The Pandemic and Its Shadow. Feminist Theoretical and ArtDiscourses on Trauma and Community in COVID-19

In her article, “The Pandemic and Its Shadow: Feminist Theoretical and Art Discourses on Trauma and Community in COVID-19,” Finnish researcher Magdalena Zolkos employs trauma theory and feminist psychoanalytic perspectives to interrogate the pandemic’s impact on domestic violence against women. She critiques the notion of pandemic “collective trauma” as overly pathologizing and homogenizing, instead framing it as a layered psychological and socio-cultural phenomenon that fosters a distinct form of communality and kinship. Zolkos coins the term “shadow pandemic” to capture the hidden yet pervasive relationship between domestic spaces and violence during COVID-19—an experience rendered largely invisible both socially and subconsciously. Crucially, she reveals how the pandemic’s safety burdens disproportionately fell on women, transforming domestic spaces into contested sites marked by danger, ambivalence, and power struggles. Violence against women emerges as a punitive response to their perceived failure to maintain safety within these “homely” domains.

Zolkos further explores how women artists critically expose this paradox through their work. For example, Anna Dumitriu’s installation Shielding juxtaposes miniature domestic beds with sterile hospital elements, highlighting domesticity as a fragile, illusionary shelter that obscures the violence endured within. This artwork visualizes the cost women bear when the domestic ideal collapses under pandemic pressures. Zolkos calls for a reconceptualization of pandemic communality that integrates the fraught, gendered realities of domestic violence victims, thus deepening our understanding of trauma’s social and cultural dimensions during COVID-19.