The affects of pushing: Chronic illness,remote work,and crip epistemology

Abstract

This article explores how different bodyminds experience working from home. During qualitative interviews with chronically ill women working remotely in Australia, ‘pushing’ emerged as a repeated refrain to describe their ways of navigating everyday experiences of pain, social relations, movements, and schedules. Beyond a generalised description of linear force, we develop the concept of ‘pushing’ in geography by unravelling its multiple affects. By discussing three affective configurations of pushing explained by our participants – ‘pushing through’ as an exhausting desire to fit in at work, a disorienting ‘pushing for’ working from home arrangements in anticipation of pain and illness, and ‘pushing back’ when working from home as concealment that leads to feelings of disconnection – we argue that the notion of ‘pushing’ reveals everyday work negotiations that often remain hidden in dominant narratives of remote and hybrid work. We contend that pushing is not only a survival strategy, but also a criptic epistemology, which offers crucial insights into the ambiguous (un)affective ways chronically ill women navigate, or are failed by, relationships at work, workplace access, inclusion policies, and legal protections.

Pushing through work

I would go to work and try and push through … using a lot of sugar and soft drinks and things to try and keep some energy levels up. (Joy, works in local government, lives with narcolepsy).

Push through, just push through. Just push through until you can’t anymore and you are sick or you end up in a hospital and then repeat. (Teresa, works in education, lives with lipoedema).

Depending on how bad the pain is, I would try to push through and persevere. (Wendy, works in state government, lives with endometriosis).

The trials and tribulations of doing paid work have frequently been likened to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, condemned to eternally push a boulder uphill only for it to roll back down each time. And yet, for some, the repetitive bodily challenges associated with work reveal this activity of pushing even more conspicuously. These opening quotes are drawn from interviews that we conducted with women ¹ in Australia who use either hybrid or remote-only working from home to navigate and manage chronic illness. ² During these interviews, we heard stories of medical disbelief and gender bias; stories ³ of misdiagnosis and delayed diagnosis, intertwined with experiences of discrimination at work; stories of hesitation around disclosing their health conditions, and of exhaustion that comes from trying to navigate the bureaucratic maze of applying for flexible working arrangements. As their stories unfolded over days of interviews, despite their diversity, we could hear a repeated refrain emerge.

Beyond the opening interview quotes, the refrain ‘push’ or ‘pushing’ was used by all our participants to describe their experiences of navigating everyday work-related social relations, movements, and schedules while living with chronic illness. Studies exploring chronically ill experiences of non-normative crip time’ (Bailey, 2021; Budworth, 2025; Evans et al., 2024; Pieri, 2025; Sheppard, 2020) and the affective geographies of chronic illness (Bissell, 2009) have largely focused on how strategies like ‘pacing’ unfold in the everyday lives of the chronically ill. While the act of ‘pushing’ is occasionally mentioned as part of how the chronically ill navigate everyday life and work, it remains underexplored in terms of its affective dimensions. How does pushing through life and work actually feel? Inspired by our participants’ emic use of the word ‘pushing’ and drawing upon earlier landmark interventions in Society and Space on the socio-spatial manifestation of chronic illness, health, and disability (Chouinard, 1997; Moss and Dyck, 1996; Parr, 1999), this article develops the concept of ‘pushing’ in a workplace context that has become prominent since the onset of the pandemic.

Geographers have traced how various white-collar jobs have been spatially and temporally reconfigured by the increased post-pandemic prevalence of hybrid and working from home (Cockayne and Treleaven, 2023; Felstead and Reuschke, 2023; Orman et al., 2024). However, there remains a paucity of studies looking at how different bodyminds ⁴ relate to such diverse spatio-temporal working arrangements. In response, our article focuses on the hybrid and fully remote working from home experiences of chronically ill workers. While discussed in emergent studies in occupational health and sociology of work (Beckel, 2021; Brooks and von Schrader, 2025; Maroto et al., 2021), this population is absent in recent geographical literature on working from home since the pandemic. Such absence is problematic given the 2022 Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers in Australia reported that 5.5 million people in Australia live with a disability or long-term health condition (ABS, 2022), and just under 3 million of them are currently working, meaning that one in five people in Australia navigate work with a chronic health challenge. As we demonstrate, working while being chronically ill often involves navigating experiences of ‘pushing’.

Through participants’ experiences of pushing at work, the empirical sections present three ambiguous and (un)affective dimensions of managing chronic illness while working from home and hybrid settings in Australia. We discuss ‘pushing through’ as an exhausting desire to fit in at work; a disorienting ‘pushing for’ working from home arrangements in anticipation of pain and illness; and ‘pushing back’ when working from home as concealment that leads to feelings of disconnection. We argue that, through the notion of ‘pushing’, we can reveal everyday work negotiations that often remain hidden in dominant narratives of remote and hybrid work and literature on chronic illness and its affects.

By developing an affective theory of pushing, this article seeks to make three contributions. Conceptually, we develop ‘pushing’ in new directions for geographers. The notion of ‘push’ has a long history in geography, dating back to positivist population geographies in the 1960s and 1970s that developed ‘push-and-pull’ models of migration (Kariel, 1963), and re-appearing in more recent poststructuralist understandings of push in terms of how subjectivities are formed in relation to space. As Thrift wrote in a highly influential essay on the politics of affect in geography ‘notions of affect [depend] on a sense of push in the world’ (2004, 64), a statement that distils some of the main ontological manoeuvres that have influenced a generation of geographers, who have since advocated for more decentred understandings of human agency, where bodies emerge from the influx of inhuman forces acting on them. This language of ‘push’ tacitly helps to unsettle a sovereign idea of the human as the seat of agency by insinuating a multitude of pressures that inform bodies. However, though this idiom of ‘push in the world’ has been useful for many geographers (Ash et al., 2009; Duffy et al., 2019; Saville, 2008), the concept of pushing itself remains underexplored or employed as a shorthand, etic metaphor alluding to linear forces. Instead, we seek to advance an emic engagement with the notion of ‘pushing’ that pluralises pushing by unravelling its multiple affects, shedding light on the tensions and uncertainties that surface through pushing at work.

