Understanding the performativity of COVID-19

An autoethnography of lockdown experiences in China and the UK

Abstract

Since the COVID-19 outbreak in January 2020, the pandemic has been changing rapidly with shifting social norms. This autoethnography of my lockdown experiences in China and the UK in 2020 illustrates how I adjusted my daily acts to the shifting social norms in different situations and how these adjustments changed me as a self-regulated subject and reshaped my understanding of COVID-19. Drawing on Butler’s theory of performativity, I analyse how acts of self-protection created a physical relationship between my embodied subject self and COVID-19. As these acts kept changing with shifting norms, this relationship was constantly redefined, constituting a fluid subject status in close relation to an equally fluid concept of COVID-19. This study suggests a two-fold performativity of COVID-19: 1) the subject self in the pandemic, 2) the dimension of COVID-19 as a social construct. Both are performatively constructed as individuals practice regulatory norms through repetitive acts in concrete social contexts.