodies, this chapter has begun to map out the politics of the emotional landscape constructed and embodied during the COVID-19 pandemic’s first wave finding it divided intersectionaly along raced, classed, and gendered lines by atmospheric walls keeping some bodies contained at the expense of others. Throughout this chapter, in alluding to pressures: myself relieved of certain pressures while others were pressured into work in dangerous and exploitative working environments or out to clap for carers, although they really didn’t feel like it and with the NHS workers and careers discussed now organising and protesting publicly – their disquiet now becoming palpable within some parts of the United Kingdom (those most affected by COVID-19) – I am concluding this chapter by considering the capacity of such contained parts to become wilful, break down atmospheric walls, and in turn pressure other parts and reshape the emotional landscape. Indeed, given that bodies are emotionally moved into or prevented from action according to how they feel and how politics itself is operating increasingly in the necropolitical mode and affective realm, doing so would not only make an emotional difference to individuals and communities throughout the body politic but also interrupt the circulatory flow of dominant bodies operating in the necropolitical mode. However, the landscape described in this chapter seems to be carved to exactly prevent these parts’ actions from becoming known and felt throughout the body politic and therefore itself further threatens the health and coherence of the collective body politic as the pandemic goes on.

Notes 1 Chertsey is a London commuter town and sits within the protected areas where construction is restricted to preserve a ‘green belt’ around the capital. 2 Of my respondents, 29.1% were designated ‘key workers’ during the pandemic. 3 I am the first and, to date, the last person in my family to attend and be awarded a university degree (let alone three). 4 Code-switching is the practice of alternating between languages or linguistic styles. For an introduction to the implications of code-switching, see Peter Auer’s “CodeSwitching in Conversation: Language, Interaction and Identity” (1998). 5 See Runnymede Borough Council’s 2018 ‘Runymede Profile’: https://www.runnymede.gov.uk/media/19119/Runnymede-Borough-Profile/pdf/Runnymede_ Borough_Profile_-_Oct_2018.pdf?m=636753703217300000. 6 See my 03/05/2020 Global Public Health COVID-19 Diaries entry “Calm the F**k Down!” for more on the hostilities I encountered. 7 The dates that the strictest government guidance was in place were 23 March to 10 May, along with the instruction to ‘stay home.’ 8 At the time of writing (August 2020), UK airports had still not established a testing programme for incoming passengers. 9 The ‘R-rate’ is the term used to refer to the latest reproduction number (R) and growth rate of coronavirus (COVID-19) in the United Kingdom (see https://www. gov.uk/guidance/the-r-number-in-the-uk). 10 See my discussion in Chapter 3 entitled Long Live the Body Politic! 11 I proofed this Chapter in the final days of December 2020. 12 See Go Surrey’s Coronavirus dashboard: https://www.gosurrey.co.uk/coronavirus/. 13 A previous iteration of this section appeared in the Global Public Health COVID-19 Diaries entry “On Numbers and Numbness” on 19 July 2020.

Conflicted bodies  155 14 On 17 March, Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance reported to the British government that 20,000 British deaths would be ‘a good outcome’ (cited in Johnson, 17/03/2020b) given the 8,000 excess deaths caused by seasonal flu annually. Vallance went on to reiterate during the daily government press briefing on 28 March that excess COVID-19 deaths in the United Kingdom would mean that ‘we will have done very well’ (cited in Hughes, 28/03/2020). 15 See Cowburn (18/08/2020). 16 See Booth (28/04/2020). 17 See https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/. 18 Details shared with the author in confidence by participants wishing to remain anonymous.

