queerantine: photographing the everyday anxiety of a queer body in the covid-19 pandemic

mark kurai & t.j. tallie

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic and as with many in the U.S. we began to distance ourselves for health and safety. After the first two weeks of self-isolation began to stretch endlessly outward, we found ourselves feeling somewhat adrift and listless. At that time, anticipating the potential for a protracted isolation, the two of us decided to undertake a photo series that documented life during the pandemic. In this photo essay, we analyze images captured by the photographer, Mark, and examine how the subject, T.J., posed himself in a variety of clothing styles to explore how we navigated the alienating, unworldly sense of the pandemic. Thinking through this experience together, we discuss what it means for queer bodies of color to move through the world —or not, in the case of a pandemic—and how this project helped us survive the endless anxiety of the year while imagining strange, and potentially wonderful queer futures.

In her book Queer Phenomenology Sara Ahmed explores the relationships between space, home, and belonging. She ties these threads together explicitly around the idea of orientation, asserting that “the concept of ‘orientation’ allows us then to rethink the phenomenality of space-- that is, how space is dependent on bodily inhabitance. And yet, for me, learning left from right, east from west, and forward from back does not necessarily mean I know where I am going. I can be lost even when I know how to turn, this way or that way” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 6). This is precisely how we felt in those first weeks of navigating the pandemic, in experiencing the now painfully over-familiar world of walls of our home, the front steps, the outer courtyard. There was simultaneously a hyper-awareness of where we were and also being wildly out of direction—where were we going, what was any of this? This is part of what our photo project offered us—a chance to feel grounded.

One of the most disorienting aspects of the past fourteen months during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent social distancing has been the passage of time. This creative venture provided us with structure and consistency. Once a week, usually a Sunday, Mark would walk to T.J.’s house, and take a series of photos. Before the fun would begin, T.J. would select one or two outfits, consult with Mark, and discuss an overall plan for the pictures. In the evenings, Mark would edit the images, and our routine would be complete. For sixty-one weeks, this became our ritual. For each photoshoot, the images became a way of marking time and our conversations helped us understand what was going on around us. What began as a weekly collaborative creative project became a series of photographic temporal markers that organized our weekly routines and our memories of the intervening year.

For Mark, the photoshoots were more than a chance to indulge his creativity. While the shift to working remotely was a smooth transition, balancing the constant pressure to perform and the desire to maintain community among friends and family often left him too depleted to focus on his own wellness. After a week spent working indoors and isolated, these regular events were an opportunity to go for a walk outside, to stay connected to a friend, and to continually nurture a passion for photography. With T.J., he had created a project that allowed him to regularly address different facets of his life. . . and he does love efficiency.

For T.J., the photoshoots offered an opportunity to escape his own pandemic-induced anxious thoughts and literally step outside of the same four walls of his apartment. Part of T.J.’s excitement for this project involved working from his own history with fashion, bodies, and performance.

In his research as a historian, he has examined the ways that Africans used fashion to claim their belonging in a colonial world and to subvert raced and gendered expectations of them and their bodies (Tallie, 206, p. 389-410). He maintains a fashion blog for his non-quarantine outfits and he’s written before about how fashion means something important to him as a queer, fat, Black person (Tallie, 2020). It allows him to move through the world with confidence, to challenge things around him, and to feel powerful. But what would it mean when I was largely alone?

For both of us, this project allowed us to stay connected as friends in a world newly shaped by isolation. Regularly taking distanced photos outside allowed us to connect with each other and feel active in a world that seemed painfully static. Little did we know that we would take hundreds of photos over nearly fourteen months stretching from March 28, 2020 until May 23, 2021.

As we retrace these photos of queerness, fashion, and the pandemic with you, we remain indebted to scholar Tina M. Campt. In Listening to Images, Campt explores the myriad ways in which Black people claim a future for themselves despite constant oppression or erasure. Studying passport photographs or ethnographic imagery, Campt chooses to listen to the images, focusing on the feelings elicited by these everyday objects. For Campt, “‘listening to images’ is at once a description and a method. It designates a method of recalibrating vernacular photographs as quiet, quotidian practices that give us access to the affective registers through which these images enunciate alternate accounts of their subjects. It is a method that opens up the radical interpretive possibilities of images and state archives we are most often inclined to overlook”. Campt finds within these images, “the struggle to create possibility within the constraints of everyday life” for Black people in white supremacist societies. The daily practice of choosing clothing that will cover the body and create moving images, can create profound frequencies of feeling for observers; these quotidian actions are “mobilized as everyday practices of refusal” (Campt, 2017, p. 5).

