Project Description, Origin Story, and Purpose
During the pre-vaccine period of the COVID-19 pandemic, we—Bethany Stevens and Sara Palmer—created a photo and essay series entitled “Corona Look of the Day.” Each day, Bethany created artful outfits, paired with colorful makeup and inspired text descriptions. These descriptions worked as lessons on how to view and appreciate the disabled body during a time when eugenic discourse was pervading the globe. The poses of Bethany’s disabled embodiment staring defiantly at the viewer expressed resistance to the isolated days filled with fear of death. Many people publicly expressed that only disabled and elderly people would suffer in the pandemic as if that was supposed to be a good thing, and this project claimed the beauty of disability in response to such violent devaluation of our existence.
A significant draw of the project was the effort to put disability in an atypical social context—that of luxury and style. There is a certain agency that we can express through makeup and fashion. In doing this project, we also learned a lot about how to pose and work a camera. In this way, we countered a prevailing social assumption that disabled people are not fashionable, that we are focused only on comfort over style. Similarly, seeing someone like disabled model and actor Jillian Mercado model for mainstream brands changes the game for the ways we can demand to be viewed.
We wanted to present something beautiful, stylish, and with a heavy dose of attitude. And people tuned in. We accrued many followers on social media who commented on how the posts shaped their day for the better. Many came to rely on the images to help uplift their days. They returned day after day to comment and like. We didn’t expect this degree of response. We were mostly doing this to pass the time of being stuck away from the world.
Most of the posts in this project were tagged with the phrase #CoronaEugenics. While not exactly the trendiest of phrases, we felt it was an important one because of the historical moment in which we found ourselves. It seemed all too apparent to us that the political landscape around the coronavirus was steeped in eugenics. People talked about the virus as something that was “only” dangerous to the elderly and the disabled. Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities were heavily impacted and not enough attention has been directed to the needs of these communities. Our country has failed us all and blames us for having health issues—some of which have already almost resulted in our death—and so we may as well die. We know that many of the comorbidities that people experience are direct results of social oppression; social determinants of health tell us that discrimination kills. Yet our deaths will be and are being deemed reasonable or acceptable because we already have a diagnosis.
At various crisis points in the pandemic, healthcare facilities engaged in rationed care in favor of more able-bodied patients, reserving life-saving equipment for those deemed most likely to survive. Ableist presumptions about quality of life provided a rationale for these decisions. As disabled people, we are not consulted about our experience of our own quality of life; it’s an ableist presumption.1
In a different type of eugenic performance, rather than donning masks to protect vulnerable individuals, people continued to party with reckless abandon. These trends were viscerally grotesque. The violence of these actions will not be forgotten, if we move forward. It was as though society wanted us to die so that they could continue living life as before.
We wanted to contest the notion that vulnerable bodies are disposable. Eugenics has a long and complex history in the world, but at its core is the idea that certain kinds of bodies should be celebrated while others should be extinguished. We wanted to fight this idea by celebrating a disabled body, the very kind of body that modern eugenics deems an acceptable loss in a pandemic. We needed to communicate in words and images that disabled bodies were worthy. Not only of care, but also as sites of joy and pleasure. Out of this need, the Corona Look of the Day project was born.
We must admit that the project was also a product of pandemic boredom. Bethany began documenting her daily outfits as a way to pass the time, taking selfies in the mirror in the early days of lockdown. Sara saw potential in this effort to contest the confines of isolation, in getting dressed up when there was nowhere to go. “Hand me your phone,” she insisted, convinced that the aesthetics would improve if she handled the camera while her partner focused on posing.
Each day we set out to capture a fresh look. With makeup and clothing, with creative posing and camera angles, we tried to deliver a look to the internet that spoke of confidence, of disability pride. Accompanying each image was a short essay post that began with a description of the image to clarify the aesthetic to non-sighted audiences (a basic principle of accessibility), followed by a rumination on the pandemic and the importance of loving disability. Pedagogical in nature, these posts were crafted to teach people, both sighted and not, to engage with disability as something that could be appreciated in its own right, instead of as a marker of despair. For example, Bethany frequently flaunted her protruding sternum to highlight how it could be considered an artful difference and not simply a medicalized deformity.
Technically, we grew a lot as the months progressed. We graduated from an iPhone to an exchangeable-lens camera. We learned to edit photos and refine makeup and costuming. We eventually put together a home studio with fabric backdrops. All in all, we composed over 250 photos of which we share a select few here. Following each image is the original social media text in italics.
Project Samples
April 24, 2020
April 26, 2020
April 28, 2020
July 23, 2020
August 14, 2020
September 11, 2020
November 27, 2020
Project Reflection
Looking back on these posts, something we remember most was the urgency of needing to post almost daily in the time before the vaccine. While the project continues at a more leisurely pace post-vaccine, the first year of the pandemic was a time in which we felt it was very important to share a celebration of a disabled subject as life-sustaining resistance to the collective acceptance of disabled and elderly death. It was a way to simply get through the day and fight the onslaught of pandemic depression that has impacted so many.
The eugenic discourse of COVID-19—the aggressive apathy about lives lost and the willingness to sacrifice the most vulnerable with ease—continues to be an enraging and exhausting force. This project was designed to be an intervention on the eugenic assumptions about the value of disabled lives. Celebration of disabled bodies is a radical act when dominant discourses continue to deem such bodies expendable.
By promoting disability style and fashion, we wanted to show that disabled people have the right to thrive even in the context of isolation. In a country that continues to be lax about COVID safety protocols, so many disabled people have no other option but to stay home to protect their health. Segregation continues to be enacted on us. At the same time, this time of isolation could be approached as a source of strength and aesthetic delight: Isolation insulates from everyday experiences of ableism, making it easier to focus on the beauty of disability. Above all, we wanted to fight the idea that disabled people are acceptable deaths in COVID times. So strong is this apathy that it feels as though some in power almost want to be rid of disabled people altogether. They wanted us to die, but we chose to look fabulous in resistance instead.2
Notes
- A few illustrative articles include Bo Chen and Donna Marie McNamara, “Disability Discrimination, Medical Rationing and COVID-19,” Asian Bioethics Review 12, no. 4 (2020): 511–18, https://doi.org/10.1007/s41649-020-00147-x; and Emily M. Lund, Anjali J. Forber-Pratt, Catherine Wilson, and Linda R. Mona, “The COVID-19 Pandemic, Stress, and Trauma in the Disability Community: A Call to Action,” Rehabilitation Psychology 65, no. 4 (2020): 313–22. https://doi.org/10.1037/rep0000368. ↩
- Earlier in the essay, we mentioned Jillian Mercado (whose Instagram account is linked here) as one important example of a disabled creative who has changed the game for ways we can demand to be viewed. Other examples of fabulous resistance by disabled creators include Sky Cubacub and Aaron Rose Phillip. ↩