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Conflicted bodies  157 isfree/2020/aug/03/nation-mourns-covid-19-dead-boris-johnson-triumphalism#comment142762942. Mannergren Selimovic, Johanna. 22/05/2020. ‘Remembering Corona: The Politics of Memory and the Pandemic,’ Utrikesmagasin, URL: https://www.ui.se/utrikesmagasinet/ kronikor/2020/remembering-corona-the-politics-of-memory-and-the-pandemic/. Marvin, C. and Ingle, D. 1999, Blood, Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 13/04/2020. ‘The Universal Right to Breathe,’ Critical Inquiry, URL: https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/. McSorley, Keven. 2020. ‘Sensate Regimes of War: Smell, Tracing and Violence,’ Security Dialogue, Vol. 51(2–3) 155–173. Nazir, Sahar. 20/07/2020. ‘Big Interview: Jason Perry, Head of Online Development, Co-op,’ Retail Gazette, URL: https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2020/07/ big-interview-jason-perry-head-of-online-development-co-op/. Ng, Kate. 17/07/2020. ‘Matt Hancock Orders Urgent Review into How Coronavirus Daily Deaths Are Calculated,’ The Independent, URL: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ uk/home-news/coronavirus-daily-deaths-public-health-england-uk-matt-hancockstats-a9624126.html. Office for National Statistics, 11/10/2013. ‘2011 Census: Key Statistics and Quick Statistics for Local Authorities in the United Kingdom,’ ONS, URL: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/bulletins/ keystatisticsandquickstatisticsforlocalauthoritiesintheunitedkingdom/2013-10-11. Office for National Statistics, 17/07/2020. ‘Deaths involving COVID-19, England and Wales: Deaths Occurring in June 2020,’ ONS, URL: https://www.ons.gov. uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/ deathsinvolvingcovid19englandandwales/deathsoccurringinjune2020. Papoulias, Stan. 06/04/2020. ‘Wine Spirit,’ The Polyphony, URL: https://thepolyphony. org/2020/04/30/wine-spirit/. Power, Gabriel. 18/02/2020. ‘The Most ExpensiveTowns Outside London in the UK,’Portfolio, URL: https://www.theweek.co.uk/80569/the-most-expensive-uk-towns-outside-london. Powys Maurice, Emma. 08/08/2020. ‘Devastating Impact of Lockdown on LGBT+ Mental Health Laid Bare as Study Reveals Seven in 10 Are Suffering from Depression,’ Pink News, URL: https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/08/08/ lgbt-mental-health-lockdown-queeratine-study-university-college-london-sussex/. Purnell, Kandida. 2018. ‘Grieving, Valuing and Viewing Differently: The Global War on Terror’s American Toll,’ International Political Sociology, Vol. 12(2): 156–171. Purnell, Kandida. 29/04/2020. From PhD to Pandemic. Global Public Health COVID-19 Diaries, URL: https://covid19healthdiaries.com/diary?did=170. Purnell, Kandida. 19/07/2020. ‘On Numbers and Numbness,’ Global Public Health COVID-19 Diaries, URL: https://covid19healthdiaries.com/diary?did=306. Pyman, Tom. 20/06/2020. ‘Government Is Accused of Underplaying Coronavirus Death Toll at height of Crisis as It Is Revealed More than 1,000 People Died Every Day in the UK for 22 consecutive days,’ DailyMail, URL: https://www.dailymail. co.uk/news/article-8441651/More-1-000-people-died-day-UK-22-consecutivedays.html. Raj, Deborah Inioluwa. 10/07/2020. ‘The Discomfort of Death Counts: Mourning through the Distorted Lens of Reported COVID-19 Death Data,’ Patterns, URL: https://www. cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2666-3899%2820%2930086-6. Roxby, Phillipa. 01/05/2020. ‘Coronavirus: ‘Many Said Goodbye To Loved Ones in an Ambulance,” BBC News, URL: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52441692.

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Conclusions

Not only in wartime or during crises,1 such as those brought on, sped up, and further revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic and explored in the book, but all of the time and everywhere, local-global politics inescapably starts and ends in and with bodies. Thus, concerning every body, the COVID-19 pandemic has done a lot of work for me by revealing the management techniques and pervasive social-political manipulations and interventions in the lives/deaths and (re/dis) embodiments of not only seemingly extremely placed and obviously exposed locally internationally contested bodies (the ones that I would focus on in my writing ‘before’ and that I have detailed in the preceding chapters – contests that have played out through the bodies of American soldiers and Guantánamo Bay hunger strikers, for example) but also the no less political contests of everyday (re/dis)embodiments, including my own. Through this book, and increasingly ‘using’ the COVID-19 pandemic as it went on, I have, therefore, tried to describe and emphasise how more and less privileged and grievable bodies in everyday and mundane as well as extreme situations are continuously contested by no more or less social-political processes of (re/dis)embodiment. In the end, I brought myself into this study. However, I did this most explicitly only after detailing violent (re/dis)embodiments engendered thanks to particular beings’ gradual reduction and or expulsion from the category of some body and the fleshing out of bodies politic via particular and dominant (power/)knowledge2 about human bodies. But really, this book could have started with and focused on anybody or any bodies because, although the often extreme physical violence brutality experienced by some (bodies) has meant their disproportionate inclusion within the purview of IR over the years, as I have emphasised throughout this text that every body is a contested site of local-global politics and subject to no more or less ‘amounts’ of ‘it.’ Of course, given the purpose of IR – to understand and explain the causes of war, peace, and political violence – IR’s empirical focus is logical and entirely and particularly understandable ethically. Indeed, through investigating bodies in pain and bodies blown to bits having become most explicitly entangled in machineries and of violent warfare and becoming the objects of what has been described throughout this book as discourses of exclusionary violence, IR scholars have rightly shone a light on atrocity and injustice and raised important questions about the use and abuse of particular embodied subjects – highlighting how gender and race play a crucial role in

