More than a public health crisis: A feminist political economic analysis of COVID-19

Abstract

Gender norms, roles and relations differentially affect women, men, and non-binary individuals' vulnerability to disease. Outbreak response measures also have immediate and long-term gendered effects. However, gender-based analysis of outbreaks and responses is limited by lack of data and little integration of feminist analysis within global health scholarship. Recognising these barriers, this paper applies a gender matrix methodology, grounded in feminist political economy approaches, to evaluate the gendered effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and response in four case studies: China, Hong Kong, Canada, and the UK. Through a rapid scoping of documentation of the gendered effects of the outbreak, it applies the matrix framework to analyse findings, identifying common themes across the case studies: financial discrimination, crisis in care, and unequal risks and secondary effects. Results point to transnational structural conditions which put women on the front lines of the pandemic at work and at home while denying them health, economic and personal securityeffects that are exacerbated where racism and other forms of discrimination intersect with gender inequities. Given that women and people living at the intersections of multiple inequities are made additionally vulnerable by pandemic responses, intersectional feminist responses should be prioritised at the beginning of any crises.

Politics and pandemics

“…The third group of papers discuss the organisation of health systems and policies in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper from Goodyear-Smith et al, 'Primary care perspectives on pandemic politics' (Goodyear- Smith et al, 2021) brings the results from an international, online, mix-methods survey that explored primary care experts' perspectives on their country's responses to the pandemic in the first months. Putting together data from 37 countries, the authors investigate whether these experts found that their countries' responses covered three features that they hypothesised would lead to a better control of the pandemic: a pre-existing plan to fight pandemics, responses primarily driven by medical facts, and decision-making authority held at the national level.…”

“…The fourth group of papers included in the special issue focuses on examining the importance of social inequalities, both in shaping the pandemic and in guiding the ways in which we analyse and interpret it. The first article, by Smith et al, 'More than a public health crisis: a feminist political economic analysis of COVID-19' (Smith, et al, 2021) applies a gender matrix methodology, grounded in feminist political economy approaches, to examine the gendered effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and response in four case studies: China, Hong Kong, Canada, and the UK. It identifies several common themes that cut across the four case studies: financial discrimination, crisis in care, and unequal risks and secondary effects.…”

Deleuze Becoming-Mary Poppins: Re-Imagining the Concept of Becoming-Woman and Its Potential for Challenging Current Notions of Parenting, Gender and Childhood

“…It emerges from an open, un-boundried body (Manning 2009). Thus, the body is no longer engendered or docile and a tacit dimension (Shotwell 2011). As Verhage (2014) aptly asserts, shared meanings and habits stick us together in a kind of intersubjective dance.…”

Untitled

“…La crisis producida por esta pandemia puede hacer retroceder los avances que se han logrado en la eliminación de desigualdades y discriminaciones estructurales e institucionales, incluidas las de género, y ha revelado el costo de no tener un sistema integrado de cuidados de cobertura amplia en la región (CEPAL, 2020). Además, estudios recientes resaltan que uno de los impactos a más largo plazo del COVID-19 puede ser la restitución de normas tradicionales de género, ya que las mujeres tienen más probabilidades de estar en la economía informal y tienen mayor riesgo de perder sus trabajos (Czymara, Langenkamp, y Cano 2021;Smith et al 2021). El COVID-19 ha confinado a las familias en sus hogares, desde donde las mujeres intentan trabajar, cuidar y educar a los niños al mismo tiempo (Bahn, Cohen, y van der Meulen Rodgers, 2020).…”