With this in mind, we offer these snapshots from the pandemic and attempt to listen to what these images may tell us about fourteen months of queerness, bodies, and movement.

We hope you enjoy going on a partial journey with us now.

March 28, 2020 (Day 15):

This photo was taken two weeks into social distancing and working remotely. We suspected the pandemic would endure longer than expected but it was difficult to comprehend the scale and seriousness of what was to come. In the first week of photos, we had a vague concept of taking regular photos but no concrete plan. It was really a chance to document how disoriented, how confused we felt. Initially, we joked that it was an opportunity to see an extrovert just be alone for a few weeks, but the anxiety was already at the forefront of this photo.

Personal fashion has always been a way to signal and reinforce queerness. Being forced into virtual environments for a vast majority of our social interactions changed our relation to personal fashion and how it reinforces (or fails to reinforce) our sense of identity. What does it mean when no one is around to see the clothes you choose? How does one rebel or mark oneself differently when so much of their lives are remote and removed from interactions with the wider world?

About the outfit: I specifically chose a fun and edgy t-shirt and some quirky mismatched glasses frames, but here they work to underline the anxiety rather than hide it. There’s something purposefully blunt and sassy about wearing a shirt with Bert and Ernie as a leather fetish gay couple, flanked by all of the uncertainy all around me.

June 27, 2020 (Day 106):

This photo was taken roughly three months into the pandemic. Beyond the rising mortality resulting from COVID-19 the U.S. was roiling in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, a devastating rise in unemployment, and economic turmoil. Everything felt as it had shifted—massive street protests, on-going conversations on antiBlack racism, and reckoning with the fundamental divides in the country—and yet it all felt so abstract from quarantine.

In the midst of the economic crisis fueled by the pandemic, many gay establishments and queer institutions have closed never to be reopened. Regardless of our feelings about these establishments—many gay bars are openly hostile to non-white, non-masculine, fat bodies—they provided spaces to be seen.

In the absence of those spaces, distanced from queer community, we began to re-examine and reinvent how we saw ourselves and the clothes we wear. We bought skirts and wore more caftans. We painted our nails, donned eye liner, and made sure the other participants on our Zoom meetings noticed (Hannah Denham, “Maybe He’s Born with It, Maybe It Helps with Video Calls: Makeup for Men Finds a Niche,” Washington Post, accessed May 31, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/07/23/makeup-for men/). We created a tiny public queer space on these Sundays, occasionally enjoying cocktails while distanced and feeling less alone.

About the outfit: I paired a bright patterned caftan with chunky navy eyeglasses and a restored vintage bone necklace. I received the necklace (rusted, and in fragments) as a donation from an old vintage store and a friend revitalized it by rewiring it and adding extra beading. It was a repurposing of an old accessory, one that made me feel like something was truly mine. I decided to wear it not only because it gave off a particularly cool summer vibe with the outfit, but because it was an act of claiming space in this pandemic.

July 19, 2020 (Day 128): 

This photo was taken at a time when unemployment had worsened and the economic situation for  many Americans was critical. Renters, low-income, and younger households were increasingly more likely to miss housing payments. LGBTQ+ homeless youth were particularly vulnerable during this time;  schools had been closed for months, the hours and services at LGBT community centers were reduced.  The pandemic had exacerbated security around housing, food, health and mental care. 

The power of ‘queerness’ comes from challenging the idea of normal or appropriate structures. There  can be power in remixing a concept or idea outside of its original context, especially when making claims  to space or freedom. As we listen to this image, T.J. inverts the standard early twentieth-century idea of  the strongman or traditional masculine swimsuit wearer. He wears it as a different type of leisure, stuck  in his apartment complex rather than the beach, and refuses the camera’s gaze. This outfit is nearly a century out of date, and no longer elicits popular masculine energy. Instead, it can be a chance to tease  that idea, and to exist outside what is seen as normal or appropriate. 

About the outfit: Yes, I own an old-timey one-piece swimsuit. And I fucking love it. As someone who  has long been nervous about the size and scope of my body, this outfit both shows it off while also  containing it in inventive ways. On this Sunday, I got to repurpose an old-fashioned masculine outfit,  pair it with a straw boater, and get a little day tipsy on your front steps. Mark also took some photos of me lifting weights like I’m a 1920s strongman. It was a fun day because I felt strong. I felt powerful. I felt  ridiculous. I honestly loved every minute of this day.