160  Conclusions making some bodies more vulnerable than others and increasingly logging the ways and means through which bodies are made and unmade, as well as how bodies are made (in)visible and represented in global politics by what I have termed dominant (government, military, and mass media, elite) bodies. However, as I have tried to explain and illustrate, every body has a story to tell about local-global politics and power. Moreover, as I have found, no body is more or less likely to be able to tell you about power operations and the logics informing and producing patterns of contemporary local-global (re/ dis)embodiment. I, therefore, have meant to suggest and encourage scholars from all factions and corners of the discipline of IR and beyond to try closely appraising more obvious, subtle, and, indeed, barely perceptible bodily contests going on within their empirical settings. Indeed, homing in on any body can, if you look closely, tell you about so much beyond that body and immediate setting because – again, as I have underlined in this book – every body is not only ontologically and existentially in excess of itself and, therefore, profoundly reliant and dependent on others but also connected via the hierarchical global endoskeleton of the world, which holds a place and accounts for every last body and body part – increasingly counting and accounting at the molecular bottom line of life and death itself. In short, this is because every body comes into and out of being according to logics greater and agents far beyond itself and thus comes to embody those logics as the fleshed-out performative materialisations of power/knowledge and the local-global, social-political contests it emerges from. Indeed, this is what makes bodies such uniquely rich sites of investigation. The conceptual and theoretical arguments made within this book have been devised over the best part of a decade and accrued and laid out within four stages through a process of simultaneous theoretical development and empirical research resulting in what has become a unique, detailed, and robust theory of (re/dis)embodiment considering not only processes of (de)humanisation but also how particular (re)constructions of human bodies reverberate around and are fleshed out as lively bodies politic and their collective body parts. Indeed, defining (re/dis)embodiment as the continuously contested and intense localglobal, social-political process through which bodies continually come to be, not be, or become other than bodies, though this book, I broke the process down into constituent factors, influences, and logics, including precariousness, ontological (in)security, and emotion (in Chapter 1 “On Bodies”), necropolitical dividing practices (in Chapter 2 “Body Politics”), and the power(/knowledge) of the bodily metaphors with a specific focus on responses to the COVID19 pandemic and the embodiment of the pandemic at the level of the British population (in Chapter 3 “The Body Politic”). Moreover, beyond this, in Chapter 4 (“Conflicted Bodies”), I used aspects of the current COVID-19 pandemic and responses to it as a means to demonstrate the utility of thinking from, through, and with bodies and embodied experiences as a means to better understand not only contemporary dynamics of domination, contest of body politics, and particular processes of (re/dis)embodiment but also wider formations of power(/knowledge) and the character and logics informing localnational-regional-global political trends and behaviours.

Conclusions  161 Despite my perhaps too grand ambition to ‘rethink the body in global politics,’ I am well aware that this book only really scratches the surface, begins to join the interdisciplinary dots, and provides but a starting point from which to now start the hard work of rethinking bodies within the study of global politics. Therefore, to reaffirm and bring together this book’s key contributions, in the following concluding paragraphs, I underline and reaffirm the implications of the book’s main contributions to ontological (in)security, necro(body)politics, bodies politic, and bodies with COVID-19 before outlining limitations and suggesting avenues for future research.

Ontological (in)security Through Chapter 1’s study, “On Bodies,” I provided an introduction to rethinking bodies, not as a-or pre-political units to then be acted upon by political forces and violence but as always already deeply political processes and the ongoing result of their (re/dis)embodiment. The concepts key to informing this process were laid out in turn as I described bodies as bodies as precarious, excessive, and ontologically insecure before going on to introduce the mutually constitutive relation of emotion and bodies. Crucially, the understanding of ontological (in)security introduced in Chapter 1 engaged with and built upon IR’s burgeoning Ontological Security Theory (OST) by widening the notion of the ontological (in)security to encompass bodies and deepening it to the existential/ontological level of being in itself while underlining the need for a reconsideration of the notion of ontological (in)security that foregrounds the acute, fundamental, and material insecurity of embodied beings. Indeed, this expanded and deeper notion of ontological (in) security works as a contribution to OST and IR writ large by outlining how bodies – in the form human(ised) bodies or bodies politic – become more or less ontologically (in)secure. Finally, as the book went on, I illustrated the utility of taking this expanded and deeper aspect of ontological (in)security into account as I explained the ways and means through which individual and collective bodies become known and used as body parts in the service of others, often being made less grievable as their value increases only to be discarded upon expiry according to the necropolitical imperatives laid out in Chapter 2.

Necro(body)politics In Chapter 2, I mapped out and characterised what can best be described as common contemporary trends in the management, governance, and (ab)use of bodies. Arguing that the COVID-19 pandemic has made body management techniques more visible and deadly, I drew and built on necropolitical theory – bringing this into conversation with Sara Ahmed’s work on bodies and use to describe contemporary body (necro) politics as marked out by a visual regime that works to entrench and reinforce a hierarchy of bodily (e)valuation and grievability based on intersectional class-, race-, and gender-based discriminations which allow for embodied beings to be dis-embodied through their reduction of the status of the (body) part to function in the service of other bodies. I also used Dionne Brand’s

