Pandemic Time: A Critical Introduction

Abstract

Pandemic TimeA Critical Introduction Darius Bost Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt as nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality,” trying to stitch our future to our past, and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And amid this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. –Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic is a Portal” A recent study published in Science Advances used weekly, online surveys to assess participants’ perceptions of time over a five-month period of quarantine in Brazil, which, at the time, ranked second worldwide in the number of deaths related to the pandemic. They aimed to understand how social distancing and emotional and psychological factors influenced participants’ perceptions of time. Researchers found that time was distorted during social distancing, the sense of time as slowing down was strongly associated with emotions and feelings of isolation, and the perception of time as speeding up was strongly associated with stress and personal care.1 The researchers acknowledged that their sample was biased toward middle- and upper-class women in the southeast region of Brazil, but they saw no reason why this sample could not be used to address their research question. In their 2020 “Feminist Response to COVID-19,” however, a global network of feminist and women’s rights organizations from the Global South and from marginalized communities in the Global North stressed that a feminist response to COVID-19 “must center the well-being of all people in an intersectional manner,” must take into account how “multiple and intersecting discrimination . . . may increase the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on specific population groups and communities,” and “that women, men, and gender non-conforming people [End Page 110] within these groups will have different experiences and needs.”2 Relatedly, they note how, “in many countries, curfews and lockdowns are being brutally enforced by military and police forces, often most cruelly targeting the most marginalized groups.”3 The principles set forth by this coalition of feminist advocates suggest that “pandemic time” is perceived and experienced differently among (multiply) marginalized populations who already live under conditions of precarity and experience the pandemic as overlapping with preexisting crises. This special section on pandemic time explores how the coronavirus pandemic has altered our senses of time through an intersectional lens. Though the pandemic has impacted every corner of the globe, care has been distributed unevenly, and often arrives belatedly in poorer countries. In the areas of the globe that have been most affected, pandemic time is felt as trauma on both catastrophic and deeply personal levels, and the time of grief seems unending to some while it is barely recognizable to others. Attempts to return to normal or to create some sense of normalcy seem cruelly optimistic when the post-pandemic world has seemingly upended normative conceptions of time.4 As the epidemic continues to unfold, and as its meanings continue to be mediated through polarizing political discourses, the unevenness of global capital, and overlapping disasters, this special section queries our senses of time in the post-pandemic world. My emphasis on senses of time is meant to underscore how, rather than producing a shared sense of time, the pandemic has exposed how racial, ethnic, class, gender, sexual, regional, and national differences shape our perceptions of time. This special section gathers leading and emerging scholars to reflect on pandemic time as it is experienced at the individual and group levels. The authors draw from feminist, queer, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx epistemologies of time to offer unique and diverse, and often personal, perspectives on the pandemic and its temporal affects and effects. By way of introduction, this essay approaches the theme of “pandemic time” by reflecting on my experience of COVID-19, beginning with my contraction of the virus two-and-a-half years after the appearance of the pandemic in the United States. I begin with my personal experience to express my sense of pandemic time, despite its official designation as an...