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Mick B Brewer, This Ain’t So Bad, or, Everything Getting Me Through this Pandemic I Learned from Being Queer, Communication, Culture and Critique, Volume 14, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 320–323, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcab020
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March 2020 ushered COVID’s arrival in the United States and, within days, my institution announced we would conclude the semester virtually. I observed colleagues across the country panicking over remaining connected to students, delivering lectures, and possible implications of these transitions as they concern continued neoliberal surveillance of students and faculty. As I watched this unfold I couldn’t help but think, “I’ve got this. This isn’t that difficult.” But I also thought, “Why am I not overwhelmed by this?” Then, something clicked. We’re now governed by counter-logics for daily existence; the looking glass, it seems, arrived. We’re facing a queering of normalcy and, as a queer person, it feels unsettlingly (…) comfortable.
While I don’t wish to proffer a universal queer subjectivity or homogenize the queer experience, it is useful to consider some elements that may characterize some queer ontologies. “Queer” goes “against the ‘normal’ or normalizing” (Spargo, 1999, pp. 8–9) and is less about lacking something than a presence of something, like a “position outside of the normal trope of daily life that affords perspectives apart from the norm” (Dilley, 1999, p. 458). The pandemic’s demands of solitude and mediated connectivity queers how we relationally do academic labor (even if those labor forms are as expansive as queer positionalities themselves) and mirrors certain queer productions of intimacy; certainly, those of my own. As Freccero (2007) claims, “anything can queer something, and anything, given a certain odd twist, can become queer” (p. 485), and I realized that queers were perhaps better prepared to adapt to this new world—this deconstructive twist—because we’re accustomed to life against the grain.