162  Conclusions (04/07/2020: par. 1) recent articulation on ‘the endoskeleton of the world’ to describe how every body is arranged in a hierarchical chain according to not only race, gender, and class but also according to use and value. I also tried to explain and illustrate how value and grievability do not necessarily align as some bodies, valued extremely highly and even lauded in life – made as a ‘precious resource’ or ‘capital stock’ – are simultaneously invisibilised and go ungrieved, sometimes being literally dumped as trash after death. Moreover, I underlined that such dynamics of (in)visibility and (un)grievability sustain power in the necropolitical mode as the unseen and ungrieved using up of such parts is precisely what (re-) fuels contemporary necropolitical structures, allows necropolitical bodies to save face, and literally buys time for other bodies further up the chain of bodily (e)valuation. Indeed, through Chapter 2, I not only characterised contemporary global body politics but also attempted to pinpoint weaknesses and contradictions inherent to this in itself precarious formation of necropolitical power(/knowledge). These stem from necropolitics’ emergence from what was, for a long time, at least on the face of it, a life-affirming and humanitarian biopolitical international system with actors attempting to save face despite their increasing necropolitical tendencies. As such, in this chapter, I brought in the motif of mask and face to describe how, in a time of COVID-19, the biopolitical masks worn by necropolitical actors can be seen coming off as the COVID-19 pandemic means body parts are being used and used up more and more quickly. I suggest that the dominant bodies’ contradictory (biopolitical/necropolitical) character can, therefore, potentially be exploited and manipulated by other subordinate bodies who can work to provoke such actors into dropping their masks completely and thereby exposing their necropolitical faces to the public and viewing international peers. It is as such that I have found the mask and face motif fitting for capturing the behaviour that contemporary acceleration of necropolitics engenders in actors explicitly engaged in and committed to biopolitical values. In light of Achille Mbembe’s warning that ‘soon, it will no longer be possible to delegate one’s death to others’ (13/04/2020. par. 6), the questions raised through this chapter concern the sustainability of necropolitics itself because, as the pandemic goes on, it is becoming harder to keep the work of death out of sight and unfelt by those who rightly contest the wastage and dumping of human bodies in the name of capital.

The body politic In Chapter 3, I began to show the merits of rethinking bodies and body politics along the lines laid out in Chapters 1 and 2. I did this through a study on the power(/knowledge) of metaphor (the metaphoricity) of the body politic and its fleshed-out materialisation in the UK setting provided by the COVID-19 pandemic’s first wave in the spring and summer of 2020. Arguing that the body politic is not a dead metaphor but unwell, in this chapter, I pushed forwards and applied the work of Stefanie Fishel (2017) and again intermixed this with Sara Ahmed’s lively bodily paradigm to show that the body at the source of the body politic materialises as not only individual bodies but also collective parts of bodies politic that are ill-equipped and unsuited to a healthy life in the international

Conclusions  163 system and unsuited to thrive in the face of contemporary threats, including, and namely, the COVID-19 pandemic. Sparked by Prime Minister (PM) Boris Johnson’s 5 March off-the-cuff comment that the United Kingdom should ‘take it [the COVID-19 pandemic] on the chin’3 and motivated to discover who will become the chin? this chapter ended up taking up the case of the PM’s very own (re/dis)embodiment through the spring and into the summer of 2020. From his diagnosis, hospitalisation, and discharge, through to press-ups performed in public by a lighter Boris Johnson telling the British public to ‘lose 5 pounds’ in preparation for a second wave of COVID-19, and the launch of the United Kingdom’s ‘Better Health’ strategy, I demonstrated how dominant knowledge continues to circulate in the form of Enlightenment-era ideas about the individual and sovereign ‘Leviathan’ bodies intermingled with stubborn and increasingly macho formations of masculinity and reverberates to become fleshed out throughout the body politic towards the (ab)use of other bodies and collective body parts in turn. With becoming ‘chinless’ being by definition a sign of weakness, the head of state’s self-mutilating command was found not only rhetorically telling but also as already proving materially self-defeating as – in line with the wider necropolitical dynamics outlined in Chapter 2 and summarised above – it entails the physical using up of the body politic’s most vital and valuable parts. Indeed, following the shameful admission by UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock MP on 15 March that the ravaged NHS had been left with only 5,000 ventilators (see Otte, 15/03/2020) and 20,000 deaths being framed by the end of March as ‘having done very well’ by the United Kingdom’s chief scientific officer Sir Patrick Vallance (cited in Hughes, 28/03/2020), it is perhaps more important than ever to return to Michel Foucault’s observation (1980: 58) that ‘one needs to study what kind of body the current society needs’ – especially as the COVID-19 death toll hovers at 65,000 at the time of writing, and during the second wave those bodies deemed responsible for their own infection (the overweight) are being threatened with house arrest in the name of protecting the NHS and facilitating the continued flow of capital via the circulation of bodies deemed healthy and strong according to what has been found to be severely outdated criteria.

Bodies with COVID-19 In Chapter 4, I zoomed in closer than before to the level of my own affective-­ embodied experience through the spring and summer of 2020’s first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. As an empirical endeavour driven by the co-constitutive conceptualisation of emotions and bodies outlined in Chapter 1, I did this as a means to begin to map out the emotional landscape constructed and embodied during the COVID-19 pandemic’s first wave. Motivated by and grounded in everyday experiences and, indeed, feelings – of discomfort, confusion, and dislocation – this chapter provides an initial response to the question how does COVID-19 feel? and begins to suggest why it feels as such and to whom. Drawing for a final time on Ahmed’s work, this time on atmospheric walls (15/09/2014), in this chapter, I describe how gendered, raced, and classed angles of arrival; individual bodies

164  Conclusions and collective body parts losing touch; and containment of grief have through the COVID-19 pandemic worked to build up atmospheric walls segregating parts of the body politic and allowing the continued circulation of some bodies and again facilitating the continued use and using up of others – lower down the endoskeleton of the world – in the service of others and, ultimately, capital in line with the necropolitical imperatives introduced in Chapter 3.

