Covid-19 and the mundane practices of privilege

Moving between the 2015 elections, Covid-19 and the sustained social justice protests in the United States in this essay, I question where and how the pursuit of joy, remedies for boredom and practices of self-care relate to the necropolitical social hierarchies in the United States. In spite of popular declarations that the virus is ‘the great equalizer’, there is considerable evidence that Covid-19 devastates along established systems of power, rights and values that organize the cultural practices of the everyday. This is especially visible in those who seek self-care from the anxieties of the pandemic, and how and why they seek such care. Driven by a combination of guilt and privilege, along with a deliberate misreading of Audre Lorde's notion of self-care as an act of political warfare, these words and their corresponding practices animate a hubristic right to the good life even at the end of capitalism. Given this, I ask how in the midst of mutating pathological social and political conditions and their corresponding discomforts, self-care and the search for joy have become imbricated in narratives of progressive politics.