This second installment of “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry” opens with a reflection on transformative access and its visioning work. We weave this discussion through not only the eight new pieces found within this issue, but also through a reflection on the practices of access and care that enabled the writing, editing, and publication process itself. We conclude with two artifacts: The first is the “Accessible Knowledge Production Manifesto” that emerged as a collectively authored set of demands generated at a workshop we held in connection to the launch of our first installment of “Crip Pandemic Life.” The second is a link to a resource list, “Continuing Threads and Proliferations; Crip Pandemic Life Archive,” compiled by Corbin Outlaw, which links out to other pandemic projects documenting crip, disabled, chronically-ill, mad, and neurodivergent experiences, particularly highlighting experiences not captured within our tapestry of crip pandemic life.
Keyword: pandemic
DISTORIES
DISTORIES is a small open-source and open-access Instagram zine project, gathering testimonies from disabled contributors. This project began in the context of the summer of 2021, as mask mandates and general precautions around COVID-19 were being relaxed. Each chapter of the zine is introduced by a question, framing stories and snapshots of experience as well as demands, affirmations, and dreams shared by contributors. The project was stewarded by geunsaeng ahn from September 2021 to July 2022.
Only Together, We Flourish: The Importance of Friendship and Care in Navigating Anti-Asian Hate and Shielding During COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic and the response of the government of the United Kingdom have exacerbated deep-seated inequalities. People of color and disabled people have been disproportionately impacted during the pandemic. This essay has two authors, Sophie, a white disabled academic from England, and Denise, an Asian music therapist from Hong Kong; we are friends who live in Bristol. By examining our understanding of the pandemic through our lived experiences and identities, we provide transparency for engaging with our individual and shared perspectives. We use Mia Mingus’s concept of access intimacy to characterize our friendship as one which prioritizes accessibility and a deep understanding of each other’s realities whilst respecting and learning from our differences. We explore the idea of vulnerability and what it means to be made vulnerable during COVID, as well as the notion of ungrievability. Through engaging the concept of embodied belonging we address care as a necessity in response to all the ways in which this pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated vulnerability, ungrievability, and challenges to finding a sense of belonging. We demonstrate solidarity, empathy, joy, love, respect, and a deep reverence for each other and our journeys through hostile environments, providing a counterpoint to the neoliberal structures of oppression as we find ways to live, create, and flourish.
600 mg of Lithium, Quarantine, and “Third-Spaces”
With a mix of prose, critical reflection, and an accompanying series of drawings inside a daily planner, this intimate essay reimagines multiple conceptions of “space” in relation to different kinds of sickness and wellbeing. Meditating on COVID-19 quarantine spaces and bipolar disorder mood/mind-spaces allowed me to discover messied “third” spaces that explore margins, and complicate ideas of boundaries and binaries. Doing so allowed me to think through new possibilities of healing, restoration, and intimacy when we talk about mental health. I offer up my personal account of a young female Asian American graduate student navigating a ten-year struggle with clinical bipolar disorder, and the personal experiences of “madness,” relapse, and recovery during the winter and spring of 2021. I reflect on my daily routines inside my 800-square-foot apartment and my growing realization that prevailing ideas of “space” are incomplete and contradictory—but can be replete with futurities and learning possibilities. Fittingly, this creative piece does not endeavor to offer any neatly packaged analysis or solid conclusions. Instead, I present one account of grappling with mental illness under extraordinary circumstances and hope it can speak to individual and collective discussions on mental health, disability, and spatiality.
