9 Break Loose

Social Frays

“One of the outcomes of living through late-stage capitalism and COVID-19 has been an overwhelming breakdown of community and social fabric,” writes Emma Jackson (2022), in reference to the Freedom Convoy 2022, which saw hundreds of truckers form a convoy in Western Canada in protest of the government’s public health response to the Covid-19 pandemic, including mask mandates and mandatory vaccinations in some employment sectors. With overt and covert forms of support, including significant financial backing from alt-right neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups from across North America, truckers, their families, and other agitators drove across the country to Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, where four to five hundred trucks and semitrailers occupied the downtown core for weeks. There, the protesters set up hot tubs and barbecues in the streets, continuously honking their truck horns at all hours of the day and night, the stench of diesel fuel filling the surrounding commercial and residential streets. Thousands converged on Parliament Hill with signs and chants disavowing public and collective health measures, instead invoking concepts of bodily autonomy and individualized versions of freedom (see Figure 28).

Just over two years after the convoy dispersed in Ottawa, a very different protest came into being in Toronto. In the early hours of the morning on May 2, 2024, approximately fifty students from the University of Toronto responded to calls for international solidarity by setting up camp on the university’s iconic lawn at King’s College Circle, creating an encampment known as the People’s Circle for Palestine. Unlike the participants in the Freedom Convoy, the student protesters were not demanding individualized freedoms but rather sought to leverage the power of the collective in the service of protecting those most vulnerable. By demanding that their university disclose all investments and financial holdings, divest from companies implicated in Palestinian human rights violations, and cut ties with Israeli universities and institutions operating in illegal settlements on Palestinian lands, the students sought to refuse the kind of world that treats some lives as disposable. Over sixty-three days and with the support of faculty, librarians, staff, alumni, local and provincial labor unions, and community members, the students and supporters raised over two hundred tents and built a library, a kitchen, and a medic tent, evolving into one of the largest and longest-lasting pro-Palestinian encampments on North American college campuses. The students led programming centering the current and historical experiences of Gazans and Palestinians while building up and strengthening links across other communities and movements: Masks were handed to all visitors at the entrance; for a time, a sacred fire was tended to by Indigenous elders; encampment Shabbat and Jummah Prayers were held on Fridays; and cross-movement community teach-ins took place. The encampment also held collective mourning and protection rituals, such as when community members carried around the circle an eighty-two-yard-long keffiyeh composed of twelve fabric panels stitched together, each bearing the names of thousands of Palestinian children and health-care workers who have been killed in the genocide (see Figure 29).

Both the Freedom Convoy and the People’s Circle for Palestine became focal points for already red-hot political tensions, underscoring an unraveling of a shared social fabric and a heightening of social division that at times resulted in violent confrontations between protesters, counterprotesters, and police. In untangling what can be learned about our shared social fabric by attending to the anatomy of its fray, it is striking that these divergent protests came to be symbolized by two distinctive pieces of fabric. At the center of the convoy, we find the deeply divisive medical mask. Fashioned of cotton cloth or polypropylene fibers, for some the mask represents a protective shield from deadly and debilitating viral exposures. For others, it became a symbol of government overreach and infringement of individual rights and freedoms. At the center of the student encampments was the keffiyeh, the black-and-white fishnet-patterned Palestinian cultural cloth, worn worldwide as a symbol of kinship, protection, resistance, and solidarity, while also vilified by some as a symbol of terrorism and antisemitism. Over the course of the respective protests, the medical mask and the keffiyeh became representational lightning rods of a wider political and cultural unraveling.

