Safe spaces, unsafe spaces, and gendered spaces: Psychoanalysis during the pandemic

Abstract

This paper explores the multilayered concept of space that has been unveiled during the pandemic and discusses our experience of space, what is safe and unsafe, and how it has become reconfigured and differently considered. The pandemic opens social fractures with regard to race and gender, and with that in mind the concept of space is discussed in terms of race, and also space that becomes gendered, as well as on those occasions when it is regressively experienced. Further elaborated are the ways that the use of space can become perverse, as well as contain creative life-giving forces in an effort to defy the fear of illness and death.