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ID:
182976
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores how competing actors established, spread, and challenged visual representations of the Chinese nation during the COVID-19 pandemic. It asks: how do official gatekeepers of meaning in China imbue their visual construction of a crisis-hit nation with pathos?; and what happens when their critics utilize the resulting repertoire of visual cues for their own ends? To answer these questions, the article first examines the visual libraries of nationalism and national crisis from which Chinese propaganda drew during the COVID-19 outbreak. It then analyses the struggles that ensued over such representations, specifically the use of national flags and the sentiments they elicit. The analysis traces representations of the flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from an initial satirical portrayal in a Danish broadsheet to the angry Chinese backlashes that followed on social media, and it shows how the tensions over such portrayals became part of a meme war over the sovereignty of Hong Kong. The analysis shows how representations of the nation can become a matter of existential anxieties during a time of crisis, especially in highly networked communication environments where authoritative official actors and their supporters are no longer in control of the symbols they established as part of their ‘emotional governance’.
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| 2 |
ID:
151181
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article proceeds from a conceptual analysis of how ontological (in)security is constructed in terms of ‘security-of-being’ in which identity dynamics are explicated in socio-psychological terms. Of particular interest is how such dynamics transcend the boundaries of individual self/other constructions to define communities and states, and how these dynamics are transformed in times of trauma and crises. Narratives of everyday traumas are especially significant in creating notions of gendered space and (in)security, and for securitising subjectivities. This article thus investigates a number of theoretical propositions and developments involved in recent debates on the emotional dimension of ontological (in)security and its relationship to states, traumas and the securitisation of subjectivity. A gendered perspective of these debates allows us to analyse, and perhaps move beyond, some of the problematic aspects of the ontological security literature as originally developed by Laing and Giddens, and later on by sociologists and international relations scholars. Using the case of India as an example, the article shows how narrative reconstructions of traumas and collective memory shape gendered space and the search for ontological security, and how attempts to govern these events and practices impact on notions of gendered space and ontological insecurity.
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