The Pandemic and Its Shadow. Feminist Theoretical and Art Discourses on Trauma and Community in COVID-19

Abstract

This article explores the philosophical and psychoanalytic trajectories of conceptualizing the Covid-19 pandemic as ‘collective trauma’, and considers what would be the risks, but also productive possibilities, of such a theoretical move. the context of this inquiry is the so-called ‘shadow pandemic’ – the drastic increase in domestic violence globally, which accompanied introduction of lockdowns as a measure of containing the impact of Covid-19 on public health infrastructures. For the women who were victims of violence during the lockdowns, the discourse of ‘sheltering’, ‘isolation’ and ‘staying home’ has carried antithetical meanings to the o6cially sanctioned ones – those were meanings of threat, danger, harm, and death. Drawing on the work of two feminist psychoanalytic thinkers, Julia Kristeva and Jacqueline Rose, and on installations by bio-artists Anna Dumitriu and Flo Kasearu, I argue against notions of the pandemic as an external traumatic event that disrupted societies and communities worldwide. Rather, the ‘shadow pandemic’ suggest that there is a more complex, even intimate, relation between the pandemic, violence, and gendered productions of sociality.