Theoretically, we bring non-representational geographies of work and disabilities into dialogue with feminist disability studies on crip embodiment. In response to Andrews’ invitation, our exploration of chronically ill pushing attunes to the ‘affective, visceral, less-than fully conscious processes’ (2019, 1116) that shape the everyday experiences of disability. Through this embodied lens, which centres knowledge emerging from chronically ill subjects themselves, we resist binary evaluations of what is enabling or depleting for our participants, or what counts as crip versus normative (Sheppard, 2020), seeking to move beyond trying to rehabilitate (Dekeyser et al., 2024) experiences of pushing. In this sense, we understand pushing not only as a survival strategy, but also as a form of crip epistemology, which offers crucial insights into the ambiguous (un)affective ways chronically ill people navigate, or are failed by, relationships at work, workplace access, inclusion policies, and legal protections.

Empirically, we centre lived experiences of chronically ill women, a population absent in geographical studies on remote work. Focus on experiences of ‘pushing at work’, we show how particular policy ecologies – Australia's disability and employment protection laws – are complicated by medical gender biases and the post-pandemic rise of remote working from home. This will show how chronically ill workers actually experience these policies in their everyday lives, often in ways that do not fully correspond with their formal protections. Specifically, we show how digital paid homeworking blurs the boundary between the office as a site of (paid) employment and the home as a space of unemployment for the chronically ill, a distinction identified in earlier geographical work on chronic illness and paid labour (Dyck, 1995; Dyck et al., 2005). Instead, participants’ homes emerge as spaces where hegemonic and ableist notions of paid work and productivity are both (re)produced and contested. In this context, the concept of pushing sensitises us to a wider range of harms that contemporary transformations of workplace capitalism induce.

Before contextualising our conceptual interest in pushing, we position our study within geographical literature on disability and illness, and research on the changing geographies of working from home and telecommuting. Methodological notes will follow. In the three empirical sections, we explore how ‘pushing’ affectually emerges in the work-lives of our participants. The conclusions reflect on the crip politics of in/visibility at work and on the ethical implications of ‘pushing’ in changing digital workplaces.

Pushing through workplace transformations

Changing experiences of the home and the workplace

Research exploring geographies of disability and illness within a minority world context has looked beyond normative medical spaces usually associated with ill-health (Parr, 2011) to investigate experiences of disability within the multiple (Horton and Tucker, 2014) and mundane (Moss and Dyck, 1999) spaces that make up everyday life. Among these everyday spaces, the workplace and the home stand out. A significant body of geographical research has explored embodied experiences of reshaping spatio-temporal environments in various workplaces (Crooks, 2007; Dyck, 1999; Evans et al., 2024; Hall and Wilton, 2011; Horton and Tucker, 2014; Moss and Dyck, 2003; Wilton and Shormans, 2025) and at home (Crooks, 2016; Dyck, 1995; Imrie, 2016) in response to chronic illness.

From these studies, the workplace, intended as a site separate from one's personal dwelling – the home – where formal, paid work is performed under structured conditions, emerges as a significant site of tension between ableist normative work culture and the non-normative spatialities and temporalities of the chronically ill bodymind. Dyck's study, for example, sheds light on the everyday micropolitics of the workplace for Canadian women with multiple sclerosis. On one hand, these women adopt ‘concealment strategies’ (1999, 128) to hide their illnesses and attempt to perform workplace norms. On the other hand, they attempt to renegotiate their working environment, in terms of ‘tasks, hours and space[s]’ of work (1999, 131). These practices of both concealment and renegotiation show how, for the chronically ill, the workplace is a site where hegemonic notions of work and productivity can be contested. However, these practices also show how the workplace can be a ‘place of risk’ (Dyck, 1999, 126), of (re)production of ableist microgeographies (Horton and Tucker, 2014) and marginalisation and exclusion (Evans et al., 2024) which leads employees to hide their condition and, often, to leave the paid workforce (Dyck, 1995, 1999; Moss and Dyck, 2003; Wilton and Fudge Schormans, 2025).

In most of these geographical studies, the workplace and the home are considered separate. The home is the place where unemployed chronically ill people spend most of their time (Dyck, 1995), as a site of ‘long-term care’ (Dyck et al., 2005), that is not always a safe sanctuary (Crooks, 2016; Imrie, 2016). For unemployed chronically ill women, who are the focus of our article, the home is a space of increased domestic labour responsibilities, isolation, unpredictable routines, feelings of resentment (Crooks, 2016), and a place of disembodiment for those with mobility impairments (Imrie, 2016). Investigating the transformative use of the home for Canadian women living with multiple sclerosis after leaving paid work and based in the Greater Vancouver area, Dyck (1995) highlights the obstacles they faced towards continuous employment, including the ‘organisation of work tasks over specified, regular time periods’ and the ‘spatial separation of home and [paid] workplace’ (1995, 310), which prevent management of fatigue, mobility issues, and the unpredictability of symptom flare ups.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, the emergence of telework started to blur the spatial separation of home and the traditional office Dyck's research refers to. The home emerged as a key opportunity – often the only option – for (some) chronically ill workers to maintain continuous paid employment (Gurstein, 2001). Only one of the women interviewed by Dyck, who was working for the federal government, ‘was able to collapse space and time constraints and substantially adapt work conditions by telecommuting from home for a period of time’ (1995, 310). Her access to telecommuting, Dyck notes, was enabled by her senior role, while other women with more precarious positions remained bound to the office. This shows how access to remote work was not evenly available to chronically ill women as a group but was structured through intersecting relations of occupational status and education and other demographic characteristics such as gender, race/ethnicity, and age (Maroto et al., 2019).

Fast forward a generation, while access to remote work remains unequal and shaped by intersecting social axes (Brooks and von Schrader, 2025; McCollum, 2025), the post-pandemic workplace has seen a significant intensification of remote and hybrid work (Felstead and Reuschke, 2023). In Australia, 2020 witnessed a 158% rise in employees working from home (ABS, 2020). Despite some return to office policies post-pandemic, 41% of the workforce still works from home between 1 and 5 days a week (Hill et al., 2023). While there remains a paucity of geographical studies on telework (Reuschke and Felstead, 2020), in the wake of the pandemic geographers have explored the effects of this surge of working from home and hybrid work on workers’ productivity (Felstead and Reuschke, 2023), attention and distraction at work (Bissell et al., 2025) workplace culture (Straughan et al., 2026), urban spaces (Richardson, 2022), social inequalities (Cockayne, 2021; Cockayne and Treleaven, 2023), and spatialities and temporalities of work and home (Orman et al., 2024). Much of this research is grounded in feminist economic geography frameworks that seek to understand how various forms of social difference are reproduced and reinforced.

