Global anniversaries and cultural rupture: September 11, COVID-19 and ethical cultural change

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the role of anniversaries of global events or crises to understand how their practice of memorial storytelling manages and governs cultural narratives of crises in ways that obscure more productive approaches to resistance. Drawing on the 30th Anniversary of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (2022) as a call for new cultural approaches to anniversaries, this paper investigates their productive role in new imaginaries for ethics of cohabitation, interdependency and liveability. Anniversaries of global crises as rituals of interdependency and belonging can, it is argued, be critically understood not as instances of historical rupture but as moments of ontological adjustment. Building on the recent work of Judith Butler, it is suggested that such ontologies centre on the relationship between interdependency, equality of grievability and infrastructural supports for care, all of which must be apprehended from poststructuralist cultural perspectives. If cultural studies is to play an advocacy role towards ethical change, then making sense of how global anniversaries can highlight rather than obscure marginal ethical practices is a starting point for cultural change towards more equitable and liveable global cohabitation.

KEYWORDS:

• Anniversaries
• September 11
• COVID-19
• Butler
• ethics

Introduction

In late 2022, the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia celebrated its thirtieth anniversary as an organization promoting the teaching and research of cultural studies in the region. Although the archives of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia were lost many years ago in the precarity of time and the changing cultural attitudes to memorialization through documentary preservation (Cover and Prosser 2024), it was discovered that the CSAA was due to celebrate this milestone anniversary. Amidst the difficult first 2 years of the COVID-19 pandemic, a search for opportunities to celebrate in ways that emphasized the shared joy rather than shared distancing was very welcome. With the 2021 CSAA Annual Conference (Edith Cowan University) postponed due to the pandemic to mid-2022, and with RMIT University scheduled to host the 2022 conference, then CSAA President Elizabeth Stephens suggested the solution to holding two conferences in close succession: the Melbourne event would be an ‘anniversary conference’, aiming to use the milestone to assess the state of Australian cultural studies research.

Thinking about anniversaries and how they memorialize and prompt re-interpretation of past events provides us with an opportunity to make sense of how cultural studies responds to the kind of cultural change or ‘ruptures’ marked by the temporal spatialization of anniversaries – and thereby to consider some of what cultural studies can do in an advocacy programme towards ethical cultural change founded in corporeal care, interdependency and cohabitation. To provide some examples of how ‘anniversary thinking’ helps highlight ethical considerations of cultural change, I would like to consider two cultural ‘events’ that have both been the subject of much Australian cultural studies scholarship and broadly map against the greater portion of the CSAA’s existence: (1) the claiming of the date 11 September 2001 as the memorialized anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington DC, and (2) the anniversary of the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic which, in ways different from the former, has quickly been memorialized as the marker of a cultural rupture. Both of these are memorialized as ‘events’ which pertain verifiably to changes in practices of the corporeal interdependency, equality of lives, bodily mobility, and social relationalities of cohabitation in global space.

To unpack the significance of anniversaries for cultural research, I describe these ‘events’ in the sense outlined by Berlant (2007): as those phenomena which exceed the ordinary ‘episodes’ that warrant management and mediation by ‘temporal, physical, legal, rhetorical, and institutionally normative procedures’ (760). That is, they are events framed as ‘crises’ in which non-normative responses produce ontological cultural shifts – albeit ones which call for the full array of cultural studies’ tools to assess them not as singular adjustments or adaptations but as located in broader cultural formations operating over the longue durée, constituted in both continuities and disjunctures – beyond the trap of a journalistic sensationalism that interprets an event as causing radical change (Kitzinger 1999). Important here is not merely to revisit events or how they are memorialized by anniversaries, but to take the opportunity that the cultural practice of anniversaries marks to find ways to recognize and utilize the event of global crisis towards promoting ethical ways in which bodies can cohabit in equitable interdependency.

I would like to begin with a brief summary of how the anniversary has been deployed as a memorial storytelling device to position both events as rupture, and to unpack some of the ways in which rupture and continuity play out at the level of corporeal subjectivity. I will follow this with some notes on how we can better apprehend cultural change before presenting a framework that draws from Butler’s (2020, 2022) work on the intersection of interdependency and equality as an analytic tool that can be deployed in cultural studies’ assessment of rupture as that which opens up the possibility for advocating for more ethical practices of cohabitation. By thinking about this memorialization of significant global events through anniversaries is, then, a means by which to consider how cultural studies might contribute to the promotion of more ethical infrastructures of care that enable equitable liveability.