Limitations and suggestions for further research While certainly liberating, abandoning the ‘methodological safety net’ (Zalewski, 2013: 133) as I got further into this project was not an easy thing to do. Indeed, as a result of the digressions made towards the production of this text, I have certainly failed to produce viable, falsifiable, testable, replicable conclusions in the eyes of many in my field.4 Moreover, conducting research during a global pandemic, as it unfolded, comes with a series of challenges. Barriers ruling out the use of a number of research methods because of the pandemic and lockdown restrictions and for personal reasons. For example, I did not break social distancing of 2 metres, even after government guidelines lifted, meaning I was unable to ‘feel the atmosphere’ (Brennan, 2004: 1) inside public spaces, including workplaces, pubs, restaurants, and cafes as they reopened. Indeed, because of my anxious composition and angle of arrival, I most probably missed a great deal. In these ways and more, this book, and in particular my auto-ethnographic, led the fourth chapter to be very obviously limited. However, I have tried to make that the point by explicitly confronting the stark invisibilities and losses of the pandemic by starting with what was out of sight and touch to me during the pandemic. Moreover, despite its shortcomings, through this book, I have not only laid out and given due theoretical weight to the discourse and practice of dominant bodies but also tried to emphasise how subordinate bodies and parts cut off – in the ambulance, in the home, and even on their hospital and deathbeds – contest and protest and work and move, make changes, and are, therefore, active in processes of (re/dis)embodiment until and beyond their dying breaths. Therefore, it is my hope that future work in this vein will continue to start and end with the microscopic focus on everyday (re/dis)embodiments as, in the end, this is exactly where I found global politics in its most potent, vital, and deadly forms. Going forwards, this project’s third and fourth chapters call for immediate expansion and scaling up so that the framework introduced in Chapters 1 and 2 can be applied and pushed through application in more and more diverse empirical settings by more and more diverse authors. As a first step, I would suggest similar studies investigating the fleshing out of the body politic in other countries and asking what does COVID-19 feel like? in contrasting locales to the one within which I became situated in and wrote this book. For example, conducting a comparative case study and surveying the residents of a town with contrasting demographics and much more sorely afflicted by COVID-19 would immediately build on the findings of the study presented in Chapter 4. Indeed, after Chertsey residents’ enthusiastic engagement with the pilot survey and as the spring’s first wave took hold, I began following the case of Newham, London, which,

Conclusions  165 providing a stark contrast with predominantly (81.3%) white British Chertsey, has one of the lowest indigenous white British populations in the country, a more than 70% BAME population, and an overall life expectancy of 57.9 years, meaning the residents of Chertsey live on average 20 years longer. In fact, Newham is a particularly unhealthy borough, with the highest rate of tuberculosis in the United Kingdom reported in 2019 (see Peracha, 28/03/2019). With an employment rate of 50% (versus Chertsey’s of 78.2%), Newham residents are also much poorer, with residents being amongst the 10% of the most deprived people in England, with 42.3% of children living in poverty compared to 10% in Chertsey. When COVID-19 arrived in England, Newham also suffered disproportionately within the first wave of the pandemic, while Chertsey remained a comparatively safe place to reside. With the pandemic going largely unfelt and unseen to me in Chertsey, occasional news coverage of Newham’s opposite experience during spring 2020 brought the borough to my attention and led me to attempt to reach out to the community with my survey. Indeed, as a place providing a stark demographic comparison to Chertsey, surveys completed by Newham residents would have allowed my study to take on a comparative dimension while the contrasting communities’ empirical observations would have added granularity and depth to claims and arguments presented in this book. However, not having an existing network or being party to local private Facebook groups as I am in Chertsey by virtue of being a resident5 presented a barrier which became insurmountable on top of the study proving too much of a stretch within the time constraints of this project. However, going forwards, an initial comparative study of this kind and an even larger scale multi-case and cross-country comparative project including more longitudinal data, investigating how COVID-19 feels now strongly suggests itself. Going forwards within expanded versions of this study, I would also make a more concerted effort to reach those parts ‘pressured,’ ‘cut off,’ and ‘contained’ by atmospheric and materialising walls during COVID-19 – by working with and through general practitioners’ surgeries, care homes, and currently mobilising NHS advocacy groups,6 for example. Doing so would begin to allow for a more holistic and less partial view of the emotional and embodied landscapes of COVID-19 to emerge in future iterations of this work. Finally, future investigations should also be translated into other national contexts and consider the work of transnational movements as the intersectional violences and injustices redoubled through the COVID-19 pandemic begin to engender multiple forms of resistance, as demonstrated by the mobilisation of the intercontinental Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the spring of 2020.

Notes 1 The COVID-19 pandemic has been understood as exposing and engendering all manner of crises, including a ‘health crisis’ (Wade and Butler, 13/05/2020), a ‘crisis of care’ (The Care Collective, 26/03/2020), and ‘crisis society’ (Pulignano and Marà, 25/04/2020). 2 I use power(/knowledge) throughout this book because of understanding (1) power as relational, as ‘neither given, nor exchanged, nor recovered, but rather exercised…it only exists in action’ (Foucault, 1980: 142) and (2) power and knowledge

166  Conclusions as inseparable and co-constitutive given Foucault’s (1978:98) distinction ‘between techniques of knowledge and strategies of power, there is no exteriority, even if they have specific roles and are linked together on the basis of their difference.’ 3 For a full transcript of the interview, see Krishna (10/03/2020). 4 J. Ann Tickner (in Ackerly et al. 2006:19) describes positivist IR as ‘committed to causality, hypothesis testing and replicability.’ 5 These groups make residency in the town compulsory as a pre-requisite for membership. 6 For example ‘Nurses United UK’(https://www.facebook.com/groups/NursesUnitedUK) and ‘NHS workers say no!’ (https://www.facebook.com/groups/314519933024565).

