When Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same: The Queer Paradox of Quarantine Pods

Abstract

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the practice of podding was encouraged in public discourse as a way to manage the isolation and stress many people experienced. While described as a creative mode of relationality that extended traditional nuclear family units, the public discourse about forming quarantine pods during the COVID-19 pandemic was a strategic bordering practice. Even though some community members (LGBTQIA+ and otherwise) celebrated the resilient ways in which queer experiences could model these nonnormative intimacies, public discourses about pandemic podding limited the potential to imagine new ways of being, often further entrenching normative ideals of citizenship and heteronormative family making. Although uncharted modes of relationality such as podding offer the promise of inclusive, radical, and generative futures, the reactive, bounded, and formalistic construction of pandemic pods never fully materialized that future.