However, while some briefly mention the perceived benefits of working from home for employees with chronic health conditions, very little is known about how bodyminds with differential capacities shape and re-negotiate the geographies of these changing workplaces. The post-pandemic intensification of remote and homework means that more chronically ill and disabled people can remain employed or join the paid workforce (CEDA, 2024). This contemporary context provides a valuable opportunity for extending the research discussed at the start of this section, which focused mainly on unemployed chronically ill women in a minority world context. Having established that chronically ill people working from home is an important but underexplored dimension of geographical analysis, in the next section, we contextualise our conceptual interest in pushing as a way to elucidate their everyday experiences.

Contextualising the concept of pushing in geography

The concept of pushing has a long history in geography. In its earliest rendering, push has its legacy in positivistic population geography of the 1960s and 1970s that developed push-and-pull models to systematise influencing factors in migration and mobility decisions (Kariel, 1963). Push here refers to an aggregate of conditions that drive people away from a place, which are contrasted with pull factors that draw people towards a place. Though this way of understanding push remains influential, such models tend to offer overly simplistic cause-effect explanations where aggregate ‘superorganic’ (Duncan, 1980) factors act in a deterministic way on atom-like individuals. Later, work on urban transformation from the 1980s and 1990s inspired by Marxist political economy invoked the concept of ‘push’ to describe how neoliberal economic policies and urban redevelopment policies effectively push certain populations out of urban centres (Sassen, 1991; Smith, 1996). Work on gentrification has consistently shown how such policies push low-income or marginalised communities disproportionately.

More recently, geographers influenced by poststructuralist theories of power have provided a more nuanced understanding of push in terms of how subjectivities are formed in relation to space. Affect, described by Thrift (2004, p. 64), is a ‘sense of push in the world’ (emphasis added) which refers to prepersonal intensities that inform bodies, both human and non-human, resulting in a transition in powers to act and to sense. Bodies from this perspective are not discrete, already-formed entities, but are instead the in-process outcomes of these prepersonal intensities that act on and transform them.

Despite the conceptual variation between these three mobilisations of push, the concept of pushing features largely as an abstract, etic metaphor to describe configurations of force. What is lacking in existing mobilisations of the concept in geography is empirical engagements with push or pushing as a specific embodied, practical experience that has its own affective uniqueness. Where Thrift insinuates that all affects are pushes of some sort, we invert this formulation by asking: what are the affects of pushing? How does pushing as a practice respond to and generate its own distinctive affects? What does the activity of pushing do to bodyminds, and how is this revealed and expressed by those individuals?

To develop a new geography of pushing, we start by drawing inspiration from Rachel Plotnick's (2018) historical account of the politics of pushing. Though their object of analysis is rather different to ours – an exploration of how the ubiquitous technology of the push button enables command at a distance – we find their assertion of a gap between the physical activity of pushing and the outcome that happens particularly useful. In the case of digital buttons, this is a ‘tension between the promise of digital command and its implementation’ (2018, xvii). What fascinates Plotnick is how the ‘seduction’ of pushing is related to the uncertainty of the outcome that the push generates. This puts the person doing the pushing in an ambivalent position regarding agency, because while they might feel in control of the action, the indeterminacy of outcome can also result in feelings of disempowerment.

We take forward three dimensions of Plotnick's analysis. First, we develop the idea of pushing as an activity with unpredictable and uncertain outcomes, in contrast to the deterministic understanding of pushing that characterises push–pull models, where pushing results in determined effects. Second, we foreground pushing as ‘seductive’ in its promise to make us ‘feeling in charge’ and of causing something to happen, even if we do not really know what might eventuate. Third, we develop the idea implicit in Plotnick's analysis that pushing is permeated by multiple affects. Our empirical sections unravel these multiple affects that pushing generates, demonstrating how tensions, uncertainties and ambiguities emerge through pushing.

By exploring the complex affectivity of pushing in the context of chronically ill women working from home, we bring geographies of disability into dialogue with non-representational approaches. This body of work appreciates how ‘all bodies are emergent, unfinished and relational […], shaped by everyday practices of affect and desire’ (Hall and Wilton, 2017, 736), and understands affect as a transition in powers of affecting and being affected. However, the key contribution of this body of work is the much greater emphasis on exploring differential bodily capacities that transition through different environments. In terms of the phenomenological registration of such affects, we are inspired by Sterne′s notion of ‘impairment phenomenology’ that is ‘founded on ambiguities, contradictions, fragments, webs: a subject who is somewhere and someplace, unsure of itself; a subject that oscillates between self-assertion and self-abrogation, between agential audacity and claiming its radical dependency and situatedness’ (2021, 19).

Through this approach, we also respond to Hall and Wilton's call to ‘give further empirical attention to the sheer diversity of embodied experiences that overwhelm any binary opposition between a normative ‘able body’ and its disabled other’ (2017, 739). In the first empirical section, for example, we draw on literature on crip embodiment (Price, 2015; Price, 2024; Price et al., 2017; Sheppard, 2020) to show how the activity of pushing blurs the boundaries between normativity and crip, healthy and ill, and challenges fixed notions of what is considered enabling or depleting for chronically ill women at work. Before heading into this, however, the next section outlines our research methods, introduces participants, and explains how we attuned to the uncertain and ambiguous affectivities of pushing.

Attuning to pushing

Who is pushing?

Our exploration of chronically ill work lives emerged within a wider project on post-pandemic home-based remote working practices. In 2023, we launched a nationwide social media survey to understand how working from home and hybrid working arrangements have been affecting Australian households. The survey asked respondents to evaluate the positives and negatives of working from home and generated around 500 responses. On analysing these responses, we noticed that 15 women mentioned that working from home helped them navigate various health challenges. The fact that only women raised this issue may reflect gendered patterns in the experience of disclosure of chronic illness but should also be understood in relation to our survey design. Chronic illness was not included as a sampling category, nor did the survey include direct questions about disability. Rather, reflections emerged from 15 participants’ comments in an open-ended response box. As such, the apparent gendered pattern should not be interpreted as evidence that only women experience these dynamics.