Bibliography Ackerly, Brooke A., Stern, Maria, and True, Jacqui. 2006. ‘Feminist Methodologies for International Relations,’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2014. ‘Wilful Subjects,’ Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2019. ‘What’s the Use?’ Croydon: Duke University Press. Brennan, Teresa. 2004. ‘The Transmission of Affect,’ Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1978. ʻThe History of Sexuality: Volume 1. An Introduction,ʼ London and New York: Penguin Books. Foucault, Michel. 1980. ‘Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977,’ ed. Colin Gordon; trans. Leo Marshall Colin Gordon, John Mepham and Kate Soper, Brighton: Harvester. Hughes, Ian. 28/03/2020. ‘UK coronavirus death toll below 20,000 ‘will be doing very well,’ warns NHS medical director,’ Essex Live, URL: https://www.essexlive.news/ news/uk-world-news/uk-coronavirus-death-toll-below-3996287 Krishna, Rachal. 10/03/2020. ‘Here is the transcript of what Boris Johnson said on This Morning about the new coronavirus,’ Full Fact, URL: https://fullfact.org/health/ boris-johnson-coronavirus-this-morning/ Mbembe, Achille. 13/04/2020. ‘The Universal Right to Breathe,’ Critical Inquiry, URL: https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/. Otte, Jedidajah. 15/03/2020. ‘Coronavirus: UK manufacturers urged to consider switching to making ventilators,’ The Guardian, URL: https://www.theguardian. com/politics/2020/mar/15/coronavirus-uk-manufacturers-urged-to-consider-switching-to-making-ventilators. Peracha, Qasim. 28/03/2019. ‘The parts of London where you are more likely to get TB than in the third world,’ MyLondon, URL: https://www.mylondon.news/news/ west-london-news/parts-london-you-more-likely-16038200. Pulignano, Valeria and Marà, Clara. 25/03/2020. ‘The coronavirus, social bonds and the “crisis society”,’ Social Europe, URL: https://www.socialeurope.eu/ the-coronavirus-social-bonds-and-the-crisis-society. The Care Collective. 26/03/2020. ‘COVID-19 pandemic: A crisis of care,’ Verso Books Blog, URL: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4617-covid-19-pandemic-a-crisis-of-care. Wade, Francis and Butler, Judith. 13/05/2020. ‘Judith Butler on the violence of neglect amid a health crisis,’ The Nation, URL: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/ judith-butler-force-of-nonviolence-interview/. Zalewski, Marysia. 2013, ‘Theorizing emotion: affective borders in Homeland,’ Critical Studies on Security, 1(1): 133–135.

Index

Page numbers in italic indicate figures and page numbers in n indicate note. Aamer, Shaker 54–55, 74 Abu Ghraib 8 Ackerly, Brooke 19 affect 43–45 affective turn 44–45 Afghan Kill Team (AKT) 37, 38 Agamben, Giorgio 7, 38, 57n11, 76–78, 86 Ǻhäll, Linda 9, 41–43 Ahmed, Sara 12, 17–18, 41, 45–48, 50–51, 55–56, 79–83, 95–97, 106, 130, 131, 133–135, 138, 140, 152, 161–164 Aistrope, Tim 10 al-Kandar, Faiz 75 Auchter, Jessica 8, 19, 34, 68, 79, 135, 136 Austin, J. L. 98 Bakarwi, Tarik 38 Baker, Catherine 10 Bargu, Banu 38 Baudrillard, Jean 49 Becares, Laia 143–144 Bell, Coleen 99 Bercito, Diogo 65 Bergson, Henri 45 Berlant, Lauren 79, 88n5 Berlant & Stewart 18 Better Health strategy 120–122, 152, 163 Bin Laden, Osama 43 biopolitics 66–68, 76–78; and face masks 72–74 Black Lives Matter 40, 165 Blieker, Roland 42 bodies 31; conflicted 129–157; with COVID-19 163–164; division of 76–78; emotional 40–56; in excess 32–33; manipulative 50–51; precarious 32–40

body politic, the 2, 95–128, 162–163; and COVID-19 103–106; dying as metaphor 106–112; and IR 97–98; living 100–103; as rhetorical device 96–97 body politics 2, 62–94; emotional 48–50; necro(body)politics 63–75 Bosse, Abraham 102, 102, 109 Bourdieu, Pierre 15 Brager, Jenna 31, 69, 89n17 Braidotti, Rosi 78–79 Brand, Dionne 23n4, 32, 64, 161–162 Brennan, Teresa 44, 46, 48, 129 Brexit 107 Bright, Evan 71 Bright, Jane 71 Brighton, Shane 38 Brown, Michael 103–104, 106 Burke, Anthony 35, 104 Bush, George W. 70, 97, 111, 112 Butler, Judith 15, 32–34, 36, 97, 98 Camp Delta 5, 10, 38–39, 53, 54, 57n27, 73–75, 100 Campbell, David 6, 49 Cannen, Emma 112 capital, human 85–86 Cash, John 56n6 Cavarero, Adriana 9, 36 CDA 18, 19 civil society organisations see CSOs Clare, Rachel 138–139 Clausewitz, Carl von 4, 24n12 Clough, Patricia 85–86 CMS 9–10 colonialism: British 103; European 82 conflict, bodily 2 Connery, Sean 132 Coole, Diana 48