Exposures, Abandonments, and Entanglements

In March 2022—just weeks after the Freedom Convoy dispersed from Ottawa—most masking restrictions in the province were officially dropped. “We are now learning to live with and manage COVID-19 for the long term,” said Ontario’s then–Chief Medical Officer of Health Kieran Moore. “This necessitates a shift to a more balanced response to the pandemic” (quoted in Jabakhanji and Knope 2022). With the policy-level dissolution of masking requirements, many were (and continue to be) left vulnerable and exposed. Nate Holdren (2023) names “broken sociality” as this abandonment of public health measures and pandemic precautions such as mask mandates, free virus testing and vaccinations, social distancing, and access to workplace sick days, rendering disabled, immunocompromised, and sick people as surplus in the “return to normal.” The move to “a more balanced response” situates the ongoing threat of the virus to our collective health and safety as an acceptable gradient of debility and death, prioritizing economic activity and wealth extraction over well-being in ways that perpetuate systemic inequities.

Two years later, in April 2024, just weeks before the beginning of the University of Toronto encampment, we saw another unraveling of protective (social) fabrics. Speaker of the Legislative Assembly in Ontario Ted Arnott banned the wearing of the keffiyeh in the Legislature, calling the Palestinian cultural scarf an “overt political statement” (Draaisma 2024). Here, the unraveling of a piece of fabric resulted in a different kind of exposure and vulnerability. Abdurraheem Desai, a student encampment participant at the People’s Circle for Palestine, describes the keffiyeh as “a quick and recognizable way to show support, despite the risk of harassment.” He says, “You become part of a larger group that is all joined with the same piece of cloth” (quoted in Qazi 2024). For Beisan Zubi, who was barred from entry to an open debate session at the Legislature because she was wearing her mother’s keffiyeh, the ban interrupted kinship ties. “It’s older than I am,” she says. “This is something that’s been passed down to me.” Arab Canadian Lawyers Association representative Dania Majid similarly speaks of the fabric as an object of protective kinship: “It’s something that our ancestors have worn for generations” (quoted in Declerq 2024). For Black Muslim disabled Independent Member of Provincial Parliament Sarah Jama, the ban led to her expulsion: She was censured as a result of her refusal to remove her keffiyeh and prevented from representing her constituents in the governing body of the province.

In Palestinian solidarity movements spaces, the two protective pieces of cloth—the mask and the keffiyeh—have become even further entangled. Write Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant (2024b), “In an era of mass surveillance, with a low bar for police to deploy arrests and violence against protesters, the utility of masking extends beyond public health.” At pro-Palestinian encampments, marches, and protests, medical masks and keffiyehs are now being used interchangeably to shield wearers’ identities as well as to protect from the virus, doxing, surveillance, or other forms of intimidation and harassment. Because of this tendency to cover up one’s face in pro-Palestinian movement spaces, and the related ways medical masks and keffiyehs protect, in New York City and beyond there has been much interest in banning facial coverings of all kinds. For Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, the rhetoric surrounding the reinvigoration of antimask laws “serves a singular purpose: to make it clear that politicians across the political spectrum can and will discriminate against anyone engaged in actions or speech toward Palestinian liberation. . . . It is a campaign to crush dissent, no matter the cost.” And because of the diverse layers of protection provided by these two cloths, this is also a campaign to increase state repression and legislate vulnerability, disability, debilitation, and death. Mask bans unite eugenics and fascism to suppress social movements and forms of community care resulting in the isolation and marginalization of disabled and other high-risk people.

Frays

We return to the offering of the fray. Textile artist Catherine Dormor (2021) writes that the fray is a kind of durational antagonistic, one that, over time, “redefines the spatiality of the cloth at the point of its disruption.” As a cloth is worn down and weakened, she tells us, “the process of its formation becomes revealed.” When the threads that bind our shared social fabrics become distressed, loosened, or are even torn, we remember that tending to these threads can teach us about the composition of our relations, potentially leading to the kinds of radical alteration work that, as explored in previous chapters, breaks with the insufficiencies of what we have and opens us up to something new. Whether threads hold, strain, or unravel, the pedagogy of the fray is interdependence. A tear exposes the terms of its construction. You tug on a strand and the whole cloth changes shape. Mia Mingus (2022) importantly reminds us that “individual safety by itself is a myth. There is no individual safety without collective safety and collective safety requires that no one is safe unless everyone is safe.” Woven together, as instruments of collective safety and solidarity, the mask and the keffiyeh compose a radically protective social fabric. Indeed, observe Adler-Bolton and Vierkant (2024b), the “socially constructed end to the pandemic has also found its shadow in the protesters who refuse to leave one another behind, and who recognize that COVID-19 and the genocide in Palestine are not crises happening independently of each other.” This entanglement is exemplified in Figure 30.