The second stage of the wider project involved selecting a sample of respondents to participate in a semi-structured interview to get a more comprehensive understanding of their working-from-home lives. We selected 45 people to interview based on quota sampling of several factors, including industry sector, job role, frequency of working from home, length of time working from home, gender, household composition and geographical location. In addition, we decided to interview seven of the women who had specifically mentioned health challenges in their responses. Of these, six are of Australian nationality and one Filipino; six lived in Australian capital cities, including Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, and Melbourne, and one lived in regional Australia. These interviews took place virtually on Zoom in 2024. The limited racial diversity of our sample may confirm patterns identified in recent research on remote work in the United States, race and disability (Brooks and von Shrader, 2025), which shows that access to working from home is unevenly distributed along racial lines, with chronically ill non-Hispanic white workers more likely to secure remote arrangements. This suggests that race plays a role in shaping who can access flexibility and who remains exposed to more rigid workplace structures. Future research in the Australian context should examine these intersections more explicitly.

From these interviews, a constellation of conditions emerged, entangled with participants’ work lives and shaped by medical uncertainty, as well as prolonged and costly diagnostic processes. Teresa ⁵ (40–44), who works in the education sector and is a single mother living with her teenage son, has been having ill-health symptoms since she was a teenager. After a series of misdiagnoses, which severely impacted her physical and mental health, she was only recently diagnosed with lipoedema. Louise (35–39), like Teresa, had symptoms since she was a teenager, and was only diagnosed decades later with hypotonia. She works in professional services as a freelance consultant, and lives with her husband and two young children – a toddler and a baby. An eczema misdiagnosis and incorrect medical treatments were also depleting for Rachel (25–29), who is an undergraduate student, living in student accommodation and working as a part-time online event manager. She suffered from steroid withdrawal syndrome, leading to permanent living with a more severe form of chronic eczema. Andrea (45–49), who has rheumatoid arthritis, lives alone and is a professional staff member in tertiary education, has had many medical misdiagnoses, and her pain has often been classified as a ‘mystery pain’, as well as Wendy (35–39), who lives with endometriosis and works for the state government. Imogene (40–44), who has a ‘constellation’ of chronic health conditions, works in social services and lives with her partner, had to wait almost 15 years to get a ‘concrete’ diagnosis for Crohn's disease. Similarly, after ‘at least a decade of just getting sicker and sicker’, Joy (35–39), who lives regionally by herself and works for a local council, was only recently diagnosed with narcolepsy in 2023.

Where is pushing happening?

Studies on crip embodiment have shown that prolonged experiences of undiagnosis create ambiguous states of health, leaving chronically ill individuals feeling ‘in waiting’ (Senanayake, 2022, 267), ‘out of time’ (Kafer, 2013, 36), or suspended ‘in-between time’ (Sheppard, 2020, 41). Living in Australia, our participants’ uncertain diagnostic status clashes with the policy ecologies they must navigate to access protection – under the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), 1992 – flexible working arrangements – under the Fair Work Act, 2009 – and support – through the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), 2013. Together, these frameworks structure the conditions under which chronically ill workers in Australia can remain in employment, and yet they operate through different logics of eligibility and access.

The DDA was established in 1992 as a rights-based framework designed to protect people from disability discrimination. It adopts a broad definition of disability that encompasses chronic and episodic conditions, and appealing to the Act does not require a diagnosis or proof of permanent disability (AHRC, 2012). However, the DDA has historically operated through a reactive, complaint-based model, placing the burden on individuals to recognise discrimination, gather evidence, and pursue legal remedies after discrimination has occurred. This limitation, which is a key focus of the 2025 Disability Royal Commission's review of the act, discourages formal complaint, especially for those already navigating precarious health and employment situations (AHRC, 2025). While the DDA usually does not require diagnostic proof, access to ‘reasonable’ adjustments, such as flexible working arrangements under the Fair Work Act 2009, often depends on medical verifications and employer discretion. As we discuss in Section 5, this creates additional barriers for chronically ill workers. The NDIS, introduced in 2013 as a major restructuring of disability support, operates through a different logic: it is accessible to those who can demonstrate a permanent impairment (NDIS, 2022). As a result, many chronically ill Australians, though protected under the DDA, remain excluded from NDIS support.

With around two-thirds of chronically ill Australians experiencing workplace discrimination (Ghin and Ainsworth, 2024) and one-third being forced out of work (Carr and Waite, 2024), these policy gaps are not marginal. For our participants, this tension between formal protection laws and their lived realities emerges through the experiences of pushing: pushing through work to meet normative expectations of their various jobs and avoid having to quit; pushing for the right to work from home against rigid formal application processes; and pushing back while working from home to conceal their conditions and resist formal disclosure processes.

Pushing and self-reflexivity

Talking about experiences of pushing at work for the chronically ill requires a sensitive interviewing approach, even more so given that our interviews happened virtually, on Zoom. However, since all seven participants regularly work from home, they were skilled and comfortable at virtual communication. A sensitive interviewing approach also requires self-reflexivity from the researcher(s). Multiple members of our research team have personal experiences of living and working with chronic illness. Following Moss and Matwychuk (2000), we suggest that our personal connection to the research topic has been crucial to ignite a process of critical reflexivity, ‘where researchers […] can connect with similar experiences related by participants’ (Worth, 2008, 301). This process, we argue, has helped us make sense of the complex and multiple experiences of chronic illness. However, we are also cautious of not overestimating the shared experiences between research and participants, and we acknowledge that a personal connection to the field does not erase the power relationships between researcher and participant (Worth, 2008). Ultimately, we agree with Worth that ‘sensitive research depends on the ethical and political commitments of the researchers rather than their level of personal identification with the subject of research (2008, 311).

