The Political Physics of an Unkicked Ball: On Diffractive No-Bodies and Pandemic Non-Matter in Footballing China

Abstract

In this chapter, we look at how football assemblages deformed, and were reformed, as the COVID-19 pandemic altered political life in the Peoples’ Republic. Specifically, we examine how the sport of football—a sport we were set to conduct fieldwork in during 2020 in China—became an important field through which the political and cultural machinations of the Chinese government came to operate, and suspend, life in everyday China. We turn to the notion of diffraction as an interpretive strategy to look at how discourses and discursive practices might be dialogically read “through one another” as the two researchers sought to make sense of how this deeply embodied physical cultural space yielded to the biopolitics of a pandemic (see Barad, 2007). We provide a critical diffraction on what we found as players stopped running, fields emptied, grandstands were vacated, and the State game was put on hold. In this state of exception—a condition assuredly forged by State-led reterritorializations of pandemic bodies (and anti-bodies) and restricted movement/mobility, pandemic anxieties, and non-normative cultural and sporting conditions—the absence of football served as a productive form-ation through which associations, relations, and economies of difference could be made anew. In essence, this chapter is a diffractive interchange of what it was like to do fieldwork of that which wasn’t, specifically by linking 1) a research actor’s (Joshua) extrospective reading of pandemic-era (footballing) China as seen through the lens of English media representations, 2) a research actor’s (Hanhan) lived experiences as physically immersed into ‘lockdown’ China during the pandemic, and 3) of the unavoidably messy, complex, and contradictory diffractions therebetween.