168  Index Cooper, Melinda 86, 99 corporeal turn 6, 11, 14–15 COVID-19 2–6, 11, 13, 14, 16–18, 20, 22, 32, 34–35, 40–44, 47, 50, 56, 62–63, 99; and British body politic 101, 107–109; Global Health Diaries 22; and necropolitics 63–69, 72, 75–88; and (re/dis)embodiment 96, 129–158 Cox, Lloyd 43 Crawford, Neta C. 41, 57n18 Cregan, Kate 110 critical discourse analysis see CDA critical military studies see CMS critical security studies 9–10 CSOs 53, 54, 72 Cummings, Dominic 44, 107 Danilova, Natasha 9–10 Dean, Robert D. 111 death 68–69, 75–88; slow 88n5 Deleuze, Gilles 45, 73 Descartes, René 13, 44 Dillon, Michael 6 disembodiment 34, 36–37, 54, 55, 65, 75; in IR 7; necropolitical 82, 85; at NSGB 38–40 Dors, Diana 132 dualism 11, 45; Cartesian 13, 14; Enlightenment 104; Western 24n22 Duesterberg, James 133 Duncan Smith, Iain 118 Duriesmith, David 10 Dyvik, Synne 9 Edkins, Jenny 7–8, 24n11, 33, 48, 73, 86, 114, 147 Eitam, Efraim 78 Elizabeth I of England 7, 110 embodiment 2, 7, 9, 35; and affect 44–45; collective 99–101, 143; concept of 12–16; and COVID-19 17, 149; and disembodiment 36–37, 39; in IR 10–11, 34; necropolitical 96 emotion 31, 40–56; and bodies 45–48; and IR 41–43; vocabulary 43–45 Enlightenment body 11, 101, 104 Enloe, Cynthia 4, 99 Epstein, Charlotte 8 Esposito, Robert 103, 143 (e)valuation 76, 86–88 Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose 6 excess, bodily 32–33 Faldo, Nick 132 Fierke, Karin 8, 42, 97–98

Fishel, Stefanie 7, 17, 96, 105–106, 162 Fitzsimmons, Barry 71–72 Floyd, George 40 Forsyth, Bruce 132 Foucault, Michel 4, 8, 11, 19, 24n12, 66–68, 73, 76, 77, 86, 163, 165n2 Foxall, Andrew 112 Frost, Mervyn 112 Gaddafi, Muammar 8 Gaufman, Elizaveta 34–35 Giddens, Anthony 34 Gilbertson, Ashley 53–54 Giroux, Henry 68 Global War on Terror see GWoT Goffman, Erving 73 Goode, J. Paul 34–35 Gorka, Sebastian 62 Gregory, Thomas 8–9, 36, 37, 41–43 grief 52–54; containment of 2, 18, 48, 56, 130, 138–139, 144–145; politics of 42–43 Grosz, Elizabeth 31 Guattari, Félix 73 GWoT 4, 5, 9–10, 18, 20, 32, 37–39, 41, 43, 48, 49, 51, 53, 70, 74, 78, 86, 99, 111, 129, 137, 148–149; body politics 85 Gyasi, Yaa 24n22 Hancock, Matt 88, 121, 163 Haraway, Donna 7 Harrison, Mark 99 Harvey, Malcolm 151 Hassett, Kevin 85, 150 Haughton, Glenn John 117 Highmore, Ben 44 Hobbes, Thomas 7, 41, 100, 101, 103, 105–107; Leviathan 101–105, 102, 109 Holland, Jack 42, 43 Holocaust, the 76–78 Hoon, Geoffrey 51–53, 56, 57n23 Hutchison, Emma 42, 48–49, 98 Ingle, David 52, 57n24, 86 (in)security, ontological 34–36, 65, 161 international relations see IR invisibilisation 68, 72 (in)visibility 68–72 IR 1, 4, 6, 14–15, 19, 21, 78–79, 86, 159–160; see also under disembodiment; embodiment; auto-ethnography in 25n29; and bodies 6–11; feminist 9, 104; narrative 25n29; positivist 166n4 Ismail, Noor Huda 10