Interviews were transcribed and thematically coded to help bring out key themes that formed the basis of reflection and analysis. During the coding process, the use of the emic term ‘push’ and ‘pushing’ by most participants became strikingly apparent, as shown in the introduction, which catalysed our development of the concept for geography. Given our conceptual predicates in poststructuralist geographies, our account is not intended to be representative. Our aim is to provide new ways of looking at difference within geography (Worth, 2008) and an account of the diverse affects experienced by chronically ill women who work from home in Australia. The following three empirical sections refract the concept of pushing in three different ways.

‘Pushing through’ to fit in at work: An exhausting desire

I would go to work and try and push through. And typically, before I was medicated, using a lot of sugar and soft drinks and things to try and keep some energy levels up. And then, I would just go back to the motel room and I would pass out. So I would sleep for a ridiculous amount of time, get up and go to work the next day. (Joy)

The first way that pushing is narrated by our participants relates to a desire to fit in workplace normalcy to find connection and avoid discrimination. This section's opening quote describes how Joy, who lives regionally and has narcolepsy, pushes through to physically attend the office of the local council she works for.

Teresa, who lives with lipoedema, also used the term pushing to describe her experience of physically going to the school where she works as professional staff:

Push through, just push through. […] That's really all there was to it. […] I have a physical disability that mean I struggle mobility-wise, so I use a four-wheel walker. And the pain and accessibility issues at school […] and just the physical demands of getting ready in the morning to get to work was draining to the point that once I got to work, I was exhausted.

Louise, who cannot drive because of hypotonia, lives in a suburban area with ‘atrocious public transport’, and has child-caring responsibilities, told us:

My daughter is very difficult to get up in the morning. It's constant fear of, ‘Am I going to make this in time? […] Am I going to look unprofessional?’ […] Then knowing that I’ve got a three-hour journey ahead of me, about two hours there, one hour back. There's an awful lot of walking, pushing a pram while carrying a heavy laptop on my back. It's physically exhausting.

We suggest that for Joy, Teresa and Louise, pushing becomes a desire to ‘perform normal’ (Sheppard, 2020) and fit into work normativity to avoid discrimination. This is because ‘[s]ometimes, [for the chronically-ill], it is easier to fit in than stand out’ (Sheppard, 2020, 44); it is easier to be exhausted than misfitting (Garland-Thomson, 2011).

Here, we connect an etic concept of desire to emic experiences of pushing through. We follow non-representational and affect theory approaches to disability that understand desire in an expansive way – as a productive force that creates relationships central to the formation of social life. Hall and Wilton evoke this notion of desire to articulate how disabled bodies desire ‘connections and engagements’ (2017, 730), which, for our participants, emerges as a desire for ‘normative intimacy’ (Berlant, 2012, 174) through normative ideas around being present (Teresa) and on time (Louise) at work, and through relationships with colleagues (Joy). Joy's words, for example, show how pushing through as a desire to fit in at work can be a rewarding source of connection. While exhausting, going to the office and being around colleagues had been paramount for her to ‘feel part of the team’ – which for her was ‘more important than a raise of salary’ – when working remotely from home:

It was easier to build those initial relationships in the office. I got to know people, know who to call […] because the organisation doesn’t have a lot of people working from home, when you are from home, no one's really calling you to check in and see how you’re going and things because it's not sort of that cultural norm.

While heeding Dawney and Jellis' (2024) warning against the ‘lure of redemption’ in some contemporary accounts of exhaustion – where strain is too readily reframed as resilience – our interviews nonetheless revealed complex and contradictory workers’ subjectivities shaped by the desire to push through to fit in at work. Rather than evaluating pushing through as either enabling or depleting, we approach it as an ambivalent practice of workplace belonging, one in which ‘it is difficult to tell […] what is normal and what is abnormal’ (Sheppard, 2020, 44). For Joy, for example, pushing through to fit in at work is exhausting; yet it also operates as a way of reconfiguring her capacities of being affected by an undesirable situation: working from home in isolation and not knowing who to call in her team.

However, fitting in is not a static experience but ‘a function of relations of power’ (Price, 2015, 271) involving continuously changing organisational context and normative expectations. Within such conditions, pushing through exceeds desire for connection and operates as ‘trickster strategy’ (Price et al., 2017) through which our participants perform normalcy to guard against discrimination in the workplace. For the women we spoke to, the fear of discrimination for being chronically ill intersects with gender discrimination. Dyck (1995) pointed out how women with disabilities experience a double stigma due to the intersection of gender and disability. They have ‘[…] fewer jobs’ opportunities than either able-bodied women or men with disabilities, and their participation in the wage labour force is also disproportionately low’ (Dyck, 1995, 307). For Louise, who has a newborn baby, disability intersects with gendered caring responsibilities:

I feel like the intersection of family responsibilities and disability hit me for a sixer. I don’t know if that's the expression, but really like throw quite a curved ball in terms of what I can do.

For others, for example, Teresa and Joy, experiences at work are affected by their experiences of medical gendered biases. Recent studies (Kolovos, 2024) have identified a ‘gendered pain gap’, which means that women's pain is often not treated with the required attention, often dismissed as ‘normal’ and not believed by medical practitioners. After years of mistreatment, hiding one's condition for fear of not being believed becomes quite common. Pushing through to fit in at work has a crucial gendered dimension. And it feels exhausting. Joy is exhausted from hiding and suppressing her condition with sugar and caffeine, to hide that she often ‘thinks against the tide’ compared with other people in her team. Teresa feels exhausted by the ‘pointless’ task of physically going to the office, to have meetings that could be done ‘over Zoom’. And Louise experiences ‘anticipatory exhaustion’ (Ahmed, 2017) while trying to wake her daughter up in the morning, thinking in anticipation of her long commute and fearing what her manager might think of her if she arrives late at work. In this sense, Louise's pushing through – and the exhaustion it creates – emerges from her desire to fit into the normative, ‘professional’ spacetimes of her workplace, while trying to push against her own ‘crip spacetimes’ (Price, 2024), shaped by the intersection of disability and social reproduction labour.

In the next section, we refract pushing in a different direction by showing how most of our participants were the first in their organisation to push for working from home arrangements.

