Transcript

Let’s get cozy. This is an invitation. When I say “Let’s get cozy,” I’m asking you to join me in the making of a new and better world.

The word “cozy” has been in the English language for several centuries as a designation of comfort. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the word was used in the names of many consumer products. The “cosy corner” was an upholstered seat in the corner of a room. A “cosy stove” was a freestanding enclosed stove. The “Cosy Express” was a kind of carriage and bus. More recognizable items like the tea-cozy or egg-cozy show us that coziness is generally a technique of retaining warmth. 

In his 1863 book about heat as a kind of motion, John Tyndall, the scientist who would make significant discoveries about what we now call the greenhouse gas effect, noted a curious feature of coziness. He poured boiling water into two vessels, one tightly wrapped in flannel. The flannel vessel actually lost more heat than the uncoated one because the fabric helped diffuse the water’s energy away. For the tea-cozy to be cozy, it must fit very loosely. Coziness is a loose, warm, imprecise thing, not a method of containment or control.

I am speaking to you from my own coziness. What I do to get cozy, generally, is I climb under a blanket. My feet naturally do this thing, where, it’s like they’re cuddling with each other? When they’ve generated enough heat, they stop. My blinking slows. My breath is even and deep. This is when I do my best thinking.

I am concerned that coziness is of too low repute. When we think about coziness, we imagine it as a quality of leisure, the thing we indulge in when we’re not working or being too serious. In fact, the way we typically imagine impressive, productive efforts to change the world is at the total exclusion of coziness. We imagine the community organizer—we imagine them intensely mobile and uncomfortable, someone whose discomfort proves their tenacity, grit, and good work. They are on their feet, they are leading the march, they are raising their voice. We imagine someone always on the move, always on the phone, punching out emails at all hours of the day.

But if we want to turn up the heat up and keep it in, why aren’t we taking coziness more seriously? Or let’s go further than that: If we want to broaden access to the good life, where everyone has stable housing, and employment, and healthcare—how could coziness not be an important part of our politics?

Coziness today is in extreme excess in some places and severe shortage in others. Some have bought so much comfort they can’t imagine how to use it all, and some cannot imagine how they would get cozy for good.

There can never be a total market for coziness. Although coziness can move with capital, it is also cultivated entirely outside financial logic, like when we take care of a friend or family member after surgery. Cooking dinner for a lover and strategizing about how to keep it perfectly warm is, in the literal sense, coziness. Many acts of care are about coziness. 

The markets for wellness have profoundly distorted how we conceptualize coziness. For one thing, self-help and self-care are contradictory terms. Care is never sealed off from the networks of dependencies that keep us alive. Often the exhortations to practice self-care seem like the opposite of a call to action, like you shouldn’t have to work. But as long as some have too much and others too little, getting cozy is always a political practice.

What if the most consistently radical place for movement work is not in the streets—but in bed, that quintessentially cozy place where we spend so very much of our time. Sleep is not wasted time. The bed is the sick place, and now the workplace, and perhaps a political place. Let us commit to never letting a nap go uncelebrated.

Those for whom a lack of coziness is endemic to their enforced states of vulnerability are experts in coziness and we must seek their wisdom. For disabled people, for chronically ill people, for negatively racialized people whose generational traumas are encoded in their chronic pain, getting cozy is the only way to work. And sometimes it is so much work that it goes completely unnoticed by those for whom getting cozy doesn’t take much work at all.

I hear from many well-meaning people that they wish disability justice was more organized and publicly legible. What they don’t know is that disability justice work can be making tea, can be turning on the seat heater in the car a few minutes before their disabled elder returns from a painful procedure in the hospital. We already have a shared language about what disability activism is. Let’s call it consent in interdependence. Let’s call it finding our breaths in peace. Let’s call it the vitality that is possible when our access needs are consistently met. Let’s call it cozy world-making.

When I say “let’s get cozy,” I am asking you to join me in the making of a new and better world.

Let’s get cozy.

“When I say ‘Let’s get cozy,’ I’m asking you to join me in the making of a new and better world.”

Gotkin reflects on the historical, social, and political meanings of coziness—from its origins in consumer culture, through to its contemporary usages in networks of self and community care. Rejecting political movements premised on discomfort or hustle, Gotkin shows how getting cozy should be celebrated when founding movements rooted in disability justice principles.

Kevin Gotkin is an access ecologist, community organizer, and teacher. They received their PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 and were a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, & Communication at NYU from 2018–2021. From 2016–2019, they co-founded Disability/Arts/NYC with Simi Linton. More recently, they were an Artist-in-Residence at Het HEM in the Netherlands, lead steward of the REMOTE ACCESS nightlife series, and an inaugural cohort member of Creative Time's Think Tank.

ASL Interpretation