Don't make me schizophrenic here! Exposed bodies / disciplined bodies from confinement

Abstract

One of the most visible cultural effects that emerged during the isolation and the COVID-19 pandemic has been the hyperdigitization of daily life and the displacement of face-to-face encounters to its web mediation. Since the confinement, the networks and the screens have become the privileged scenario for artistic consumption, production and circulation. In the networks, at the same time, it was possible to see how the pandemic strengthened the multiplication of discourses linked to "well-being", "healthy living", "therapeutic cultures" or "mental health", articulated through the imperative of happiness, which, as Sara Ahmed (2019) points out, has become a new performance indicator in politics and the global economy. This discussion interests me as a framework to address the reading made by cartoonist and writer Robertita, on her Instagram and Instagram TV accounts (@soyrobertita and @benditoinstagram) during the months of Preventive and Mandatory Social Isolation in Argentina. On the one hand, in the feed, his "Pandemic Diary", written and drawn as a comic. And on the other, in their stories, the work of monitoring, editing and setting up public accounts of millenials focused on self-exposure in relation to hegemonic themes: self-help, mental health, obsession with the body and food, control and the psychologization of sexual life. From the fragility of confinement, making use of the home tools provided by the Internet, Robertita relieves these stories and reads them from the cutting and assembling of the mass culture heritage of the eighties and the return to democracy in Argentina. His ironic, critical and also affective gaze questions the scope that this eighties scene has today to think about limits, excesses, freedom and self-figuration; questions that seem to be reissued now under new disciplines.