This pandemic is a heteronormative hellscape: Alexandra

If you asked my closest friends, they would tell you that I usually expound the benefits of singlehood – we even have a group chat for the purpose. I am a serial dater, and I am serially dismissive of the people I date. Until March this year, I was happily dancing from one person to another while I did my Women’s Studies master’s in Oxford; I was exploring the twists and turns of desire, listening to people and reading texts that made me question the stability of identity categories and the inescapability of normative kinship structures.

Then, quelle surprise, we were all told to leave Oxford. I was fortunate, I realise, to be able to move back to my parents’ house for the first wave of the pandemic, and I know that this was not the case for every student. Yet the mass return to family homes that the pandemic engendered should surely be framed as a triumph for heteronormativity, a strengthening of the family unit as the primary structure around which our society is organised. The order to stay indoors was an order to inhabit domestic space, to use our bodies in an orderly fashion, and to become impenetrable, disconnected beings. Some domestic spaces are more hospitable than others, and many have found themselves ‘re-closeted’ as they reintegrate into their family units. If Jack Halberstam defines queer time as an eccentric recalibration of the relationship between the present and the future, an alternative to ‘the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance’, then this pandemic is surely the straightest time of all. We have learned to assess the risk of every human interaction in our drive towards a Covid-free future. Hope functions, now, along a linear axis as we crave progress in the form of a vaccine.

Being at home for so long has reset my understanding of kinship and stability, and foreclosed the kind of experimentation with which I was previously so comfortable. Never, never more than in the febrile context of this pandemic have I been so desperate for a boyfriend and a baby to love me unconditionally, forever and always, the end.

I expressed this desperation recently to Chloe and Erin, two of my friends from Women’s Studies. They looked at me askance. Honestly, Chloe said, I’m not sure you should have a baby… why don’t you get a rabbit instead? Have you seen how big their feet are compared to their tiny bodies? They are cute, and loving, and would fill your lonely heart.

This interaction made me think. What forms of affective relationship remain viable for young, single people in the context of Covid? Might kinship bonds with nonhuman beings provide a (Covid-secure) foil to the heteronormativity of pandemic life? This pandemic is a heteronormative hellscape, but the vulnerability that it has occasioned is also an opportunity to expand our understandings of intimacy, community and care. The ongoing uncertainty of the situation seems to preclude any form of conclusion, but for now, if you find yourself alone and afloat: consider getting a rabbit.