Reflections on front-line medical work during COVID-19 and the embodiment of risk

Abstract

Drawing on the voice of a woman NHS front-line doctor during the current COVID-19 pandemic, we explore her lived experience of the embodiment of risk in the crisis. We explore her struggles and difficulties, giving her voice and mobilizing our writing to listen to these experiences, reflecting on them as a way of living our own feminist lives. Her story illustrates that the current crisis is not only a crisis of health, but a crisis for feminism. Through telling her story, we cast light upon the embodied amplification of inequalities, paternalistic discourses around risk and lived experience of exposure to risk of contracting a deadly virus. We explore her work on the NHS front line, providing a conceptual framework of the multi-level facets of the embodiment of risk, through lived experiences of risk and observations of the inequality of risk in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK.