“In these times / in these end times,” I’m heartened by what I see as an incipient intersectionality in much of the popular response to COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus. [1] COVID-19’s global scale and ready participation in existing international conflict, as well as its reception as a general “threat to life,” has garnered the virus significant attention.  Its arrival, however, has not occurred in a vacuum of attention to the politics of life. Rather remarkably, the public has been learning how to think intersectionally, not only taking in the regularity of police brutality against Black people in the United States but also considering the ways in which hierarchies of class and race functioned as drags on George Floyd’s life well before he was murdered; they have been learning about the divergent life chances of trans women of color and the increased challenges that Black women face. Standing Rock Sioux leaders and other Indigenous allies have applied Native sovereign practices to resisting the poisoning of the land and waters around the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline; tied to polluting industrial projects such as these is intimate knowledge about unjust burdens and chronicities that appear to compound the virus’s effects. The very question being asked as I write in October 2020, “Who will get the vaccine first?” acknowledges the capitalist power of biotech and the privatization of the vaccine effort and highlights the divide between the access of the moneyed and the neglected class of essential workers, among whom racial and gendered minorities are overrepresented. The bulk of effective pedagogy has been due to the sustained work of so many antiracist, anticolonial feminist actors and thinkers.

All of these concerns have been present in recent memory, so that, one could argue, COVID-19 both is and isn’t the name of a virus. It is many, many things – many histories, many bodies, many politics. It is also the name of differential bodily burdens, differential state resourcing and differential state securitizations under terms that create bifurcations between care and murder. As this short piece will explore, one of the core contributions of a feminist analysis has been the examination of what was often an implicit racialized gendering of a purported division between public and private. Below, I examine its relevance to the multiplicities of COVID-19.

Above, I have used the descriptive “is,” as if COVID-19 were explainable in the domain of knowledge, even as I gesture to the richness of referents it contains. These viral particles have a physical and interactive character segregable enough to be called “novel,” and yet so much of what is being witnessed feels old and familiar. Unlike the declarative “is,” a more familiar feeling for so many is incomprehension. “I just can’t wrap my head around it.” “It’s impossible to understand.” I have been heard saying those words, and I have said them mostly as a comment on my inability to form a singular, consistent shape out of the tumult of accumulated and novel violences that accrete to something like the phenomenon of COVID-19. Even while equipped with critical race theory, cultural studies, feminist science studies, Asian American studies, queer studies, animal studies, and disability studies perspectives that together might allow me to make a certain quick sense of this fast-developing catastrophe, I am simultaneously compelled to register exhausted grief and a newfound hesitancy about analysis itself, or its regathering into synthesis. Against the iterative beat of horrific circumstance, any scholarly gratification from newfound comprehension simply escapes me these days.

Perhaps, too, such incomprehension is because COVID-19, in my localized experience, has joined in a duo with another happening of equally spectacular, and perhaps confounding, scale: the seasonal fires of California. COVID-19, because it has managed to thrive in the US population through this fall, and the California seasonal fires, intensified due to human-induced climate change as well as poor fire policy, are two airy phenomena that dance together, aloft, touching. Surely, they make contact in actuality: in one conjuncture, smoky air intermingles with the exhalations of an infected, unmasked pedestrian, creating a doubly potent inhalant for someone else; in the next beat, wildfire smoke is also inhaled into that infected pedestrian’s body. The smoke and virus intermingle such that a body, and its differentially responsive organs, represents several (chemically) modifying nodes—not a single barrier—in a continuous traffic. But the two phenomena also touch at dense epistemological crossroads or analytical matrices.