‘Pushing for’ working from home: A disorienting anticipation

[at the beginning of the pandemic], I really pushed to be working from home sooner than maybe a few of my other colleagues just because we didn’t have a strong understanding of the virus and things like that. I was just like, Nope, I don’t want to mess around. Send me home. (Imogene)

Working from home is crucial for Imogene to take care of her chronic health conditions, maintain employment, and nourish her personal social relationships. Teresa, who since the COVID-19 lockdowns has tried ‘to do as much work from home as possible’, had a similar experience:

By working from home […] I don’t have to rush around in the mornings. I’ve got support workers who help me to shower and dress. So that makes it much, much more manageable.

Significantly, both Imogene and Teresa were the first employees in their organisation to push for working from home arrangements. Indeed, many of our participants pioneered such arrangements. For example, Joy was also one of the first:

I originally started for a six-week contract, which had no work from home, and I was away five days. As they were looking to extend that, I started then negotiating work from home arrangements, and it wasn’t something that the organisation did. I was very lucky that I had a team leader and a manager who really did sort of support that. And I guess then, what it's done is show the organisation that it can work.

For Joy, Imogene, Teresa and other participants, pushing for working from home is critical for keeping their jobs while managing their chronic health conditions. This, in turn, complicates and blurs the distinction between being sick and being able to work. That is, they express that working from home allows them to work during or in between ‘flare-ups,’ because they can pace themselves through pain and/or work flexible hours. As Wendy says:

I can just go have a nap during work, or have my heat pad on my stomach, and take my meds and stuff […]

Working from home provides a good amount of temporal flexibility to face situations when it is hard to predict when they are going to be unwell, and they do not want to use all their sick leave. Working from home also helps Andrea, who works as a professional staff member in tertiary education, lives with rheumatoid arthritis, and has more predictable flare-ups:

I might start getting kind of sore feet one day, but it won’t really impact me, and then the next day they might be worse and then they'll be really bad. It's kind of like I know, I can know, and I’ll just manage it by saying, Hey, I’m actually going to work from home for the next two or three days.

Pushing for working from home here emerges as a way of preparing for futures through different scales of uncertainty. Along with precaution and preemption, Anderson (2010) considers preparedness as a form of anticipation when ‘futures are made present’ and so ‘become a cause for action’ (793). Participants push for working from home because it prepares them to deal with pain and sickness by providing a ‘comfort’ zone (Imogene) where they can enact different strategies of self-care and pacing (nap, lay down, take shoes off, put leg up, etc). This conceptualisation of ‘pushing for’ emerges as an anticipatory strategy to deal with (un)predictable pain and sickness. Geographical work on the intersection between anticipation and mental health illness (Boyle, 2019) is instructive here in shedding light on the uncertain affects and embodiments of pushing. On a surface level, pushing for working from home as anticipation and preparedness seems to be a deterministic way for participants to improve the management of their health conditions, as if working from home only has positive effects. However, as Boyle reminds us, ‘anticipatory processes are not just about management of bodies, they are embodied, disembodied and re-embodied in the everyday experiences of health and illness’ (2019, 74). Following Boyle, we argue that anticipation is embodied in participants’ everyday experience of pushing for working from home.

Such pushing is not an effortless or smooth process (see also Wilton, 2004; Wilton and Schuer, 2006). Instead, pushing for working from home rights is disorienting and frustrating, showing the tension between formal workplace protection laws and their lived realities. Among our participants, Teresa is the only one who formally applied for flexible working arrangements. When we asked her – at different points in the interview – about the process, she conveyed a sense of frustrated confusion and described the contortions involved in her pushes to permanently work from home. She initially wanted to apply back in 2020, but her organisation put an embargo on applications during the COVID-19 lockdowns. While she could often work from home during that time, her work schedules and locations were ‘all over the place’, making it hard to manage her health conditions. At the beginning of 2023, all employees in her organisation were required to return to the office. Then she was able to formally apply for flexible arrangements. The application process was ‘lengthy’, even though, explains Teresa, ‘it didn’t have to be’. Joy refers to it as a ‘rigmarole’. Its intricacy, as Imogene explains, is caused by:

a lack of communication or clarity about what people can actually ask for and […] when people start to say, ‘Oh, I would really like to have a flexible working arrangement or a reasonable accommodation’ there's always this kind of little thing put in there that's like, ‘Oh yeah, you can ask for it … unless it's too expensive for the employer.’ So what are people supposed to know that they’re actually entitled to?

This unknowability of what employees can ask for in terms of working from home/flexible work rights causes disorienting feelings for our participants. Here, we suggest that ignorance can operate as an intentional ‘social construction with social causes and consequences […] which induces ‘doubt, ambiguity and uncertainty’ (Nikolaeva, 2024, 3). Pushing for work from home as an anticipatory strategy to deal with uncertain health conditions is disorienting because it often encounters the limits (Bissell and Gorman-Murray, 2019) of bureaucracy. This form of pushing is permeated by incomprehension and confusion (Bissell and Gorman-Murray, 2019), like in Teresa's ‘all over the place’ situation of not knowing who to talk to in the organisation and what to ask. Indeed, most participants prefer not to formally ask for flexible working arrangements and just have a verbal agreement with their line manager. Wendy says:

I like it when it's verbal, because there's flexibility in that. […] having something formalised is very rigid. […] we don't know when the pain's coming, and we don’t know how bad it's going to be, either, we don’t know, until we’re actually in the pain.

Alongside the need for flexibility to manage unpredictable pain conditions, establishing informal arrangements accompanies a choice of non-disclosing personal health conditions at work. Joy explains:

[…] the current workplace health and safety person, at a team meeting said they shouldn’t hire anyone who's on antidepressants. And so, there wasn’t that culture of feeling like if I went and spoke to them that I would not be, I guess, discriminated against.

Imogene, who understands workplace rights very well as part of her advocacy work, says that she prefers to disclose the least possible to employers. She explains that according to Australian workplace law, what employers need to know about employees’ health conditions ‘is very limited’. However, she continues:

…[t]he reality of how disability and work, and discrimination all kick together is that unfortunately people do have those unconscious biases […] things that people just naturally can’t really control about themselves [about] the whole values and ideology we have about how people are productive and what they’re supposed to be doing and how available they are in their jobs.

These ‘unconscious biases’ also intersect with gendered forms of discrimination discussed in the first empirical section. All the women we spoke to who had verbally discussed flexible arrangements told us that their line manager was a woman, otherwise they probably would not have disclosed at all.

