Description
On 8 September 2022, after more than 70 years on the throne, Queen Elizabeth II passed away. The responses among the public, media, and state institutions to the news were varied, with competing views on the role of the monarchy and the legacy of the queen. The questions this paper seeks to answer are 1) why the monarch’s death was perceived as a critical situation and 2) how this moment led on the one hand to efforts to reaffirm the dominant UK autobiographical narrative, and on the other to efforts to contest this narrative. Drawing on the 10 days of mourning after the queen’s death, we illustrate our argument by exploring how the government and the royal family attempted to create a sense of continuity and transfer royal authority onto the next generation as well as how activists attempted to subvert this established narrative to problematise the country’s (post)colonial history and societal inequalities. Using Gestaltpsychology, we theorise the role of perception in subjects’ experience of critical situations as well as their subsequent attempts to manage the ensuing anxieties. More specifically, this paper enables a more nuanced understanding of how human perception enables and guides avenues for narrative contestation as well as conservative attempts to (re)establish the predominant autobiographical narrative.
