Redefining ‘safe bodies’: queering the shifting body politics during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Bodily safety during the post-covid ‘new normal’ is a fraught, but phantasmal notion, subject to manipulation by both institutional and non-institutional power structures. Looking at the Indian context, a queerer understanding of the pandemic is required at a time when bodily relations have been queered by numerous instances where new forms of non-economic social stratification are discernible. Bodies are getting targeted, otherized, and discriminated against in unpredictable ways while imagining and negotiating the modalities of the new norm. Medicalization of the everyday at this massive scale does not follow the biomedical logic but seeks to normalize heterogenous responses based on irrational fears perpetuating ableist myths about the normal body. Queer activism and praxis need to play an interventionist role in shaping policies cognizant of the new threats and challenges that are being faced by queer individuals in such a scenario. Queer identities need to be reconfigured for continued sustenance, support, and political relevance. The case of the Hijrah community in India is studied as an example where a new political language is needed for revamping their mode of protest in response to the shift in the current body politics.