COVID Queens
This Series called “COVID QUEENS” draws on the mores of feminine gender performance as a way of teasing out the unique tensions facing women as heads of households during the Covid-19 pandemic. At once hopeful, defiant, and playful, the queens offer a rebuke to the unreasonable demands of pandemic living. Their seamless and sparkling masks and elaborate hair dressing are a triumphant refusal to succumb to the drudgery. At the same time, they ask the viewer to entertain the logical extension of women’s labor in maintaining the crucial systems that bolster families and communities through times of crisis. We can do all this and still maintain these perfect facades, they say. We are stronger that this. But they leave us uncomfortably aware of how immense the labor of maintaining appearances can be.