In this second empirical section, we unpacked pushing for working from home as a form of anticipation to prepare for uncertain health and pain conditions. Unknowing what reasonable arrangements are, encounters with unclear bureaucracy and fear of discrimination ignite anticipatory forms of pushing, which feels frustrating and re/dis/orient participants towards which path to take to advocate for working from home arrangements. On one hand, employees’ ignorance of their rights limits their avenues of pushing. On the other hand, fear of discrimination in the workplace leads them to put their employers and HR teams in a position of not(formally)-knowing about their health conditions. In the final empirical section, we explore this latter form of unknowing as concealment.

‘Pushing back’ when working from home: A disconnecting concealment

In this last section, we examine a different mode of pushing that happens when working from home, which we name ‘pushing back’ against demands for presence and visibility at work. For Andrea, for example, non-visibility of her attire is a key expression of the benefits offered by working from home during a pain flare:

If I’m at home I can just sit on the couch or put my feet up or […] shoes are really painful, so when I’m at home I don’t have to put shoes on. I can probably just go braless or whatever, no one's going to see I just get my head up here on the video.

This ‘pushing back’ has a dual sense, first in terms of resistance against expectations of presence, and second in terms of retreating and concealing from colleagues. During an eczema flare-up, Rachel, who is a student working part-time as an online event manager, also foregrounds this sense of withdrawal:

I’m on mute the whole time and they don’t see me either. Then I got to just apply a cream freely and openly. […] I can literally apply with one hand while I'm typing with another hand.

While acknowledging that the home is not always an accessible and safe space (Cockayne, 2021), in our interviews, it emerges as a space that provides the comfort necessary for our participants to manage flare-ups and ‘persevere’ (Wendy) through work, aligning with the desire to fit into work normativity discussed in our first empirical section. For example, Andrea's bodily adjustments – putting her feet up, not wearing shoes – are enabled by the materiality of the home, such as the presence of the couch where she can sit if in pain and by the concealment the home offers: ‘no one's going to see’ those bodily adjustments. In other words, working from home enables both pain management and the ability to push back by masking pain from her team using the visually selective framing of video. This element of pushing back as concealing appears more clearly in Joy's interview:

[working from home] is a good way for me to manage my health and still contribute without needing to draw attention to what's going on with my health. […] if I was really tired, I could go lay down or whatever or take half an hour away and shift my hours around without it being obvious to anyone.

The work of concealment here is two-fold. Similar to Andrea, working from home allows Joy to conceal the flare-up symptoms of her health conditions. It also allows her to conceal the spatialities (‘laying down’) and temporalities (‘shift my hours around’) that she needs to manage, push and pace through the illness.

In their research with young people living with chronic illness in Australia, Harper et al. (2024) explore the affective relationality of chronicity, which ‘is made up of the relationships between the lived physical experiences of illness and pain, individuals’ previously established beliefs and emotions, and encounters with others which are both real and imagined’ (p. 2). In doing so, they shed light on the elaborate practices of concealment young people put in place. These practices not only concern the masking of illness, but also the exhausting ‘downplaying the specter of fear, vulnerability, and uncertainty that is persistently present’ (Harper et al., 2024, 10) in their lives. We suggest that concealment when working from home stems from a similar fear. When we asked Wendy, who lives with endometriosis and works for the state government, if she would tell her manager when she is taking a break because of her pain, she replied:

Sometimes I will, but sometimes, I won’t. I just find, I don’t want to look bad, as well, going, I am going for a rest […] Yeah, that's the thing, it's a perception thing. It's like, you’re kind of viewed like you’re lazy or something, right?

In the first empirical section, we showed that Louise did not want to be late for work at the office because she ‘did not want to look unprofessional’. Here, relatedly, Wendy conceals her non-normative temporalities when working from home, because she does not ‘want to look bad’. ‘It's a perception thing’, she adds, which links back to the previous section when Imogene talked about the ‘unconscious biases’ employers have towards employees with chronic illnesses. Despite having formalised or verbally agreed to flexible working arrangements, employees still do not want their flexibility to be ‘obvious’ (Joy) to their team members. They do not feel comfortable in sharing their diverse ways of being productive and available to others. In this sense, we show how the post-pandemic home is a site where hegemonic and ableist notions of workplace and productivity are both (re)produced and contested. We contend that pushing back as concealment is a way to keep safe (Davidson and Henderson, 2010) via ‘keeping to themselves’ (Horton and Tucker, 2014, 83) to avoid the stigma which often derives from exposing non-normative ways of moving through time, work, and productivity. For example, Joy told us that:

The other thing that I would do that's probably kind of weird is on Teams I wouldn’t automatically show as on because my hours were so all over the place, just so then people could reach out to me at any point. They didn’t have to see that I was online. And even if I was lying in bed having a lay down, it would come through to my phone and I would immediately respond that way. So just to sort of not create that culture that people needed to see me online to message me, which may not have been the right thing to do, but yeah.

Joy shows how concealment hides her bodily and material strategies of dealing with her condition at home (‘having a lay down’) and her non-normative work schedule. However, concealment also enables creation of her own work ‘micro-culture’ (Straughan et al., 2026). In this way, she controls and changes how her team interacts with her to suit her differential spatialities and temporalities of working.

However, as per the other experiences of pushing that we have analysed in the previous empirical sections, the outcomes of pushing back when working from home are ambivalent. For example, Andrea explained that her flare-ups come ‘with a bit of fatigue and brain fog as well’, and so working from home ‘works against’ her because she is already ‘easily distracted at home’ and ‘kind of [goes] off into a vague haze much more easily’ than at the office. This makes her feel ‘disconnected’ and ‘looped out’ from the team. Joy also shares this sentiment. She told us how a sudden change of manager dramatically switched her team's approach to working from home:

Before, I felt really like a big part of the team. Even though everyone was in the office, I still felt very connected. When this new person came in, I would go days without people speaking to me.

At that point, she started to feel ‘very disconnected’:

There was sort of like jokes made sometimes that, ‘Oh, we remember you’re there, but we just get busy.’ It's almost like you are that first thing that drops off.

