Ugly Feelings

Abstract

At the height of the pandemic, the concept of care and the moral imperative to take care of one another rapidly entered public discourse. Yet while the UK government sought to assure us that we were ‘all in this together’, a very different picture soon emerged as a lack of protective personal equipment meant that NHS staff found themselves at a greater risk of dying of Covid-19. This risk was also disproportionately distributed as many Black and Global Majority NHS staff, who were in front line services, were more at risk than their white colleagues. This article examines three digital monologue performances that were streamed at the height of the pandemic in 2020 and which engage with the negative feelings of anxiety, fear and risk taking which framed contexts of racialised care at this time. Tales from the front line … and other stories-Part 2: NHS Mental Health Worker, was a verbatim performance produced by Talawa Theatre, while Rivers by Meera Syal and First, Do No Harm by Bernadine Evaristo were both commissioned by the Old Vic Theatre and screened as part of The Greatest Wealth project, commemorating the foundation of the NHS. In different ways, these performances explore care giving, but do so by foregrounding the experiences of Black and Global Majority NHS staff. Focusing on the fear and risks of caring for others, these performances explore what, borrowing from Sianne Nagi (2005), I will describe as the ‘ugly feelings’ of care. Instead of depicting the aesthetics of care-giving, these monologues expose the riskiness of caring and the ugliness of racism endured by Black and Global Majority NHS carers while attending to the needs of others. Through an examination of the moments of discrimination and disempowerment experienced by these NHS carers, these performances transform these ‘ugly feelings’ into sites of critical productivity, generating work that calls upon us to decentre our conceptualisation of care and to consider our own political allegiance in order to demand progressive change.