Photo by Christopher.Michel

These matrices include environmental burdens and their relation to chronic illnesses that confound mainstream allopathic medicine; medical racism and colonialism; policy-borne failures to provide egalitarian forms of care; modulations of bodily constituents and their biochemical interaction with inhalants entering the lungs and bloodstream; the ability to account for exceptional zoonotic (nonhuman animal to human) transmissions, including species and scenes (such as “wet markets” in China) that have again been made globally spectacular, while being slow to properly conceive means of intraspecies (i.e., intrahuman), viral transmission. We find two cultural images of sexualities: a queered, “wet” interspecies commingling in China and a straightened image of neoliberal, “dry” monospecies (human) independence that renders white transmissibility impossible while racially othered people continue to be marked as vectors. That is, colonially informed segregations of “nature” from “culture” remain generative, such that live animal markets (including pangolins, who are believed by some to be a source of COVID-19) become seen as perverse and primitive sexualities while gender-reveal pyrotechnics that incite “wild” fires and indoor hetero wedding celebrations do not; and so on.  This second form of touch (of analytical matrices) is represented, for example, by the emergent social-justice knowledge that COVID-19 has affected Brown and Black people disproportionately in severity and death, such that Black Lives Matter protests can be affirmed as benefiting, rather than threatening, public health (which pertains to the first form of touch, actual intermingling).

Photo by Fibonacci Blue

What is more, at the level of policy, much of the incomprehensibility of the past few months of national experience with COVID-19 seems due to a fatal confluence between an administration embracing white supremacist nationalist exceptionalisms and a public health infrastructure that had long been inadequately provisioned and tied to only certain forms of “public.” Simultaneously, the history of privatization of government agencies and the deferral of health care to self-care sit comfortably beside the framed exceptionality of the pandemic and an admittedly remarkable swath of disease effects that corporeally ground and haunt the unknown. Here, various observers, from newspaper essayists to TikTok creators, have been illustrating the painful impossibility – again, that word – of following public health advice: to protect yourself from COVID-19, “stay outdoors,” but to protect yourself from wildfire smoke, “stay indoors,” not to mention the type of mask an individual might seek out for proper protection from either ill (another clash, given available supplies). The COVID-19 guidance, especially that from the World Health Organization, has only inched toward acknowledging the primacy of air as the means of COVID-19 infection. As if surprising, we learn the “disgusting” fact that blowing on birthday candles will drench the cake’s surface with droplets of your breath; speaking to one another, much less shouting in a room, unleashes both droplets and aerosols whose range can extend meters, enveloping an interlocutor. Here, even public health for the masses can yield no certain calculation for safety.

Incomprehensible: from Latin comprehens, “seized, comprised”; perhaps air itself is flagged an unimaginable assembly. Air, in this circumstance, comprises both aerosols and particles; gases, ash, airborne virus. So why does airy thinking feel impossible here, in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area, in this current moment? Has air itself been seized? If land were opposed to air (which it is not), we might say that in the Bay Area, among social justice circles, there has been an increased opening to a recognition of Indigenous (Huichin Ohlone) presence and unceded territory that aligns with and augments, rather than creating friction against, the common learning about Black disenfranchisement as collated forms of white supremacy. In such terms, the real estate value of this Bay Area land depicts it as that which can be property; the financial losses of COVID-19 lockdowns are attributed to the shutting down of storefront retail and the foreclosing of homes.[2] This is an indirect logic by which land becomes meaningful to majoritarian narratives of COVID-19.

But rather than be a distraction from airborne justice, attention to a reimagining of land must be augmented in order for those who live in this place to be fully resident in the traffics, solaces, and violences of the air. After all, fire’s rapid transformation of living beings such as trees into forms of ash and gas represent a kind of transformation between “land” and “air” that in its essence is not categorically unwanted: here I am mindful of Native practices in these regions of regular, restorative burning and the ordinary cycles of fire on which many forms of life depend. The binarisms that inform what land means also yield continued perverse constructions of “wildlife,” that fantastic realm that supplies a pangolin at one end of this moment and vulnerable forest fauna, such as orphaned baby black bears unable to outpace a fire, at the other. Why is it a hard stretch to embrace the otherwise of human primacy, particularly if we take seriously Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) consequential challenges to the sharply interested figurations that have been invested into what is thought of as this human species?  Why so difficult to honestly appraise the interdependencies that make up the fabric of the natureculture “here” that is not geopolitically opposed to a “there,” a remote region such as China?

In my previous writing, I have alluded to being hyperattentive to passageways of air because I need to anticipate chemical incursions in space that would exacerbate my chemical sensitivity, and thus I have a need to move “queerly.”[3] Those with certain forms of chronic illness have of course long been necessarily attentive to the air and what it brings. But for the rest, it seems, like COVID-19, this is a “novel” way to think. And we see how slowly a habitus can be learned; many of my excellently trained colleagues who wield magnificently expansive frameworks for thinking about matter seem remarkably unprepared and reactive to managing their air differently under these conditions.[4] Disabled people already living in what they describe as necessary and largely self-funded “quarantine” have commented on whatever masking and ventilation policies have managed to be implemented despite resistance from “free air” ideologies. “Is this what it took for you to make the conditions we need universally available, enforceable, public?” they have asked.