Index  169 Jabri, Vivienne 7, 54 Jackson, Richard 49 Jennings, Ben 102, 105, 107, 109 John, Elton 132 Johnson, Boris 2, 17, 36, 95–96, 102, 107, 108, 147–148, 150–152, 163; and (re/dis)embodiment 109–122 Johnson, Melissa 134 Joint Task Force Guantánamo see JTF-GTMO Jones, Ann 70, 86–87, 153 JTF-GTMO 5, 10, 38–40, 56n8, 57n27, 74, 100 Kant, Immanuel 44 Kantorowicz, Ernst 110 Kaplan, Amy 38 Kennea, Nigel 139 Kennedy, John F. 111 Khadr, Omar 39–40 Khalifa, Khaled 77 Khrushchev, Nikita 111 Kimbrough, Gray 85 Kimmel, Jimmy 63 Kneale, Dylan 143–144 Kristeva, Julia 10 Kruger, Barbara 5, 5 Kuenssberg, Laura 120 Laing, R. D. 34 Lakoff, George 99 Las Heras, Jon 68 Laterza, Vito 64 Law, John 24n24 Le Sommer, Samantha 122 Leahy, Patrick 70 Leder, Drew 33 Lee, Christopher 64 Lester, Nicola 52 Lesutis, Gediminas 68 Locke, John 7 Machiavelli 44 Macron, Emmanuel 117 Malik, Nesrine 144–145 Mangan, J. A. 111 Mannergren Selimovic, Johanna 140 Marlin-Bennett, Renee 8 Marvin, Caroline 52, 57n24, 86 masks 62–63, 72–74 Massumi, Brian 42–43, 152 Masters, Cristina 7 Mbembe, Achille 1, 3, 11, 63–65, 76, 80–83, 139, 162 McCullins, Dun 42

McDermott, Rose 42 McGee, Jenny 113 McSorley, Kevin 8 Mercer, Jonathan 42, 57n19 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 14 metaphoricity 17, 99, 100, 106–107, 114; of the body politic 98, 162 Morgenthau, Hans 41 Murray, Andy 132 Musloff, Andreas 101 Myers, Richard 78 National Health Service see NHS Naval Station Guantánamo Bay see NSGB necropolitics 2, 63–75, 161–162; and COVID-19 63–69, 72, 75–88; global 78–79 necropower 17, 63–64, 68–69, 73–74, 76–77, 80, 86, 129 Newman, Iver B. 8 NHS 18, 24n8, 47, 65, 80, 87–88, 97, 130, 149, 163; clapping for 18, 116, 130, 149–154; ‘powered by love’ 97, 149, 151–154 Noor, Poppy 63 NSGB 37–40, 54, 74, 100 Nuila, Ricardo 118–119 Obama, Barack 112 Oliver, Jamie 121 ontological security theory see OST OST 16–17, 34–36, 56n6, 73, 161 Papoulias, Stan 135, 136 Pawelec, Andrezej 106 performativity 31, 96–98, 112; theory of 15 Pierce, Joseph 62 Pin-Fat, Véronique 7–8 Pinochet, Augusto 132 Plato 13, 44 power(/knowledge) 9, 15, 40, 66, 147, 160, 162, 165n2 precariousness 31–40, 55, 65 Public Health England 23n7, 23n8 Pugliese, Joseph 86 Purnell, Sonia 118 Purser Brown, Zach 62 Putin, Vladimir 112 Raab, Dominic 117, 145, 146 racialisation 83 racism 44, 83; interplay with masculinity 112; structural 40

170  Index Raj, Deborah 147 Rasmussen, Claire 103–104, 106 (re/dis)embodiment 1–6, 9–17, 20, 31, 33, 35, 46, 56, 65, 74, 76, 83, 104, 111, 121, 135, 140, 142, 159; and COVID19 96, 129–158 Reeves, Audrey 9, 43 Richard, Cliff 132 Robertson, Hamish 64 Römer, Louis Philippe 64 Rose, Axl 62 Rose, Nikolas 85 Rosher, Ben 34 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 7 Runciman, David 107 Rwanda genocide 8 Saco, Diane 7, 110 Sarah, Duchess of York 132 Sasley, Brent 42 Saurette, Paul 97–98 Schofield, Phillip 95 selfhood 34–36, 56n5 Seymour, Wendy 15 Shakespeare, William 101, 112–113 Shaw, Marc 112 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 14 Shelton, Hugh 85–87 Shepherd, Laura 111 Shilling, Chris 14–15 Shinko, Rosemary 8, 85, 100–101, 110 Siege of Caffa 6 Silicio, Tami 71–72 Skeggs, Beverly 15 Solomon, Ty 43 Sontag, Susan 98–99 Spinoza 45 Spry, Tami 22 Stahl, Lesley 54–55 Stroup, David R. 34–35

Sunak, Rishi 116, 121 Sweet, Matthew 114 Sylvester, Christine 7 Thucydides 41 Tickner, J. Ann 109, 166n4 trauma 23, 34, 48–50, 98, 136; embodiment of 9 Travaglia, Joanne 64 True, Jacqui 19 Trump, Donald 62–63, 67–69, 75, 84, 117 Vallance, Patrick 155, 163 Van Rythoven, Eric 43 Van Veeren, Elspeth 68 Venus, David 9 Viz, Meenal 133, 153 Walton, Jason 8 Waltz, Kenneth 24n13, 24n20, 41 Watson, Elwood 112 Weber, Cynthia 7 Weissman, Jordan 85 Welland, Julia 9 Wendt, Alexander 98 Whitehead, Alfred North 12 Wilcox, Lauren 8, 101 Williams, Kayla 108 Williams, Owain 22 Willoughby, Holly 95 Wilson, Marieke 8 Wood, Steve 43 Wright-Foley, James 137 Young, Iris Marion 14 Zalewski, Marysia 21, 41, 48 Zevnik, Andreja 38