Living Life as a Queer Person in Shanghai Covid-19 Lockdown
An ongoing series of interviews
Type: Individual Research @Queer Space Lab MIT
Date: 2022
Since COVID-19 first broke out in 2020, China has performed a zero-tolerance policy combating the public health crisis, including rounds of city-wide lockdowns. The stringent lockdown policy, which never got lifted in the past two years, utilizes residential complexes (sub-districts) as control units and is considered the most effective way to limit the spread of cases in China. Following lockdowns, measurements such as the conduction of massive PCR testing across the city and the implementation of the green-code system to survey, monitor, and record individuals’ health conditions disrupted the pre-COVID daily routine to become the new norm. Many have adopted lockdown as an abnormal yet everyday lifestyle in the country, while others are actively seeking alternatives to bring back daily life before COVID-19 and create a sense of belonging in the community despite the reality of physical isolation.
Early in 2022, Shanghai went through the most rigorous lockdown in the nation, where residents were, on average, quarantined for around sixty days at home without a single step out of the room. Food was in short supply and snatching groceries through mobile apps seemed to be the only way to stock up the fridge. People anxiously awaited the announcement of the policy lift-up and updates on the resumption of work every day. Under such extreme conditions, people strive to fulfill their basic survival needs, taking less care of their other desires. Socially, when most offline event spaces were confined to precautionary inspection, social media linked people together, helping form all kinds of virtual neighborhoods. Some of these were based on a chatgroup structure, though temporary, worked autonomously and succeeded in providing members with resources to life supplies, medical services, and social support.
This project is a collection of slices of life in the scenes mentioned above during the Shanghai lockdown from people who self-identified as queer. It tries to reflect on their personal experience of seeking comfort in living space, adjusting distances between themselves and others, and redefining daily habits in the quarantine. The project is meant to archive the emotions and feelings of ordinary people, which are undercovered mainly by the official media streams, as these narratives of “how the public lives a life” are “unnecessary” or “less important” compared to the rendering of heroic storytelling of the COVID-19 front line.
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