Corpo-Affective Politics of Anxious Breathing: On the Agential Force of Bodies and Affects in Vulnerable Protest

Abstract

Analysing SIA’s music video Big Girls Cry (2015), this chapter argues for a recognition of corpomaterial and affective agency amongst forms of political resistance beyond forms of protest, in which engagement can be restricted by bodily and affective vulnerability. It signals the agential significance of quotidian corpomaterial and affective actions in enacting political resistance by focusing on anxious breathing diffused throughout SIA’s music video. Although breathing and anxiety are not usually associated with politics, this chapter shows how quotidian corpomaterial and affective practices are intra-actively enacted through social power relations, and how they enact transformations, breaks, and re-directions of the ways social power relations are lived. It argues that striving for breath and for breathable lives needs a recognition of differential forms of political practices and resistance needs to focus not only on how bodies and affects act in politics but also how they enact politics in a quotidian manner.