Short and Locked Down: The Impact of COVID-19 on a Person With Dwarfism

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