Frauen und Corona-Proteste

Abstract

Our article proposes a theoretical interpretation of women‘s broad participation in the coronavirus protests. For this purpose, we consider two central themes of their protest: vaccination and caring for their loved ones. From a sociological perspective, we show how their protest affirms the gendered division between the private and the public spheres that is constitutive of bourgeois capitalist society, and what role romantic thought plays in this. The women accept the social role assigned to them as caring women and creatures of nature. From a philosophical perspective, we illuminate how this affirmation is accompanied by a threat to society. That threat is based, as we point out with Hegel, on a contradiction of woman and society. Their protest reveals paradigmatically the dialectical movement of affirmation and endangerment of the bourgeois capitalist order.