COVID-19: Intersectional Perspectives on Patriarchy and the Pandemic

COVID-19 unleashed a severe setback to gender equality. All over the world, patriarchy has benefited from the pandemic to reclaim power. The economic crisis caused by the pandemic has increased various forms of domestic abuse and violence, perpetuated women’s job loss, upheavals, and distress, and reaffirmed men’s place as women’s controller and protector. The vulnerability of disabled women and girls, as well as those caring for their dependents, increased exponentially.

Examining COVID-19 and the rise of patriarchy from an intersectional feminist lens highlights how power and injustice are organized differently for individuals, how policy responses to it affect different social groups differently, and how measures that are beneficial for some groups may reinforce pre-existing situations of injustice, especially in the case of overlapping and mutually reinforcing marginalization produced by global and local power structures. This session calls for papers to explore the intersectional dynamics of patriarchy, race and ethnicity and other types of marginalization in face of the pandemic.