The Place and Pace to Remember: Keeping What the Pandemic Has Given Us
We begin with the question “what do we want to keep that the pandemic has given us?” Largely co-written in 2021, this reflexive essay serves as a snapshot in time, at one stage of the pandemic, reflecting upon earlier, shared experiences at one institution of higher education. We locate each of our identities and positionalities in that space and beyond. Our essay uses Moya Bailey’s 2021 discussion of an ethics of pace to frame our thinking and collective memory work and to counter what we identified as the distinct efforts of institutions of higher education to not have places for institutional memory. We articulate that without memory places, it is impossible to build both a history of justice work in institutions of higher education and accountability that this justice work is seen through. And we ask, how are we to build justice and healing in higher education when the place is designed so that we can’t remember things, and when there seems to be a goal to not have institutional memory that remembers how, why, and by whom justice work is done? We answer the question: “what do we want to keep that the pandemic has given us?” with this: “the pace and place to remember.”
Editors’ Introduction
In this introduction, the editors continue their reflections on scholarly editing in the pandemic, welcome two new co-editors, and announce a grant-funded initiative that builds on Lateral Forums. This issue features three regular articles, book reviews, and the first installment of a special section, “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry,” which builds on the “Cripistemologies of Crisis” special section, edited by Theodora Danylevich and Aly Patsavas, last year.
Introduction: Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry
“Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry” takes up a thread from disability justice writer, educator, and organizer Mia Mingus to assemble an archive that “leaves evidence” and captures experience emergent from crip lives and life in the pandemic. The need to gather, hold space for, and preserve evidence—of our angers, our fears, our griefs, our joys, our pleasures, our communities, and our lives—has, for many of us, never felt more urgent. In this editorial introduction to the first installment of the special section of Lateral, “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry,” we narrate project origins in response to pervasive and obfuscating crisis rhetorics, feelings of indignation, and a desire to gather and preserve evidence of crip life and crip knowledge from within the context of the pandemic. “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry” offers a unique digital archive that brings together creative and scholarly reflections to document the experiences of disabled people during the COVID-19 pandemic. The collection includes a multimodal introductory roundtable; multimedia projects; digital renditions of sculptures, masks, fiber arts, and zines; critical interrogations of pandemic politics and policies; and theorizations of crip sociality. This editorial introduction is our brief overview and invitation for readers to travel through spacetimes, bear witness to, and be cared for by this tapestry, archive, collection.
Crip Pandemic Conversation: Textures, Tools, and Recipes
“Crip Pandemic Conversation: Textures, Tools, and Recipes,” brings together experts whose scholarship, curation, organizing and artistic work centers crip insights and creativity to reflect on the work that “Crip Pandemic Life: A Tapestry” undertakes. Margaret Fink, Aimi Hamraie, Mimi Khúc, and Sandie Yi each discuss how the pandemic impacted their work, and they join section co-editors Alyson Patsavas and Theodora Danylevich in discussing the tapestry’s content. Their conversation pulls out some of the most salient threads of the work: smallness, grief, care, community-building, tenderness, and pandemic coping tools. “Crip Pandemic Conversation: Textures, Tools, and Recipes” includes an unedited video recording of a Zoom roundtable session, a lightly edited text version of the conversation, and a glossary of terms that appear in the discussion, as a contextualizing access tool located at the bottom of the document. In choosing a preferred way of engaging with the content, we invite readers to consider, as the roundtable participants themselves do, how access (transcripts, zoom recordings, and captions) produces its own caring archive and knowledge-making practices.
Personal Protective Purple Daikon Equipment: A Handbook (and an Autistic Manifesto)
During the Spring semester 2020, I took an art class at the Rhode Island School of Design. “Personal Protective Purple Daikon Equipment: A Handbook” was my final project for the class. Part zine, part Zoom performance experiment, part autistic meltdown, the project bears witness to my anger, isolation and fear during the lockdown. It is both a commentary on academia and the constant demand to “make use” of every experience—to continue academic life as usual even during a pandemic that saw so many disabled people die—as well as a handbook for making one’s own Personal Protective Purple Daikon Equipment (PPPDE) at home and an absurdist manifesto. As a research-creation project, the Personal Protective Purple Daikon Equipment offers a snapshot of a moment in (crip) time, that of the first state-sanctioned lockdown and of the early days of the pandemic.
How Do You Grieve During an Apocalypse?
