A sour taste of sick chronicity: pandemic time and the violence of “returning to normal”

ABSTRACT In the face of COVID-19 shutdowns, much of the world fundamentally adjusted its relationship to time, space, work, productivity, and rest. In this essay, I theorize the pandemic as forcing many people to live within “sick spacetime,” which involves 1) experiencing inconsistent mobility, 2) acknowledging the precarity of our bodyminds, and 3) living in the liminal state of being constantly in-wait. I use “sick spacetime” to problematize widespread calls for the “return to normal,” then outline a politics of crip/sick futurity in which orientations to time and space remain flexible as pandemic restrictions ease.