She ‘became very insular’ and no longer ‘an important part of the team’. Hafermalz (2021) employs the metaphor of ‘exile’ to describe such situations of invisibility and exclusion from the ‘perceived centre of organisational life’ (p. 698), which threatens remote teams. This impacted Joy's mental health so badly that she resigned, making it very clear to the organisation that the reason was that shift in ‘working from home culture’, due to the personal ‘style’ of the new manager, that ‘you need to be in front of her to be front of mind’. This disconnect between being at distance on a screen and being recognised (Hafermalz, 2021), or cared for, was also raised by Imogene:

If I’m just sitting here and I’m like this, and that's all you see of me, and I’m able to just put on a smiley face and get through a meeting and different things like that […] I think there is a disconnect and a difficulty in people not seeing someone face to face to get that kind of holistic observation about what's going on for that person […] ‘how much people are able to have compassion or understanding for people they don’t meet physically’?

This final section has explored how ‘pushing back’ helps to conceptualise both the spatial tactic of distancing from colleagues to conceal bodily pain and of pushing back against workplace norms in knowledge work that places a premium on expectations of visibility and availability. However, while this form of pushing back reveals a sense of agency for these women – by enhancing their ability to be more responsive to their condition while at work – it also gives rise to a range of ambivalent affects within the relationship between our participants and their wider workplaces. For some, concealment might result in feelings of progressive neglect and abandonment by their colleagues. For others, concealment to avoid stigma might result in not being properly understood by colleagues, a form of disconnection that leads to feelings of loneliness (van Holstein et al., 2025). This conceptualisation of pushing back raises crucial questions concerning work from home, visibility, and remote work ethics that we address in our conclusion.

Towards a new geography of pushing

For a generation, geographers have become appreciative of the affective and material dimensions of everyday life and so have developed sophisticated new vocabularies to describe these worldly configurations. While ‘pushing’ is a concept that has been cast through different theoretical traditions, it has been mainly employed as an etic metaphor alluding to linear forces. In response, in this article, we have developed the concept of pushing by unravelling its multiple affects. Catalysed by the emic use of the term by women who work from home while managing chronic health conditions, we have explained how ‘pushing through’, ‘pushing for’, and ‘pushing back’ each relate to a suite of affects emerging from our participants' (re)negotiation of their spatio-temporal working environments while chronically ill.

In sharp contrast to a linear sense of pushing that activates a certain outcome, each of these affective configurations of pushing – exhausting desire, disorienting anticipation, and disconnecting concealment – result in uncertain and ambivalent outcomes. Across participants’ accounts, we have shown how ‘pushing’ operates as an analytical tool that reveals everyday work negotiations that often remain hidden in dominant narratives of remote and hybrid work. Therefore, we contend that pushing functions as a crip epistemology, which offers crucial insights into the ambiguous (un)affective ways chronically ill women navigate, or are failed by, relationships at work, workplace access, inclusion policies, and legal protections. We conclude with three main reflections and outlining directions for future research.

First, our participants show that the home is a vital space of paid employment for people with chronic illnesses, enabling them to manage their conditions better than going into an office. Though ‘flexible work’ tends to refer to the variable time spent either at home or in an office, our participants’ reflections indicate how home itself is a place of flexibility that permits much more fine-grained oscillations between the activities involved in paid working and the unpaid labour required to navigate chronic illness, the latter encapsulated in the concept of ‘pushing through’. However, what we also witness in ‘pushing through’ is a desire to be evaluated as a productive worker that is both valued and accepted (Wilton, 2004) by their organisation and that simultaneously affirms one's sense of self as a performing normally (Sheppard, 2020) individual. There is clearly a risk here in the mobilisation of the concept of ‘pushing’ to support pro-work tendencies. However, as we have explained, the outcome of pushing is by no means certain, and can lead to thresholds of realisation of both uplift and depletion at different times.

Second, in an era where the benefits of working from home are being questioned by some organisations, our findings reveal that it is a fundamental necessity to many people who are managing chronic health conditions, encapsulated in the ‘pushing for’ that many of our participants are engaged in. However, working from home for these women is also freighted with ambivalence and contradiction and is by no means the antidote to work-related challenges. The notion of ‘pushing back’ shows how working from home can result in feelings of isolation and disconnection from their work colleagues and organisation. This can resonate with remote workers negotiating challenges other than health, such as those working from home owing to caring responsibilities. Attending to research showing that consideration and care can be practised at a distance, including through digital screens (Ahmed, 2004), this raises key practical questions for organisations about how workers can be kept ‘front of mind’, rather than ‘pushed back’ within remote teams. This pushing back, and resulting concealment, risks making already invisible chronic illnesses even more invisible by removing them from the office and the possibilities of encounters, and so to undermine the crip politics of the workplace, which crucially infuses ‘the disruptive potential of disability into normative spaces and interactions’ (Price, 2015, 279).

Yet, at the same time, our participants indicate that the intersection between chronic health and remote work complicates the distinction between the invisible and visible, and between what is restorative and depleting. Though the chronic illnesses that are experienced by our participants are diverse, for many, their intensity of registration in sense fluctuates depending on spatial, environmental and institutional encounters. Hence, we ask how we might move beyond dualistic thinking – visible/invisible, good/ill health – to instead encourage more immanent modes of ethical evaluation for both workers and organisations. Such an approach would better appreciate the fluctuating and uncertain needs of chronic illness and the transforming needs of changing workplaces.

Finally, we suggest that the experiences of ‘pushing’ analysed in this article extend beyond those of chronically ill workers to encompass the broader pressures faced by workers to meet normative expectations under neoliberal professional cultures. In this sense, the concept of pushing reaches beyond disability studies, offering insights for wider labour geographies. However, we are aware that extending the conceptual value of pushing requires careful attention to the predominantly minority-world perspectives embedded in much working-from-home scholarship, including this article. We therefore position this article as both a starting point and an invitation. By examining the intersection of gender, chronic illness, and work, we offer initial conceptual groundwork that can be developed in future research with more racially diverse samples and in majority world settings, where labour protections and labour market structures may produce different affectual configurations of pushing, particularly for workers navigating precarious working environments. Ultimately, we invite future research to mobilise pushing as a conceptual tool to interrogate the uneven and intersecting pressures of work, health, and inequality across different geographical contexts and social axes.