Identity, politics, and the pandemic: Why is COVID-19 a disaster for feminism(s)?
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Identity, politics, and the pandemic: Why is COVID‑19 a disaster for feminism(s)? Suze G. Berkhout1,2 · Lisa Richardson1,3
Received: 26 August 2020 / Accepted: 3 October 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract COVID-19 has been called “a disaster for feminism” (Lewis in The coronavirus is a disaster for feminism, 2020) for numerous reasons. In this short piece, we make sense of this claim, drawing on intersectional feminism(s) to understand why an analysis that considers gender alone is inadequate to address both the risks and consequences of COVID-19. Keywords Intersectionality · Feminism · COVID-19 pandemic
1 Introduction Calls to track disproportionate risks and consequences of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic for women have come from a range of sectors. Globally, limited gains in gender equality since the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action have been flagged as at risk of being rolled back as the pandemic deepens preexisting inequalities (United Nations Policy Brief, April 2020). Early in the pandemic, Nature published a commentary discussing how social restrictions impact women especially, given that they are disproportionately responsible for family care work and also make up the majority of single parents (Minello 2020). Unpaid care responsibilities have increased dramatically as COVID-19 has closed schools, overwhelmed health services, and heightened the care needs of older persons—these * Suze G. Berkhout [email protected] 1
University Health Network, Toronto General Hospital, 8th floor Eaton North, 228A, 200 Elizabeth St., Toronto, ON M5G 2C4, Canada
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Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
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Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
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S. G. Berkhout, L. Richardson
have both disproportionately burdened women and exposed the fragility of women’s roles in the paid economy (Power 2020). In the popular press, COVID-19 has been called “a disaster for feminism” (Lewis 2020) as heightened care obligations within the pandemic context negatively impact many women’s financial and employment security. In this short piece, we make sense of how COVID-19 has been considered a disaster or crisis for feminism(s) and why an analysis that considers gender alone is inadequate to address the issues.1 In answering this question, it is crucial to emphasize “women” are not a uniform demographic group. Feminist discourses surrounding the pandemic that fail to locate intersections of racism, patriarchy, ableism and heteronormativity (amongst other axes of social power) will be inadequate for understanding and addressing vulnerability: an intersectional analysis is needed along with a response that centres the experiences of multiply positioned community members. We bring to this analysis our own positionalities: Suze Berkhout is an urban, white,2 settler woman; she is a clinician-investigator in feminist science and technology studies (STS) and philosophy whose research is embedded in ethnographic m
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