Events and anniversaries

Celebrating a milestone such as an anniversary of a global public event is not about acknowledging cultural resilience and survival over time but precarity. To take, for example, the case that prompts this study, the anniversary of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia marks the organization, the field and the scholarship not merely as having sustained across several decades but as being precarious in the sense that is an organization to which subjects have an attachment that can be lost and would be grieved if lost. Anniversaries mark a dual temporal moment within the spectre of loss and precarity – both the past marker of the event, such as the founding of an organization and the shift from its prior to the existence as that change which must be remembered, and the now, being the standpoint at which culturally one interprets a period of time as normative (Sharma 2011). Although the anniversary of an event can act as a storytelling device that re-asserts the demand for conservative or normative reinscription of an event (Perera 2007), it is also available to be read as the story of an incomprehensibility of an event that invoked crisis, now resolved (e.g. Badiou 2005) and thereby celebrated, or indeed as productive of emergent and alternative ways of being and cultures of relationality.

Anniversaries, then, serve as memorial practices that operate as a form of storytelling, acknowledging, interpreting or framing a past event that, typically, is perceived as one of the significance to the present or future of a group or wider community. In that sense, anniversaries are in some way about the cohabitation of subjects in interdependency, for while we can acknowledge an anniversary in solitude, cultural practice calls upon those who are aware of it to engage with others. The anniversary asserts the claim over a date and locates it in the shared space of cohabitation (Tumarkin 2005), whether local or global, but also ‘manages’ ways of remembering and speaking of the event – the controversy over the anniversary of the invasion of Australia celebrated as ‘Australia Day’ being an important example.

There is, then, a ‘moral lesson’ (Derrida and Michaud, 2009, 35) that the anniversary connotes: a fable or story that calls upon those who remember it, those who become aware of it and those who may not hear or recognize that call at first, and thereby to perform the celebration of the new epoch its originary ‘event’ is supposed to have brought about and, simultaneously, to the mourn the attachment to a past it was supposed to have obliterated. To suggest that the anniversary performs a pivotal cultural role that frames the ways in which an interdependency of bodies in a society is produced is to say, then, that the anniversary is never merely a lifeless and empty date-marker. Nor is it to suggest that the fact of an anniversary’s familiarity lessens the impact of the story for those who must acknowledge it in its regular familiarity in a cyclical framing of time that sits uneasily with liberal-humanist pretences of temporal progress (Thompson 1967). Rather, it is to say that how the anniversary can be read critically is always also beyond the intentions of those who call for it and those from whom celebration, recognition of precarity and/or mourning are activated by it.

In this respect, an anniversary speaks to the trace of interdependency, even in a contemporary cultural setting marked by liberal-humanist individuation. In some respects, it serves as the carnivalesque that highlights interdependency while sustaining an individualized normativity throughout the other days in an annual cycle (Stallybrass and White 1993); at the same time, it can be read critically for its role in obscuring the inequality across that interdependency and the ethical obligation for equitable access to the supports of interdependent culture that permit all lives in our corporeal vulnerability to be liveable lives (Butler 2020).

September 11

The events of the 2001 terror attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the United States are marked annually by an anniversary, including particularly milestone anniversaries at the 10-year and 20-year mark (Hartig and Doherty 2021). Arguably, the anniversary serves multiple purposes. In a banal sense, one of the roles of its memorialization is to uphold a false sense of the United States as an arbiter of democracy in opposition to ‘rogue’ global elements such as terrorist organizations or nation-states perceived to support them (Green and Jacka, 2003). For Zizek (2002), the anniversary date is a marker of a false notion of epochal change – the mundane claim that nothing will be or ever was the same after 11 September 2001, despite the verifiable fact that it actually marks continuities and embedding of policy and culture rather than shift. In a more Derridean framework, the anniversary connotes a historical instance of an autoimmunary response to an event that produces a cycle of repression, violence and violence on the state as ‘self’ that produces other kinds of ontological change (Cornell 2006).