We hear this commitment to collective protection in the solidarity work of G, a Gazan who called into Adler-Bolton and Vierkant’s (2024a) Death Panel podcast to share his practice of mask-making amid a genocide against his people. “It can be hard to get people to care about COVID when there are bombings all day and night, snipers, drones, block by block warfare,” he says. “But all day long, I am making masks out of whatever materials I can find and handing them out. . . . I talk about COVID and Long Covid to everyone who will listen.” Another Gazan caller, R, explains further, “On top of the direct killing, maiming, and senseless overt violence every day . . . social determinants of health are being weaponized more precisely than the cowardly, lazy and heinous bombings.” R is quick to point out this observation is meant not “to minimize the scale and brutality of the direct killing” but rather to name the deliberate, slow wearing down of bodies and communities, the pulling apart of protective social structures, infrastructures, systems, and the fabrics of people that connect these, as itself a settler colonial technique of eradication. “We are cold. We are tired. We are sick, and hungry. No one has medications. No one has dialysis. There is nowhere to give birth. This is not a humanitarian crisis. This is how health is also a weapon of war,” R states.

We likewise find threads of solidarity in the mutual aid work of mask blocs across Turtle Island that distribute free masks, rapid antigen tests, and other personal and protective equipment and resources. One group in New York City describes itself as a “disabled-led collective of NYers organizing to fight COVID through mutual aid, political education, and direct action” (Antiheroine 2023). With protest signs like “Free Masks for a Free Palestine” and “Free Masks: Protect Yourself from COVID and Doxing,” the group links disability justice masking, personal and collective safety, and Palestinian liberation in ways that exemplify the entanglement shown in Figure 30. Without conflating or collapsing the racial, geopolitical, and material differences between the genocide in Gaza and the ongoing pandemic in the United States, the organizers identify shared threads that connect the social abandonment of disabled and debilitated populations in the United States to the expendability and disposability of disabled, injured, and debilitated populations in Gaza. They write, “As disabled organizers, we cannot ignore how settler-colonial occupation violently disables people and leaves them to die.” In the pandemic-era United States, they identify a shared and distinctly settler colonial eugenic logic at play where “medically vulnerable” people are made to “simply ‘fall by the wayside’ as acceptable collateral damage” (Antiheroine 2023).

We also find interwoven layers of protection in the solidarity work of a Palestinian- and Jewish-led coalition of nineteen students at Brown University who engaged in an eight-day hunger strike for Gaza to pressure their university administrators to divest from Israel. “We need to keep our strikers safe tomorrow,” reads an Instagram post from Brown Divest Coalition (2024) sent out prior to the rally. “Seven days of hunger striking has left them immunocompromised.” Organizers asked the over four hundred attendees to test before the rally and to wear N95 masks (both of which were provided) to protect the vulnerable striking students and to show solidarity with the thousands of civilians who are being rendered immunocompromised by forced starvation in Gaza.

“When we follow the virus—any virus, really,” writes Steven W. Thrasher (2022, 5), “we follow the fault lines of our culture.” Whether considering the global pandemic or the genocide in Palestine, differential social protections and exposures need not be inevitable. By weaving and stitching together expansive understandings of protection with situated entanglements, we need not repair frayed social fabrics as much as alter them through the care it takes to survive, not as individuals but as interdependent collectives committed to refusing to abandon each other and to weaving transnational disability justice into the fabric of our daily lives.