Covid-19 and the mundane practices of privilege
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Moving between the 2015 elections, Covid-19 and the sustained social justice protests in the United States in this essay, I question where and how the pursuit of joy, remedies for boredom and practices of self-care relate to the necropolitical social hierarchies in the United States. In spite of popular declarations that the virus is ‘the great equalizer’, there is considerable evidence that Covid-19 devastates along established systems of power, rights and values that organize the cultural practices of the everyday. This is especially visible in those who seek self-care from the anxieties of the pandemic, and how and why they seek such care. Driven by a combination of guilt and privilege, along with a deliberate misreading of Audre Lorde's notion of self-care as an act of political warfare, these words and their corresponding practices animate a hubristic right to the good life even at the end of capitalism. Given this, I ask how in the midst of mutating pathological social and political conditions and their corresponding discomforts, self-care and the search for joy have become imbricated in narratives of progressive politics.
DOI: 10.17615/3jhx-0n23
Author: Silva, Kumarini
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4415190198
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