Do-It-Yourself-At-Home: between performance culture and agency. Experiences of the urban middle classes in Buenos Aires

FLORENCIA BLANCO ESMORIS; NEMESIA HIJÓS

Rome

Congreso; III Convegno Nazionale della Società Italiana di Antropologia Culturale; 2021

Società Italiana di Antropologia Culturale

The house and the body are the protagonists of isolation. In Argentina, staying at home is experienced as an unequal privilege. The coronavirus put on the table such inequalities: the structural and naturalized ones and the less perceivable ones. For metropolitan middle classes (in Buenos Aires) taking care of themselves in confinement is shown as a challenge, an odyssey, and another duty: care of one´s body in order to feel pleasure and well-being. Productivity and self-governance intersect with the fear of getting fat as an undesirable effect of quarantine. Physical training is a way to position ourselves competitively: not to lose the status we have reached, to demonstrate our "self-management", our will to strength and improvement. "With what you have, you do" or "The one who wants, can" are the phrases we heard the most.