Past Event

Ghostly Figures in Pandemic Times: Interrupting the Fetishization of “Back to Normal” through a Genealogy of Long COVID

Building on a decade of work on medically unidentified illnesses and their impacts on marginalized subjects, I take interest in the chronic and disputed form of COVID-19, known as Long COVID. I adopt a feminist critical disability, mad, and race studies framework to engage with the following questions: How are gender, race, and illness co-constituted beyond their time and place, so that a new illness might already open up histories of production? How does Long COVID interrupt and haunt a public desire to return to a fetishized “normal”? How does being affected by structural conditions come to shape subjects as irrational? Offering theoretical entry points for thinking through pandemic times, I caution us against the risks of reproducing gendered, racial, and neoliberal power in our treatment of what may very well become the biggest chronic health condition of our time.

Bio: 

Ghaida Moussa is a feminist critical disability, mad, and race studies scholar. Her first monograph, Why are we all sick? QTBIPOC Interventions in Fibromyalgic Presents, is currently under review with Temple University Press. Her latest research project explores the temporalities, affects, and gendered and racial genealogies of Long COVID. Her concept of “neuroliberalism” will soon be included in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Critical Perspectives on Mental Health. She is co-editor of multiple book collections, including Queering Urban Justice: Queer of Colour Formations in Toronto and Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto, and a special issue of Feral Feminisms entitled “Complicities, Connections, and Struggles: Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism.” Most recently, she was keynote speaker for the Annual Gender Equality and Social Justice Keynote at Nipissing University in 2020 and for the Women and Gender Studies et Recherches Féministes conference at Congress in 2019. She currently works in the Research Partnerships Portfolio at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).