The memorialization of September 11 through the acknowledgement of its anniversary is, then, a cultural mechanism for managing the interpretation of an event that cannot be reduced to a singularity given the complex politico-cultural history in which it emerged (Evans and Giroux 2015). That is, the change the original event brought about was not so much a rupture in the sense of a break with its immediate past, but part of a global history of shifts in cultural interdependency in the second half of the twentieth century that adjusted how corporeal lives are positioned in inequal grievability. Graeme Turner (2003) noted in the early anniversaries of the event, it was possible to discern a deeply conservative cultural shift occurring through and alongside September 11 that altered the practices of corporeal mobility across the planet (Urry 2007), whether that was the inequalities for people seeking asylum and refuge, or the fears of those travelling for pleasure and tourism (Lewis 2006). At the same time, this conservativism produced shifts in the practice of bodies living in civility together (Aly 2010) and concerns over the capacity for locales to be cohabited by those marked by difference in ethnicity or culture.

The cultural ‘lesson’ of September 11 after more than 20 anniversaries is, then, not that it was causal of cultural change but that its representation as an event worthy of an anniversary is a marker of both continuities and ruptures which, if unpacked from the perspective of corporeal lives in relationality and cohabitation, demonstrates cultural shifts in how our global interdependency is performed. If interdependency is an a priori fact not only of survival but as that which is always prior to subjectivity (Butler 2020), and if we take note of Butler’s point that interdependency is not itself ethical unless it is radically underpinned by equality, then in the anniversary’s role as a marker of ‘the event’ we find the trace of shifts in the practice of equality among subjects (Poynting et al. 2004). That is, September 11 is not re-presented in anniversaries to tell a story about changes to security, national securitization, global politics and patriotism (Zizek 2002), nor merely in the storytelling of a global community that moved from a sense (for some) of ‘security’ to ‘vulnerability (Ahmed 2004). Rather, when unpacked critically, the anniversary can be read as a representation, reminder and re-enactment of ontological shifts that made structures and infrastructures less equitable and ethical, and thereby enabling a global interdependency that made some lives even more liveable and grievable than others: a distinctive adjustment in how corporeal subjects relate to each other and relate to spaces is discerned.

COVID-19

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has – at the limits of representation and discourse – receded into the background of everyday communication and corporeal practice as the virus has become endemic in the global everyday (despite continuing high infection and mortality rates around the world), like September 11 it has become an important example of an ‘event’ warranting an anniversary that frames it as rupture. As with the September 11 anniversaries, the onset of the pandemic is regularly memorialized with news stories in the January–March period that assess the ‘victory’ of the virus (Johnson 2023), the resilience of the human population, business organizations and health infrastructure (Reeves et al. 2023) or, in the United Kingdom, that note a ‘national day of reflection’ to grieve those who died from the infection (COVID Aid 2023).

Perhaps even more so than the September 11 ‘event’ that was witnessed at the most ostensible level globally as a television event (Zizek 2002), COVID-19 was affectively experienced by the disruption to normative bodily practices across most jurisdictions globally: social distancing, lockdowns, curfews, emphatic hygiene practices, mask-wearing and eventually the introduction and mass distribution of new vaccines (Cover 2023). Significant here is that the anniversary of COVID-19’s onset marks a shift in the cultural formation of normative interdependency, partly by drawing that interdependency into consciousness with shifts in how that interdependency is practiced – movement in-and-out of crowds, means of social engagement, ordinary practices of acquiring food, operational health regimes and so on, each disrupted in ways which phenomenologically affected the sense of place in the world (Butler and Worms 2023).

The emergent annual storytelling of that initial cultural rupture is actively memorialized through anniversaries as ‘crisis’. This is not crisis in the sense of risks to the biopolitical futurity of population health in jurisdictions or more globally (Lemke 2011), but as the disruption to the everyday ways in which identities are performed and expressed through corporeal relationality with space (Cover 2020), and as a disruption to the temporal flow of everydayness, the chrononormativity of interdependent liveability (Sharma 2014). Again, inequity is at the core of how disruption of interdependency is experienced in the event and obscured in the memorialization of the anniversary that performs the myth of togetherness.

