Description
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the post-human in IR. Nascent work has begun to engage the politics of animals, helpfully illuminating their role for military institutions in providing practical and emotional support on the battlefield and in winning hearts and minds. There has also been a parallel growth of scholarly interest in the politics of comedy, interrogating its psychological and emotional effects, especially during moments of 'crisis'. Our paper builds on these insights to explore the (micro)politics of how animals were aesthetically and affectively represented online during the 'crisis' of the Covid-19 pandemic. Focusing on the ‘internet’s favourite animal’ - the cat - it provides a qualitative analysis of outputs from Twitter accounts including: Larry the Cat, the Whitehall cats & Giant Military Cats. It shows how militarised narratives of the pandemic in Britain and the United States have informed these ostensibly light-hearted and absurd accounts, illuminating the intersections of anxiety, comedy & ontological security amid Covid. In doing so, it speaks to the indeterminate potential of comedy for achieving (an always elusive) ontological security - highlighting its stabilising and destabilising possibilities for individual Twitter users and emergent communities of feeling.
