Performative 'healing' and/in Rehana Zaman’s Sharla Shabana Sojourner Selena

In this paper, I propose a kind of ‘performative healing’, claiming this as necessary in a context of neoliberal cognitive capitalism, whereby feelings and experiences, including trauma and pain, become sites for the extraction of surplus value. I suggest that Zaman’s film enacts a tactics of performativity in which pain, anger, desire, and joy are relayed without either the resolution of stabilized identities or the comfort of feeling sad about another’s pain. In this, the film creates a conflictual treatment that both exposes the toxic parameters of sexism and racism in neoliberal capitalism and enacts a precarious reparation of them.