Short and locked down: the impact of COVID-19 on a person with dwarfism

Abstract

Living with a visible physical disability—specifically dwarfism—brings situational, psychosocial, and cultural challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic, and its restrictions, amplifies these dwarfism-related complexities, exposing the politics of visibility and exclusion, as well as spatial injustices. This autoethnographic paper deliberates these heightened disabling encounters in their various contextual layers—physical, social, and psychological. Fundamentally, people with dwarfism have become further disabled and disadvantaged because of the pandemic’s psychosocial stresses, contextual traumas, and physical exclusions. The paper intimately addresses the embodied, psychological, cultural, and spatial inequalities short-statured individuals endure because of the pandemic. Drawing on theoretical models of disability, critical disability literature, geographies of disability, as well as the conceptual paradigm of biopolitical power, the paper begins to make sense of these experiences so that shifts may occur in different spaces. Arguably, the experiences of COVID-19 that are shared here are also applicable to people with other disabilities.