Leisure & COVID-19: Forbidden Bodies and Changes in Leisure Dynamics in the Cities of Maia (Portugal) and Curitiba (Brazil)

Abstract

This article intends to place, at the heart of a critical, political, and theoretical reflection, the changes in urban leisure dynamics, namely in the cities of Maia (Portugal) and Curitiba (Brazil), the fruit of the COVID-19 pandemic. We believe, through the lens of cultural studies, that COVID-19 constitutes an essential and unique opportunity to understand human phenomena around an extreme health situation that triggered biopolitical processes and technological control mechanisms in the mobility and leisure of bodies and continues to do so. This article highlights how the pandemic has blurred the domestic, work, and leisure boundaries, much to the service and benefit of the neoliberal and capitalist systems. Our methods combined ethnographic collection (conducted from March 2020 through June 2021), qualitative data analysis, and theoretical contributions by Foucault (1979/1998, 1996/1999, 1975/2002, 1994/2006, 2010a, 1976/2010b), Deleuze (1992, 1995), Certeau (1980/1994, 1993/1995), Haraway (1997, 2018), Braidotti (2020) and Mbembe (2003/2018) in a very particular articulation with the locus, the social and political context of the spaces and the pandemic consequences acting in a very specific and insidious way in each one. We were able to verify that, in the pandemic, leisure is (re)claimed and valued as a fundamental right in the face of regulation, control, and discipline over bodies. Data indicate that subjects reclaim their lost mobility and space, challenging the order, law, and authority put in place. A pertinent theoretical and empirical articulation was also evidenced between the sanitary policies in place and the observed disruptive and subversive performances, which show, in time and space, a gradation and progression of the subversion of bodies in leisure parks, which are privileged loci of freedom.