In early feminist critique, which is now seen as “liberal white feminism,” private spaces were those assigned to implicitly white domesticity and gendered as the devalued feminine, whereas the public was assigned to the masculine member of a couple, understood to be the one working. One feminist gesture was to assert that labor within the region of the feminized private must be credited as well as remunerated. Black feminist theorizing corrected this flattening narrative, pointing out the ways that systems of chattel slavery (upon which white private spaces depended and which they consumed) organized slave labor, sexuality, and property such that the realm of the private collapsed racialized labor, including the space of the domestic and enslaved people themselves, into zones of white property. Race, gender, and sexuality all factored in the Lawrence v. Texas (2003) case, which moved homosexual activity and other forms of sex into the realm of the protected private domain. Today, the historically high number of precariously housed, chronically ill/disabled queer and trans of color populations here in the Bay Area tells a story of continued challenge but also creative survival in the face of COVID-19 and the California fires.

Finallly, the indoors/outdoors dyad that features in contrasting public health recommendations, is itself haunted by public/private oppositions. Any juxtaposition of the higher COVID-19 infectiousness of the “indoor” domain against the unbreathable wildfire smoke of “outdoors,” both of which are counted as threats to health, falls flat from the perspective of many unhoused people. Organizations such as the queer-/trans-led Mask Oakland are notable for prioritizing the delivery of N95 masks to the most vulnerable residents of Oakland: “We come from and strive to be in alignment with many movements, including climate justice, Black Lives Matter, housing justice, environmental justice, disability justice, queer and trans liberation, indigenous movements, workers’ movements and economic justice, and Black and trans-led feminism.”[5] While striving to align with these many movements is likely to engender complex decision points (that are sometimes negatively rendered as undesirable “conflicts”), Mask Oakland insists on the radical need for an approach that in some loose way looks like the intellectual spirit of intersectional feminism – the surely welcome starting point for much progressive political activity today – but arguably goes further epistemologically and ontologically. Nowhere in their stating of alignments are the toxic illusions and structurations of white supremacy or capitalism or property or indoors or outdoors mentioned, but they are everywhere in this statement. As is needed in this time, theirs is a necessary mess of uncomplicated love, hope, and commitment.

In this moment, what might be some new feminist versions of “public” and “private,” and their relation, that could help us move beyond the impossibility of survival in a time of COVID-19 and forest fires? Beyond a biopolitics that naturalizes the view of public services and public health advisories as aimed at the individualized protection of one’s “own” health? Leaving behind a binary-gendered, heteroreproductive, neoliberal, “dry” account of survival and futurity that preserves the supremacies we now live with for an ecofeminist, “wet,” crip complexity of interdependent life and death? Beyond a militant medicalism that vows an all-out fight against bodily vulnerability (which often amounts to eliminating vulnerable lives) and disabled difference, and toward forms of care that refuse to be corralled within either the dignified private or the militarized, necropolitical public? Beyond a racial imagination of differentially embodied publics that means that, in this moment, Asian bodies affectively expand from the mundane (and distant) public into a threat of contagion within private spaces, unleashing responsive violence, whereas white bodies simply occupy all publics thoroughly, with no apparent notice of their violent occupations?[6] Beyond the “public” occupancy of land-grant universities of unceded Indigenous land? Beyond the viral transmission of video clips that register the insistence by police that Black public life must be transformed into death, while the loss of homes and even of unhoused emplacement threatens Black lives more than ever before? Beyond the idea that air can really be ever imagined as either public or private, but only remarkably shared by both?

