Deconstructing the Label 'Hero': Superhuman Expectations by Alisha Maycock
This talk explores the label 'hero' as applied to healthcare professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through elevating healthcare professionals to 'heroes', a superhuman aura has been created around their work and existence. While initially a gesture of thanks, this valorisation has implied that healthcare professionals do not need support, protection or remuneration - that they do not have human requirements.
In drawing on digital participant observation conducted amongst Twitter and Instagram users and from interviewing three healthcare professionals, I will unpack the tension between implications and actuality. I will demonstrate how, ironically, a critical discussion of the label 'hero' serves to highlight healthcare workers mental, physical and financial suffering. Importantly, I will also show how it obscures governmental responsibility for their welfare, primarily through the use of the word 'resilience'. This word, through operating symbiotically and synergistically with the label 'hero', is equally problematic as it assigns sole responsibility to the individual and not enough, if any to the wider structures. Further, I will unpack other suggestions such as what the label 'hero' makes of healthcare professionals who choose to shield: "If those who work on the frontline are extraordinarily tough, selfless and admirable, are these healthcare professionals weak and selfish? As a result, I will argue for the use of a human lexicon: to begin calling healthcare professionals what they really are - workers. Ultimately, I will illustrate that , while the public and politicians have imposed superhuman expectations onto healthcare workers through granting them 'hero' status, healthcare workers have their own expectations - necessary, simply, and human in nature.
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