Abstract
This essay is inspired by what has become a staple of cultural studies, the parsing of keywords that appear and crystallize during moments of social, cultural, political and economic change. It takes as its starting point a methodology based in the examples of Williams’ (1985) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society and Grover’s (1987) “AIDS: Keywords” in order to trace the ways that the language of COVID-19 has served simultaneously to make intelligible and obscure, reveal and cover over the divisions, contradictions and inequalities of the pandemic experience. Rather than attempting a dictionary-style entry system of keywords, which would imply a stability of meaning that might be excavated and understood, this essay animates certain keywords of the pandemic, which are bolded below, in order to situate, define and critique them. It looks to particular keywords tied to pandemic subjectification and the divisions these elicit and elide, such as the asymptomatic carrier, essential worker, self-isolation/inverted quarantine and vulnerable populations, as heuristics for a kind of conjunctural analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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