Going back to an early moment in queer theorizing, I’m reminded of Diana Fuss’s comments, responding to the already ample concerns about the gay and lesbian construction of “the closet” (which, in its literal form, is another doubly private feature of the private indoors). Fuss wrote: “The philosophical opposition between ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual,’ like so many other conventional binaries, has always been constructed on the foundations of another related opposition: the couple ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ The metaphysics of identity… has, until now, depended on the structural symmetry of these seemingly fundamental distinctions and the inevitability of a symbolic order based on a logic of limits, margins, borders, and boundaries” (Fuss 1991, 1). While Fuss took a psychoanalytic approach to the critique of this implicit opposition, that moment joined sexuality with this spatialized image of interiority and exteriority; thirty years later, there is much more critique sitting with us at the conjuncture of sexuality and the inside/outside binary. I also recognize that interior/exterior differences seem fairly fundamental to living in the world’s many naturecultures. But today’s easy public health deployments of “inside/outside”—of the two concepts, as well as their binarity—ignore these years of critique, presenting inside and outside as possibly the least complicated givens in a complex decision tree of advisements, naturalizing a propertied approach to land and air that should perhaps be the first to be apprehended (something Indigenous, Brown, and Black people subject to environmental pollution know well). If inside/outside and private/public are so deeply informed by a classing, racing, abling, and sexualizing of space (not to mention human speciation), how to detach from, release, these substantiating – and pillaging – concepts to allow others to take their place, at a time when our conditions demand it? To pursue the expanded queer ecologies of the present, opening to visions of life and thriving around this earth that have been pressed out by broken imaginations? Here, a reimagining and expansion of the commons must be emphasized. 

While a feminist response of any kind should be a minimum, it’s also true that some feminisms head further into territories of domination and capture. Registering women’s participation does nothing to remedy the drag of whiteness or imperialism on an antiracist or just future or to, for instance, counteract a property-invested liberal settler mindset. I prefer a feminist account that readily indicts the gender-reveal’s explosive binarism and its ritualistic invocation of an entire community of witnesses to determine the spatial, material, economic, racial, and social details of a future gendered life on the basis of one or maybe two medical determinants of sex. And I prefer a feminism that connects this to entire swaths of land-air and their living residents disproportionately going up in flames, and the associated accelerated death, over a feminist account that connects Jacinda Ardern’s identity as a woman (one apparently of a global community of women on some vague shared basis) to her success at managing the pandemic in New Zealand; the Navajo Nation, Rwanda, and other sub-Saharan African governments have also done remarkably well, after all. But I’m still not satisfied, and I am still exhausted, and I have so much more learning to do. Out of the desperation and melancholic pragmatism of this moment, at stake are a series of questions about the “about” of feminisms whose imaginations promise something in the end. [7]

Read the other symposium essays

References

Chen, Mel Y. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Choy, Timothy. 2011. Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Fuss, Diana. 1991. “Inside/Out.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss, 1-10. New York: Routledge.

Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.

Shah, Nyan. 2001. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s China Town. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3):257-337.

Notes

[1] It’s commonly observed how the use of the phrase “in these times,” “in these troubled times,” “in these uncertain times” as a preface to emails has swelled recently, and especially during the pandemic.

[2] Anthropologist Tim Choy (2011), in his analysis of the diverse socially, politically, and scientifically informed accounts of air in Hong Kong, has written of the continued inadequacy of social theory in the face of something as ungraspable as air, in an intellectual realm that prefers certain versions of the substantial over others.

[3] See Chen (2012), particularly chapter 6 (“Following Mercurial Affect”).

[4] For all of Donna Haraway’s (2003) work on naturecultures and anthropological and postcolonial feminisms’ reimagining of these dualities, I feel that the divide persists when urbane intellectuals who live in/primarily by institutional conditions encounter what are presented as novel circumstances that involve some form of “nature” or “wildlife.”

[5] See http://maskoakland.org/volunteer.

[6] Nayan Shah’s (2001) work on the queer contagions of opium pipes, “from lip to lip” (95), in the smoky opium parlors of San Francisco’s turn-of-the-century Chinatown, weaves new smoky tendrils into the present day, placing infection in a stage of dense and racially tinged air.

[7] “Melancholic pragmatism” is a phrase that emerged in my conversation with philosopher and activist Alisa Bierria on October 17, 2020, about melancholies that do not end in what can be a strangely idealistic form of lossful nihilism or that are perpetually delayed or denied but are instead permitted to exist, registering layers of complexity and the acceptance of inevitable complicity and incompletion.