In this respect – as with September 11 – what the anniversary remembers of a past rupture is not so much an experience of what Laura Mulvey (2006) describes as ‘a resonance of change, of breaks with the past’ (23) but an exacerbation in the continuity of extant inequities in social, political and cultural practices, including particularly the violence of global inequalities in the access to healthcare, the commodification of travel, movement and mobility (of the kind that spread killer viruses), the search for new profit-generating resources through encroachment into areas of the planet (and the viruses they may harbour) rarely touched by human industry, and so on. The memorialization of the onset of the pandemic is often represented as a marker of the resilience of a violent normativity and the normativity of violence that survives a global pandemic. Again, this is a way of telling a story that obscures the deeper cultural and ontological shift that momentarily drew cultural attention to the precarity inherent in contemporary, inequitable and uncaring practices of interdependency. The fact that a virus can travel in a crowd, that the multitude may not be the site of democratic post-singularity but a setting of risk, and the reflections that were required as practices of touch, face-to-face visuality and the knowingness of chrononormative routines of daily and seasonal work, entertainment and mobility are disrupted are all notable (Cachopo 2022; Di Cesare 2020).

Both of these ‘events’ are memorialized through anniversaries that remember unexpected global events as rupture in ways which obscure the historical inequities in interdependent belonging that actually produced the events. Simultaneously, they draw attention away from the ontological cultural changes that call upon us to produce subjectivities differently, either in ways which produce more ethical access to global infrastructures or – unfortunately – in unethical ways in which existing inequities are enhanced through securitization and moral decision-making governed by self-interest and individuality in western neoliberal settings (Butler 2022, 40). However, with the tools of cultural studies, it is possible to draw from the cultural ritual of anniversary storytelling some of the more marginal practices of resistance that can be productive in new ways of perceiving cultural change not as an adaptation to the effect of an event but as an ethical practice of equitable interdependency. For example, the recognition of shared vulnerabilities during COVID (Lupton et al. 2021; Cover 2023) or the remnants of the protest movement against corporate globalization that persisted after September 11 while the public discourse turned to debates about inter-jurisdictional war (Chomsky 2002; Gibson-Graham 2003) or the many instances of care, including particularly those that move beyond the transactional, familial or maternal in favour of a ‘caring with’ the other (The Care Collective; Tronto 2013) that have endured across the decades between these events of rupture and continuity, become more identifiable in the context of the ways in which anniversaries more readily reveal the continuity of practices of interdependency and ethics as counter-hegemonic cultural formations.

Cultural change and ‘crisis’

What, then, does the memorial storytelling performed through anniversaries of major global events tell us about the cultural change these stories represent? Understanding and managing cultural change remains a core aspect of the work of cultural studies: for example, a scan through some archived CSAA conference programmes from the past 30 years reveals an array of keynotes, plenaries and papers that bring together a unique brand of Australian interest in the intersection of bodies, ethics, spaces and cultural politics, underpinned by a view that understanding cultural change may expose more ethical practices of living, cohabiting, relating and sustaining life through equity, care and justice. In that respect, there is an aspirational element that runs through Australian cultural studies and manifests in a kind of responsiveness based in advocacy for progressive cultural change and the analysis of marginal collective practices towards more just liveability (Turner 2003; Probyn 2005; Milner 1999; Hickey-Moody 2016, etc.). If advocating for emergent and marginal cultural practices that are rooted in a recognition of equitable and ethical interdependency is a valuable goal for a scholarly field, then we need to take cultural studies scholarship further into the realm of understanding how cultural change occurs and how it may better be shaped through critique towards ethical outcomes.

One aspect of advocating culture change, however, that is not often remarked upon in contemporary cultural studies scholarship is that culture itself cannot be produced with intent. For Raymond Williams (1985) we cannot produce a desired cultural outcome in advance:

We have to plan what can be planned, according to our common decision. But the emphasis of the idea of culture is right when it reminds us that a culture, essentially, is unplannable. We have to ensure the means of life, and the means of community. But what will then, by these means, be lived, we cannot know or say.

(320)

While we cannot plan culture, and while deploying twentieth-century lenses to advocate for more ethical liveability in the third decade of the twenty-first century is risky (Di Cesare 2020), a cultural studies focus on how the ritual cultural practice of anniversaries frame and manage past events as ‘cultural change’ in ways that may obscure the compact of continuities and ruptures may indeed provide opportunities. Here, it is not about ‘planning’ culture, but drawing out the interwoven continuities of injustice and ontological ruptures through a lens that apprehends the anniversary for the trace of a ‘crisis’ of interdependency in its intersection with equality.