July 26, 2020 (Day 135): 

This photo was taken as some Americans continued to refuse—sometimes violently—taking the most basic precautions for theirs and others safety, like wearing masks. Rallies of anti-mask, anti-lockdown protestors were highly visible in San Diego where we live and across the rest of the country. 

The resistance to following medical guidance on safety inherently touched upon ableism, racism. For people living with disability or conditions that predisposed them to COVID-19, for communities living  with histories of traumatizing medical experiences or being denied adequate medical assistance, there  was an immeasurable fear of this pandemic. These realities were felt disproportionately by Black,  Brown, and Indigenous people. 

Queer fashion can and does respond to these environments. It can offer the potential to resist scripts of conformity, of belonging offered in events like the anti-mask protests. Instead, it can imagine new  worlds, reinvent new types of dressing or behaving or being. It can stand out and challenge our daily  comforts. 

About the outfit: The pandemic changed social connections, imaginations of what’s possible or acceptable or permissible. For me, this involved transforming ideas of what clothing was personally  meaningful. Like many people, I’d begun thinking critically about what my gender identity meant in isolation from everyone. I feel comfortable with both he/him and they/them pronouns, but I wasn’t  sure about wholly embracing traditionally feminine-perceived fashions. But finding this vintage  housedress at a nearby store (that I ordered and received remotely!) changed this. It’s a sunny, bright  floral print—and it has pockets! I felt like a cool auntie around the house in the flowy, practical garment, and when Mark first took photos of me across the street from my apartment, I felt nervous  and also liberated all at the same time.

August 30, 2020 (Day 170): 

This photo was taken at a time when COVID exhaustion was starting to impact the emotional well-being  of many people more and more. For many who continued to social distance and follow Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention guidance, a constant stream of social media stimulus depicting people exercising at gyms, eating at restaurants, traveling, smiling mask-less among friends and family had evoked a range of emotions related to  frustration, anger, and a lack of sympathy. 

Months after lockdown, we were battling to maintain a healthy, active lifestyle. The pandemic had  highlighted the fragility and security of our health, sensitizing us to our bodies. Watching the changes in  our physique, the decline in our muscle tone, our weight gain was difficult. Insecurities with our bodies  were reawakened—insecurities that had developed (pre-pandemic) in relation to white, masculine  bodies. It was not a coincidence that those were the same bodies that we saw over social media continuing to travel and lively freely during the pandemic while we stayed inside and dealt with a  growing dissatisfaction directed at ourselves. 

About the outfit: I remember feeling very vulnerable in this photograph because it was one of the first  times that my stomach was so exposed. As a queer, Black, and fat person, there’s a sense of vulnerability, of fear and nervousness about my body. This vintage cape felt like a decorative armor. I  loved how it helped me move through the space and feel powerful and provocative. I thought to pair it 

with some strong eyeliner and an old military cap a friend gifted me years ago. I love that this feels  celebratory, joyful, but also somewhat militant. It’s the idea of not being gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you—fuck these systems, fuck these oppressions, fuck these hierarchies. Let’s be glorious in our claiming space.

October 11, 2020 (Day 212): 

This photo was taken some time after the U.S. surpassed 200 thousand coronavirus-related deaths.  

Since the outset of the pandemic lockdown, the word “normal” had been used in common discourse.  People nonchalantly remarked about the “new normal” in workplaces and dreaming of getting back to  their “normal” life that existed before the pandemic. There was a stubborn attempt to return to  normality—or perhaps more accurately, back to the ordinary and comfortable. 

The relation between normality and queerness is fraught. Normality has historically been weaponized  against the LGBTQ+ community—“why can’t you live a normal lifestyle?”—reifying the boundaries of  sexuality to provide feelings of comfort and certainty to straight people, borders that queers were not  allowed to cross (e.g., marriage, adoption). 

We felt this tension consistently as we continued to engage with non-queer people through work or as  we watched from our isolation. Our work attire often reflected that pull towards normality—wearing  professional attire like a button-down shirt for virtual meetings. 

