Gone Goose: The Remaking of an American Town in the Age of Climate Change

Choreographing social reproduction: Making personal protective equipment and gender during a neoliberal pandemic

“…Paralleling research on responses to socioecological disruptions and disasters (Leap, 2018;Sherman, 2009), we found that makers innovatively challenged and adhered to established ways of doing gender as they worked to produce PPE in response to shortages linked to decades of neoliberal governance strategies. To fabricate and distribute PPE, men and women often employed gendered skills such as sewing or 3D printing that they had previously acquired through school, work, or hobbies.…”

“…Paralleling previous research on responses to socioecological disasters (Leap, 2018;Moreno & Shaw, 2018), even when women and men learned and/or utilized skills typically associated with either femininity or masculinity, respectively, they sometimes utilized these skills in manners that disrupted gender and gendered inequalities in messy, ambivalent manners.…”

“…Although such leadership work can undoubtedly have drawbacks associated with doing more labor, it can also be empowering and emotionally fulfilling for women doing this work (Leap, 2018; Milroy & Wismer, 1994). This point was repeatedly emphasized by women leading PPE production efforts in their communities.…”

“…Disaster response initiatives often “feminize the responsibility to care” by purposefully enrolling women to labor on behalf of their households and communities during crises (Bradshaw, 2015, p. 69). Even without official policies and programs, women feel compelled to help others during times of need at least partly because their household and community members simply expect them to do so (Leap, 2018).…”

“…Responses to disasters also “offer windows of opportunities to challenge unequal power relations” (Moreno & Shaw, 2018, p. 220). Reflective of how gender and gendered inequalities are rearranged through everyday (inter)actions informed by institutions (Butler, 1990), as men and women respond to socioecological disasters and disruptions they often rearrange, reproduce, and undermine gendered inequalities in ambivalent, uneven manners (Leap, 2018; Moreno & Shaw, 2018; Sherman, 2009). Accordingly, early research indicates that COVID‐19 has complicated the gendered dimensions of socially reproductive labor in ambivalent manners in U.S. Women who were much more likely than men to reduce their time in the paid workforce (C. Collins, Landivar, et al., 2021) or become unemployed (Heggeness & Fields, 2020) because of COVID‐19‐related childcare issues (C. Collins, Ruppanner, et al., 2021; Petts et al., 2021).…”