Antípoda. Revista de Antropología y Arqueología

Antipod. Rev. Antropol. Arqueol | eISSN 2011-4273 | ISSN 1900-5407

The Im-Possibilities of Care: Reconstructions of Care in the COVID-19 Pandemic Based on the Experience of Women in Chile

No. 45 (2021-10-01)
  • Sebastián Rojas-Navarro
    Universidad Andrés Bello, Chile
  • María-Alejandra Energici
    Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile
  • Nicolás Schöngut-Grollmus
    Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile
  • Samanta Alarcón-Arcos
    Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda45.2021.05

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to highlight that the increase in caregiving tasks, as a result of the pandemic and the breakdown of the care network, have fallen most heavily on women. By recognizing the crisis of care, which has privileged an individualistic model over a social or community model, the covid-19 pandemic reveals the overburdening of one type of subject and the impossibilities of thinking about other forms of care. By presenting some of the results obtained via the Cuidar survey, conducted in Chile in May 2020, in a context of strict quarantine, closure of educational establishments and social distancing measures, we discuss the participation of women in care practices that are becoming increasingly fragile. If we consider that women are key actors in these articulations, the precariousness of their quality of life affects the very capacity of the network to sustain and care and, therefore, women’s capacity to care for themselves as well as for others. In other words, the pandemic reveals not only a set of practices that is disarticulated and reorganized, but also that, given its privatized organization and concentration in one type of individual, it becomes much more fragile in that it depends almost exclusively on a subject whose possibilities of rethinking or rearticulating itself are reduced or limited.

Keywords: Care, care crisis, gender, pandemic, practices

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