This essay is a rumination on loss during the pandemic—not only the physical loss of loved ones but the loss of experiences and time. Focusing specifically on the death of my aunt, Joyce Dana Apostole, I reflect on what it means to mourn, not only as an individual but as a collective. Through the retelling of significant moments in Joyce’s life and recalling our relationship, I consider the questions: How do you navigate grief when you cannot congregate with others? How is that grief compounded by institutional failures—medical, governmental—and informational lack? And how does social response to individual and mass loss reflect philosophies and policies that (continue to) devalue—and prove detrimental to—the lives of disabled people? Ultimately, this essay is not only a reflection on grief, but it is also a eulogy, an opportunity to fully recognize my aunt and her complex history, a life shaped by illness and disability in ways that counter popular narratives of recovery and overcoming. It is an archive of not only what was, but what wasn’t, necessary documentation within a culture in which “return to normalcy” can become synonymous with forgetting.
Chronic Illness Wisdom is Both/And
This poem reflects on dual tensions that sick & disabled communities have to navigate during ongoing pandemic conditions. In particular, it addresses the chronic illness knowledges that people with post-viral illnesses already possess (the reality of chronic conditions after acute infections, the necessity of solidarity across bed space) in the face of medical and political institutions that refuse to know.
August 2020
Unemployed at the time, not visibly disabled, but having become quite unwell in the middle of a pandemic, this poem illustrates my anxious and exhausting insomnia against the caretaking labor for my youngest child. I worked to minimize the projections of stress and anxiety onto her, laboring for stillness and comfort. As Luce Irigaray states in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993), “Music comes before meaning. A sort of preliminary to meaning, coming after warmth, moisture, softness, kinesthesia” (168).
Editors’ Introduction: New Milestones, New Initiatives
As we begin this second decade of Lateral, we reflect on the origins of the journal and new initiatives underway. We also consider the precarious nature of scholarly publishing and editing in the pandemic and reaffirm our commitment to this care work. This issue features three articles—two of which emerged from our articles-in-progress workshop at last year’s Cultural Studies Association annual meeting—as well as the 2021 Randy Martin Prize winning essay and a number of book reviews. We invite applications for our editorial team and proposals for new initiatives at the journal.
Editors’ Introduction: Materializing Immaterial Labor in Cultural Studies
This introduction frames the six original articles in this issue and the forum on “Corona A(e)ffects: Radical Affectivities of Dissent and Hope” around the concept of immaterial labor. Two full years into a pandemic that has uprooted place-based work for many, and forced even more indoors, away from public spaces, and onto screens, we reflect on the very material effects of present-day immaterial and emotional labor.
Introduction—Corona A(e)ffects: Radical Affectivities of Dissent and Hope
Right from the emergence of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, national governments and international institutions have been relentlessly qualifying it as an “unprecedented” event. We have been told that the virus sees no color or class and that equal sacrifices from each one of us are and continue to be necessary to contain its spread. We have been instructed to look at the virus in scientific, neutral terms as if we had equal chances of being affected by it—as if its routes, that is, did not follow the roots of sedimented histories of oppression, exploitation, dispossession, and structural violence. This forum departs from such narratives to look at how the current COVID-19 pandemic intersects with other pre-existing and enduring pandemics, such as those produced by racism, capitalism, and speciesism. In building on the emerging critiques by Indigenous, feminist, Black, and queer academics, movements, and activists, the contributions it hosts offer multimedia reflections on affects triggered or evoked by the current pandemic, such as rage, fear, despair, restraint, care, and hope. Coming from different parts of the globe and disciplinary approaches, authors convey the “Corona(virus) a(e)ffects” in multisensorial ways, combining written essays, poetry, videos, and photographs. By contextualizing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic within a historical legacy of structural violence within and across species, this forum moves beyond deceitfully single-focus and temporally flat narrations. In so doing, it provides a space for the expression of radical affectivities of dissent and hope that its outburst has arguably made only more visible and pressing.