About the outfit: This is absolutely an outfit I would wear in my regular day job as a university professor,  and it felt very, very surreal to wear it after seven months of working remotely. My work clothes  felt…well, they felt like a costume. Granted, they’d always been a performance, a way of projecting 

being a history professor and ostentatiously performing belonging even when I didn’t feel it, but this felt  more like I was on stage than before. I love this checked shirt paired with a tie I found in a thrift shop  years ago and an old derby gifted by a retiring colleague. I changed it up a bit with a pop-in septum ring.  The pants are reproduction turn of the century style, and I feel snug and secure when in those  suspenders. It’s strange that we took this photo on National Coming Out Day, and yet I wore a regular  day outfit, perhaps as a way to think of the ways that queerness takes multiple forms, even in the everyday.

January 10, 2021 (Day 303): 

This photo was taken after months of apprehension and anxiety over the 2020 Presidential election, an  intense and on-going denial of the new administration, and days after the Capitol Riots. It had been 300  days of isolation, but some hope was on the horizon as the Food and Drug Administration had  authorized emergency use of a vaccine created by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer back in January. 

Queer self-fashioning can respond to these endless, despairing pressures by creating new worlds. As blogger Maurice Tracy argued:  

I live in a world where either body privilege or race privilege is always against me. So I point my  camera at my face, most often when I am alone, and possibly bored, and I click; I upload it to Instagram, and I hold my breath because the world is cruel and I am what some would call ugly,  but I don’t see it. …I want them, you, to see that I am human, and there is a reason why I got to  this size, but I owe you no explanation or justification for any part of my existence I owe you no  explanation or justification for my smile or my swag or my selfie. Hell I didn’t even owe you this. (Maurice Tracy, “The Fat Boi Diaries: Why Selfies?,” BlaQueer (blog), March 16, 2013, https://blaqueer.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/the-fat-boi-diaries-why-selfies/)

As Tracy asserts, there can be a defiance in continuing to take pictures, to allow your body to be visible.  In this image, we can hear the exhaustion, but we can also hear continued resilience, defiance, and a  general reference to clothing and styles outside of Western norms. It’s amorphous and challenging,  outside of the clear hierarchical lines of order the Capitol rioters called for on January 6. 

About the outfit: I am exhausted beyond measure. I broke out some hexagonal clear frames to wear over a long sleeve shirt, but thought I’d dress it up with a West African Sankofa beaded necklace made  by a dear friend. She’d intended it to be a “power necklace,” something to hold to whenever I felt  scared or intimidated, and that fit the bill. I draped myself in an old oil cloth I’d had around the house  with some great batik designs and wanted to reflect both my exhaustion but also my refusal to simply  fade into the background in the darkest days of the journey so far. 

February 26, 2021 (Day 350): 

This photo was taken at a time when multiple vaccines were being rolled out across the U.S. focusing on vaccinating the elderly and those most at risk. At the same time, a U.K. variant of the coronavirus had been spreading rapidly within the U.S. We were learning that new variants were potentially more easily  transmitted, more lethal, more resistant current vaccines. 

Listening to this image, the top hat and formal dress recall elements of dandyism, a historic style utilized by Black Americans to claim space and disrupt the everyday norms of white supremacy and  heteronormativity. As historian Monica Miller has asserted, “the dandy’s affectations (fancy dress, arch  attitude, fey and fierce gesture) signify well beyond obsessive self-fashioning—rather, the figure  embodies the importance of the struggle to control representation and self- and cultural-expression” (Monica L. Miller, On her book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity :  Cutting-Edge Intellectual Interviews, Rorotoko, October 15, 2009,  http://rorotoko.com/interview/20091016_miller_monica_on_slaves_fashion_black_dandyism_styling_black_ident /?page=2").  As the fears of a potential new-vaccine world lay on the horizon, and a year of isolation loomed, the self conscious carefree regality of a dandy stares back at us in this image. T.J. looks at us confident, directly,  but still with a slightly off-kilter, or queer stance, reminding us that not all is as normal as we’d think. 

About the outfit: This look was so much fun to do! I thought some old sweater pins, found online, would pop against this vividly patterned dress shirt, and with these dark blue geometric frames. Mark last minute suggested the top hat, which truly brought the look all together for me, incorporating an element as formal as it was playful. It felt like an opportunity to experiment with bold colors and hope that things could be changing. This was the last photo we took before I got my first vaccine shot, and I was nervous and excited!

