The Chronicity of Home-Making: Women Caregivers in Dis/Abling Spaces

Abstract

Care for disabled family members in Brazil has historically been concentrated in the home, but the Covid-19 pandemic has intensified domestic care labor by limiting infrastructures of care. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with women caring for disabled others at different stages of life in three regions of Brazil, we advance two interconnected concepts that emerged in our interlocutors’ narratives. We contend that the Covid-19 pandemic has engendered a chronification of home-making, which intensified a long-standing pattern of unequally gendered labor in maintaining arrangements of spaces, people, and things. In the context of the progressive loss of social safety nets and deepening social inequality, this chronicified process of home-making also gives rise to dis/abling care—care that simultaneously enables others and disables caregivers. Our work demonstrates how the pandemic is re-entrenching historical inequalities in Brazil and how disability is produced in pandemic times.