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ABSTRACT
In the face of COVID-19 shutdowns, much of the world fundamentally adjusted its relationship to time, space, work, productivity, and rest. In this essay, I theorize the pandemic as forcing many people to live within “sick spacetime,” which involves 1) experiencing inconsistent mobility, 2) acknowledging the precarity of our bodyminds, and 3) living in the liminal state of being constantly in-wait. I use “sick spacetime” to problematize widespread calls for the “return to normal,” then outline a politics of crip/sick futurity in which orientations to time and space remain flexible as pandemic restrictions ease.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I use the term “crip/sick” to build upon the reclaiming of the term “crip” by radical disabled people. While many healthy disabled people have reclaimed the term “crip,” fewer chronically ill people reclaim “sick.” Here, I use a slash to add this reclamation and to note the overlap between the two terms.
2 I mirror the format of this confessional: Fortesa Latifi, “Outside Blues: Chronically Ill People Face an Old New Post-Pandemic World,” Bitch Media, May 14, 2021, https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/chronically-ill-people-post-pandemic-world-fear.
3 See Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018).
4 Alexander J. Means and Graham B. Slater, “Collective Disorientation in the Pandemic Conjuncture,” Cultural Studies 35, no. 2–3 (2021): 514-522.
5 Margaret Price, “What Is a Service Animal? A Careful Rethinking,” Review of Disability Studies 13, no. 4 (2017), 1-18.
6 See Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011). I use the term bodymind, echoing Price, “to emphasize that although ‘body’ and ‘mind’ usually occupy separate conceptual and linguistic territories, they are deeply intertwined” (240).
7 Paula A. Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 3.
8 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Culture, Media, Language, ed. S. Hall et a1. (London: Hutchinson/Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1992), 284.
9 See Tweets from Imani Barbarin (@Imani_Barbarin), Alice Wong (@SF_direwolf), Sarah Hollowell (@Sarah Hollowell), Karli Drew (@KarLeia), Sparrow/Liz (@UntoNuggan). See also María Elena Cepeda, “Thrice Unseen, Forever on Borrowed Time: Latina Feminist Reflections on Mental Disability and the Neoliberal Academy,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 301-320; Samuels and Freeman, “Introduction”; Ashley Shew, “Let COVID-19 Expand Awareness of Disability Tech,” Nature, May 5, 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01312-w.
10 Margaret Price, Mad at School; Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013); Ellen Samuels, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time,” Disability Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2017): n.p; Ellen Samuels and Elizabeth Freeman, “Introduction: Crip Temporalities,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 245-254.
11 Cepeda, “Thrice Unseen”; Piepzna-Samarasinha, “Care Work”; for in-depth discussion of crip spatiality in relation to bathrooms, see Isaac West, “PISSAR’s Critically Queer and Disabled Politics,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2010): 156-175.
12 Susan Wendell, “Unhealthy Disabled: Treating Chronic Illnesses as Disabilities,” Hypatia 14, no. 4 (2001): 17-33.
The introduction of the term “unhealthy disabilities” was intended to muddy the image of disability as a relatively stable construct made up of steady impairments (like d/Deafness and limb differences).
13 James L. Cherney, Ableist Rhetoric: How We Know, Value, and See Disability (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019).
14 Wyatt Koma et al., “Low-Income and Communities of Color at Higher Risk of Serious Illness if Infected with Coronavirus,” Kaiser Family Foundation, May 7, 2020, https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/low-income-and-communities-of-color-at-higher-risk-of-serious-illness-if-infected-with-coronavirus/; see Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
15 Shew, “Let COVID Expand Awareness,” n.p.
16 Erin K. Willer, “A Re(Defining) Moment: Eulogizing Good Death in the Face of COVID-19,” Health Communication, ahead of print.
17 Koma et al., “Low-Income and Communities of Color,” n.p.; see Puar, The Right to Maim.
18 Claire Cain Miller, Kevin Quealy, and Margot Sanger-Katz, “723 Epidemiologists on When and How the U.S. Can Fully Return to Normal,” New York Times, May 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/upshot/epidemiologists-covid-return-normal.html
19 Jason Maley, “A Pandemic that Endures for COVID Long-Haulers,” The Harvard Gazette, April 13, 2021, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/04/harvard-medical-school-expert-explains-long-covid/#:~:text=These%20so%2Dcalled%20,just%20mild%20initial%20conditions.
20 Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip, p. 28.
21 Moya Bailey, “The Ethics of Pace,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 2 (2021): 286.
22 Piepzna-Samarasinha, “Care Work,” p. 210.
23 Maley, “A Pandemic that Endures.”
24 Piepzna-Samarasinha, “Care Work.”
25 Sins Invalid, Skin.
26 See Emily Krebs and Kelsea V. Schoenbauer, “Hysterics and Heresy: Using Dialogism to Explore the Problematics of Endometriosis Diagnosis,” Health Communication 35, no. 8 (2020): 1013-1022.