March 7, 2021 (Day 359): 

This photo was taken after over a year of sustained awareness of violence directed at non-white  communities. After another year of violence directed at Black communities was being erroneously  compared to pandemic-related hate directed at Asian communities. By this this time over 3,700 incidents of hate targeting Asian Americans had been documented. In the coming weeks, new incidents  would become part of public consciousness in the news and social media from Seattle to Queens,  Portland, and San Antonio. 

As hope continued to give way to further disillusionment and violence, queer fashion can subvert as well  as inspire or threaten. This image threatens. It proclaims a self-regard and also screams “back off.” We may still have been isolated, but we were also not willing to give a single inch. 

About the outfit: Some days you must go hard femme, dripping with queenly disdain. This tiara, some black matte lipstick, and a fun white caftan made me feel regal, made feel powerful. I loved this day.

May 23, 2021 (Day 436):

This photo was taken 2 days after Mark could consider himself fully vaccinated. Sixty weeks after social distancing became a lifestyle, we ended the weekly photo documentation  project. Today, we have entered a period of time when the demand for isolation is less immediately  real, and we are cautiously exploring our place in the midst of socialization. 

Following a time of great and enduring change we are remarkably different people in this photograph  compared to when we started. However, our photographic journey has made us feel closer to each  other, the regular rhythms of our friendship having continued throughout the isolation of the pandemic.  In that regard, and beyond any other consequences, the strengthening of our friendship was the  greatest success of this project. 

About the outfits 

T.J.: I also feel the clothes here are so marvelously queer. We look respectable, fancy, and yet also not  normative. Mark’s got an amazing shade of red lipstick, such a beautiful suit jacket, and this wonderful  skirt. I’m going more for early twentieth century floral dandy. We could be opening a queer bed and  breakfast or hawking artisanal soaps. But there’s also something more here…a sense in that we’ve  marked time, and navigated a sense of loneliness, isolation, and being profoundly disoriented. I feel  community here, that we’ve made space in the midst of this. Also, we look fucking hot.

Mark: Photographing and scrutinizing the images of T.J. reminded me to appreciate the bravery and  beauty in queer bodies. Sixty weeks of photos. Hundreds of photos edited. Attending to the color of  T.J.’s skin, the way light and shadow play along his contours, I became more intimate with T.J.’s face and  body than I was with my own. Throughout the pandemic I was so hypersensitive to how my body felt  that I intentionally distanced myself from how my body looked beyond an abstract sense of  dissatisfaction. This photoshoot and my outfit were an opportunity to reflect on how I use clothing to  augment or hide my body. In picking an outfit I intentionally included pieces that are pre-pandemic (the  button-down shirt) and those acquired during the past year (the bandana necktie), pieces that are more  masculine (the blazer) and those that are more feminine (the skirt), those that hung tighter to my body  and those that flowed around it.  

In reflecting on these photos, we turn back to Sara Ahmed. So many of these photos were about confronting the uncertainty, the anxiety, and trying to make it known. An artistic endeavor that documented the unstable experience of a global pandemic created a feeling of control. More than that, it was the consistency of queer fellowship that grounded us. As Ahmed says, “What I remember, what takes my breath away, are not so much the giddy experiences of moving and the disorientation of being out of place, but the ways we have of settling; that is, of inhabiting spaces that, in the first instance, are unfamiliar but that we can imagine--sometimes with fear, other times with desire--might come to feel like home. Such becoming is not inevitable.”9Such transformations are not inevitable; we take for granted now that the severity of the pandemic has decreased, that vaccines have changed things somewhat, and our relationship to space is recalibrating. But these photos are reminders of hope and wonder and confusion—the idea that amid all of this, we could make some sort of peace, and find a resting place in this roiling sea.

about the artist

Mark Kurai (he/him) is a gay American-born Japanese behavioral scientist who is passionate about social justice, delicious food, and being an opinionated introvert. He enjoys nourishing his soul and relationships by sharing culinary endeavors and beauty documented in photographs. He received his PhD from UC Davis in Social and Personality Psychology and is now a data nerd telling stories with empirical research and panache.

about the artist

T.J. Tallie (he/they) is a queer black writer, thinker, and troublemaker. T.J. is also an Associate Professor of African History at the University of San Diego. They specialize in comparative settler colonial and imperial history, focusing on gender and racial identity, indigeneity, and sexuality. He is the recent author of Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa. T.J. also bakes a mean clafoutis and a delicious focaccia. Find him on twitter at: @Halfrican_One.