In presenting a treatment of the role of interdependency as a component in an ethics of non-violence, Butler (2020) made the key point that interdependency itself is an a priori fact constituting subjectivity, since no subject can come into being in individuated and independent non-belonging. However, drawing out interdependency towards an ethical outcome is, for Butler, not possible without a new egalitarian imaginary – by which they mean not an equality of individuals among one another, but a relationality that demands all corporeal life is equally grievable, equally cared for and equitably supported by that social interdependency without calculation. That is, new ways of understanding equality beyond individual access are necessary, since ‘it is not possible to understand social inequality without understanding how grievability is unequally distributed’ (Butler 2022, 93). If the anniversaries of the events that I have been describing provide cultural narratives that frame the events as change, and if the task for cultural studies is to produce change by drawing out the range of continuities, resistances and ontological ruptures that are sustained by the way anniversaries frame those events, then the work of cultural studies is to investigate how those anniversaries carry the trace of a crisis of the intersection between interdependency (as drawn out in crisis) and critical engagement with equality as relational (as obscured in how the stories of anniversaries are told).

Crises that shift how we perceive ourselves and our practices of social engagement are not, of course, new. Rather, much of the twenty-first century has been marked by various crises that produce new arrangements of politics, economy, lifestyle, labour and culture (for example, the contemporary populism, disinformation and electoral crises in the United States that respond to the crisis of de-industrialization in parts leading to deprivation and disenfranchisement). For Antonio Gramsci (1971, 179), socio-political organic crises emerge in ways which demonstrate to the public that ‘uncurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves’. Both September 11 and the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, of course, revealed not only some of the infrastructural unpreparedness and vulnerability in many parts of the world but also the overwhelming reliance firstly on interdependency as a global cultural way-of-life, and – if read critically – the inequities in grievability that make that interdependency both precarious and violent.

Although the concept of crisis is used to narrate historical change in ways that are both limiting and available for sustained memorialization through anniversaries, they are of course also formative and may produce new forms of relationality by signifying the contingency of historical social arrangements in ways that allow us to think ‘otherwise’ (Roitman 2014). Stuart Hall (1979) argued that, rather than being understood as a rupture that destroys the past, events framed as crises produce: ‘a new balance of forces, the emergence of new elements, … new political configurations and “philosophies”, a profound restructuring of … ideological discourses … pointing to a new result, a new sort of “settlement”—”within certain limits”’ (15). Although intended to describe the operations of power blocs, this conceptualization of the productive nature of crisis neatly describes how events can be subject to moral decision-making that mis-reads global interdependency in ways divorced from equitable grievability and thereby mis-use the crisis to make some lives less liveable than others.

If crises are transformative (Duggan 2003) and yet also an aporia operating both as interruption to history and formed in history (Lazzarato 2013), how they are memorialized through anniversaries presents a regular unfolding of opportunities to consider how their liminality tells a story of the ‘wrong’ kind of interdependency; that is, how the anniversary sustains a narrative of global political interdependency for elite nation-states or interdependent trade, labour and consumption practices (in the case of September 11) or an interdependency of human resilience and utilitarianism (in the case of COVID-19) that celebrate the restoration of violent mobilities and individuated ‘freedom’ while leaving many lives lost to market calculations as ungrieved, and marginalizing the productive stories of equitable grievability founded in marginal practices of care. Here, the anniversary is used to sustain the myth that global interdependency can operate ethically while sustaining the myth of individuated self-sufficiency and the fact of inequitable grievability and care practices. Arguably, the distinction cultural studies can draw out between what is remembered in the anniversary of the global event as ‘crisis’, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the alternative care practices that are marginalized from those stories as new ways to produce a global interdependency founded on equitable care and grievability of all lives.

Cultural change and the ethics of care as infrastructure

I would like to conclude with some remarks, then, on what it might mean for cultural studies to play a role in the ethical demand for an equitable interdependency from the perspective of corporeal relationality in the spaces that we cohabit. If we are to understand ethical cultural change as centred on re-framing global interdependency through equality of lives, then where that equitable interdependency takes place as the setting for equitable cohabitation is key, that is, to consider the supports and infrastructures that form the ecology for liveability as that part of culture for which we seek to ‘manage’ change through critique. As memorialized events, both September 11 and COVID-19 occur in spaces marked by inequities of support and practices of temporality (Tumarkin 2005, Sharma 2011), yet these are spaces that frame and support liveability as an interdependent socio-cultural relation. Bringing the ecology of global space into the ‘arrangement’ of interdependency and equality as the necessary supports for liveability and cohabitation is, I argue, one means by which we can access a formation of cultural change that falls into Williams’ (1985) categories of what might be plannable and therefore should draw the attention of cultural studies scholarship that seeks to perform advocacy for more equitable, just and ethical ways of living.

