Survival and liveability in #COVIDtimes: Queer women’s transnational witnessing of COVID-19

Abstract

<jats:p> Exploring liveabilities as more than survival, this commentary underscores how survival remains important in these #COVIDtimes. Discussing our privileges and resistances as queer women with various intersectionalities, we offer transnational notes on negotiating, surviving, and living in these non-normative times. </jats:p>

The signature of the disaster: Witness‐ness in death camp and tsunami survivor testimony

“…Witnessing has returned to prominence, from survivor testimonies of #MeToo (Gilmore, 2019) and digital witnessing of racialised police violence (Richardson, 2020) to social media testimony of asylum seekers held in spaces of exception (Rae et al, 2018), critical witnessing of COVID‐19 (Browne et al, 2020), and the "geological self‐witnessing" of the so‐called Anthropocene (Yusoff, 2016, p. 5). Meanwhile, an interdisciplinary body of literature has theorised the complexities of the act and genre of witnessing (e.g Givoni, 2016; Pollin‐Galay, 2018; Trezise, 2014), which belie the seemingly straightforward representational logic of bringing something absent back to presence: as if witnessing were no more than memory retrieval.…”