Offering Southern feminist assessments of detailed case studies from 12 countries, this open access book provides crucial insights into the gendered repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on macroeconomics, labour, migration and human mobilities, and care and social protection throughout the Global South.
Using DAWN’s interlinkages approach, the chapters provide a comprehensive and intersectional perspective on how the pandemic affected, and continues to affect people, especially women and girls of different ages, gender identity and sexual orientation, class, race, ethnicity, citizenship and migration status.
Written by Southern feminist academics, activists and thinkers across Asia, Africa, the Carribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific, the volume highlights how the pandemic was often used as an opportunity to create periods of exception that compromised democratic processes. Contributors pay special attention to the opportunities for transformative practices that emerged during the pandemic, highlighting the role of resistance and social mobilization. By bringing to light important new forms of resistance the chapters make important interventions into critical debates on the role of the state, the market, civil society, and grassroots organizing in addressing pandemics, other complex crises, and their aftermaths.
This volume ultimately challenges dominant narratives that overlook the gendered implications of crises, and in doing so provides an original, feminist analytical framework for understanding policy trends shaping realities the world over — one that offers concrete policy and practice recommendations for fostering southern-based feminist and social justice.
The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN).
Introduction: Lather, Rinse, Repeat?: Women and Gender Inequalities in the Pandemic Conjuncture Masaya Llavaneras Blanco and Damien P. Gock Section I: Examining Austerity and Path Dependence 1. Macro Patriarchal Pandemic Policy: The India Case Ritu Dewan (Indian Society of Labour Economics) 2. Food for Thought curtailed: Austerity, Socioeconomic Crises and Ghana’s School Feeding Program Gertrude Dzifa Torvikey and Sylvia Ohene Marfo (University of Ghana) 3. Social Protection and Care Policies: Impacts on Gendered Inequalities in Trinidad and Tobago Karen A. Roopnarine and Crystal Brizan (CAFRA, St. Lucia) 4: The impact of Covid-19 on Domestic Workers in China: Reflections on a Fragmented Policy Response Zhihong Sa (Beijing Normal University, China) Section II: Attempting to Depart from Path Dependence 5. Who Really Wins?: Kiribati Labour Mobility Schemes and the Post-Covid Lockdown Era Roi Burnett (University of Auckland, New Zealand) 6. Social Protection Versus Orthodoxy: Lessons from South Africa Busi Sibeko (SOAS, UK) 7. The Crisis of Care: Crafting Social Care Policies through Debt and Covid-19 Pandemic Daniele Bobb and Leigh-Ann Worrell (University of the West Indies, Jamaica) 8. Conditional Transfer Programmes during the Covid-19 Crisis in the Plurinational State of Bolivia Silvia Amparo Fernández Cervantes (Independent, Bolivia) Section III: Social Organizing, Resistance, and a Collective Politics of Care 9. The Pathway Towards the Care System in Argentina: Transformative Potential and Persistent Challenges Cecilia Fraga and Corina Rodríguez Enríquez (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) 10. Transformative Action for Domestic Workers in Jamaica: Analyzing Factors Influencing Grassroots Feminist Organizing in Times of Covid-19 Ayesha Constable (IISD, Switzerland) 11. Collective Care to Confront the Pandemic: Migrant and Pro-Migrant Activism in Chile Nanette Liberona, Carolina Stefoni and Sius Salinas (University of Tarapacá, Chile) 12. Organizing from the Heart: Migrant Domestic Workers’ resistance in Malaysia during the Covid-19 Pandemic Liva Sreedharan (NEOM, Malaysia) and Yen Ne Foo (Independent, Malaysia) Conclusion Masaya Llavaneras Blanco and Damien P. Gock Index
Masaya Llavaneras Blanco is Assistant Professor of Development Studies at Huron University College at Western University, Canada, and an executive committee member of DAWN. Her research focuses on feminist political economy, development studies, South-South human mobilities, and social reproduction in the Global South. Damien P. Gock is a PhD candidate at Western Sydney University, Australia, a DAWN associate, and a board member of the Alliance for Future Generations (AFG), Fiji. His research focuses on migration, women, and care regimes in Australia and Fiji.
Reviews for Pandemic Policies and Resistance: Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of Covid-19
The potential for transformation of deep-rooted inequalities and marginalization comes in historic moments, is often subverted by powerful vested interests, and when it does happen, is a “messy process.” This book takes us on one part of the transformative journey through the lived realities of women and communities across the global South during and post the Covid-19 pandemic. In the face of an “unforgiving intellectual property system” and the mutual entanglement of corporate strangleholds and rising state authoritarianism, unrelenting gendered-civil society activism offers hope for a radical politics of care with diverse but collective pathways to equality and social justice. Covid-19 is but one milestone. A must read. * Chee Yoke Ling (Executive Director, Third World Network) * The world has turned a blind eye to the COVID-19 pandemic – as if it was just a blip, an anomaly in countries’ trajectories and lived experiences. With sufficient distance to take a historic perspective, but with the lived experience fresh in our collective memory, this book takes an intersectional and feminist perspective to examine the policy responses to the pandemic, either marked by austerity and path dependency or by innovation and change (with varying degrees of success), and the instances of resistance and transformation led by the social movements. This book is a necessary and timely eyeopener, breaking new ground in feminist analyses and supporting renewed feminist advocacy and activism. * Valeria Esquivel *