The key point here is that an equality of interdependency is operationalized only through the function of infrastructural supports. These are not to be understood merely as the engineered structure of cities (roads, sewerage, transport pathways and mechanisms enabling the sale of food and shelter) but as institutions, language, technologies of governance, art, representation, tools of communication, among others. Butler recognizes the significance of infrastructural supports in considering how an ethics of interdependency resembles the supportive care frameworks outlined by Joan Tronto, whereby care as a practical form of ethical relationality is not merely interpersonal or transactional but can only be operationalized by infrastructural supports that are accessible and work equitably (Butler and Worms 2023, 36). Infrastructures, then, are not cultural formations that exist alongside dispositions to care; rather, to be ethical, they must be caring infrastructures; indeed, care as infrastructures, and infrastructures of care.

If bodies are both vulnerable and interdependent as irreversible conditions of subjectivity, and if care is founded on providing support, then our attention must be upon the ecology in which that care is sustained such that lives can be led as liveable lives, that is, lives not subject to violence. Indeed, for Butler, the key ethical question for contemporary care involves asking what ‘intersubjective institutional conditions … would include conditions for the possibility of cohabitation such that life could become increasingly livable for populations deprived of that possibility?’ (Butler and Worms 2023, 30). In this context, for Butler, ethics is not about acknowledging our interdependency as it may shift in instances of global events or crises, but about the capacity to cohabit in interdependency sustained by social structures that ‘affirm and … support the institutional conditions that support interdependent lives as part of a community’ (32).

To consider what infrastructures that enable liveability through cohabitation in equitable interdependency might mean in terms of care, it is useful to turn to the late Lauren Berlant’s (2022) posthumous work On the Inconvenience of Other People, in which she addressed some aspects of the ‘infrastructural commons’ as a way of exploring the meaning of a concept of ‘we’ (an alternative framing of interdependency). Berlant describes social supports for liveability as relational and ecological processes that sustain worlds. In this, we have the opportunity to utilize anniversaries of global events or crises to apprehend not what changes occur in the interdependency between subjects (the marginalisations that followed and were sustained after September 11; the social distancing or healthcare disparities that persist after COVID-19). Rather, it is an opportunity to think through how the anniversaries of these events mark certain kinds of violence to infrastructures – broadly defined – that enable care as the force of interdependency, sustained liveability and cohabitation among subjects as an ethical relation. If infrastructures are conceptually entangled with concepts of planning, then the task of cultural studies in contributing to ethical equities in interdependency is to understand and promote infrastructures founded in care for liveability itself.

Conclusion

By drawing our attention to the representation frameworks of anniversaries of global ‘events’ marked as crisis or rupture, I am putting forward an argument that if cultural studies seeks to respond to these events through advocacy for more ethical means for lives to be liveable in interdependency, then we have the opportunity to utilize the anniversary to understand not merely how cultural change has occurred in ways that mark both continuities and disruption, but to better recognize the productive opportunities of anniversaries of crises apprehended through a lens attentive to the trinity of interdependency, equality and infrastructures enabling ethical cohabitation. Here, the opportunity is to engage in advocating for more ethical, equitable and caring access to infrastructural ecologies that support cohabitation and liveability. As Hardt and Negri (2009) have shown, events that are framed as crises are never quite ‘collapses’, no matter how they are framed as historical ruptures; rather they serve as political openings that provide an opportunity for more ethical ways of being. This, however, they note, is not in itself a goal: ‘political organization is required to push [that opportunity] across the threshold’ (161).

In this sense, the figure of the anniversary re-presents the originary event as opportunity for advocacy whereby cultural studies is best positioned not only to utilize its re-presentation to draw out the resistances to inequities founded in interdependency but to point to the ways in which may think ‘otherwise’ about how supportive care infrastructures can be planned and re-organized to overcome the unequal worth of corporeal lives and their unequal grievability for a more ethical cohabitation in culture.

Acknowledgments

Parts of this paper were presented as a keynote presentation at the June 2022 Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference (hosted by Edith Cowan University, Western Australia), titled ‘Bodies of Hostility: Apprehending Violence in Contemporary Culture’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.