“…Whether it is a natural disaster, an economic crisis, political unrest, or a pandemic outbreak, the intent of disaster profiteering is to capitalize, literally, on the fear, exhaustion and chaos of a crisis to impose “emergency measures” that are, in effect, capitalist takeovers in disguise (Klein, 2007, p. 199). As Marina Vujnovic and Johanna Foster have summarized elsewhere, Klein's work described a global pattern whereby elites have sought to deliberately destroy the economic and political infrastructures of communities, and, indeed, entire nations, in order to establish, through cruel and often brutal means, including violence, ‘clean canvasses’ for capitalist reconstructions that not only rely on the state to do the bidding of corporate elites but, even more fundamentally, to privatize governance itself (Vujnovic & Foster, 2022, p. 10).…”
“…have sought to deliberately destroy the economic and political infrastructures of communities, and, indeed, entire nations, in order to establish, through cruel and often brutal means, including violence, ‘clean canvasses’ for capitalist reconstructions that not only rely on the state to do the bidding of corporate elites but, even more fundamentally, to privatize governance itself (Vujnovic & Foster, 2022, p. 10).…”
“…Amidst the national battles over mandatory vaccine and masking policies in schools and workplaces, the scandalous stories of hospitals in bidding wars for ventilators, and the contentious debates over the quality of remote "learning" are equally critical political and economic battles over who owns, or should be able to own, the commonly shared resources of education, healthcare, and critical services necessary for health and democratic society. Prior to the pandemic, for instance, some of the most well-known titans of global capitalism, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan and Bill and Melinda Gates, had already set their eyes on a total digital transformation of public schooling, including higher education, on a global scale as leaders of a global educational industry worth billions of dollars and growing (see Vujnovic & Foster, 2022). Along with legions of other investors in a network of global educational technology corporations, venture capitalists and private equity firms, and for-profit educational consultants connected in a web of predatory educational privatization corporations that see students and their families as life-long customers of "educational" products, they have already profited obscenely off of the disastrous shift to online learning platforms and the increasing ownership of curriculum via a transfer of content to digital space.…”
Section: Workplace Policies and Practices: Latent Retrenchment And Bl...mentioning
In this concluding article, the authors use a global, intersectional feminist political economy lens to reconceptualize disaster response policy and practices that center women's lives. They extend this issue's discussion of the COVID‐19 pandemic's impact on women's health and safety in ways that have exposed and expanded gender inequalities, and differently for different groups of women, to the discourse of how disaster responses have not only failed women, but have also been used opportunistically by elites to enhance racial and gendered capitalism. In the first half of the article, the authors discuss how the previous feminist literature on the gendering of disasters, with important exceptions, largely misses a critique of the ways the crisis of neoliberalism and the role of racial and gendered global capitalism sets the stage for women to be targets for disaster opportunism. At the same time, critical scholars who have taken on the analysis of disaster capitalism often ignore the well‐established feminist social science on disasters. In the second half of the article, the authors bridge these two literatures and provide an intersectional gendered analysis of what they call the political economy of “racialized patriarchal disaster capitalism” as applied to select cases from the COVID crisis as illustrations. Finally, the authors discuss the theoretical implications of their analysis for feminist conceptualizations of disaster opportunism, as well as practical implications for global public health advocates, policy makers, NGOs, and feminist health activists.
“…Whether it is a natural disaster, an economic crisis, political unrest, or a pandemic outbreak, the intent of disaster profiteering is to capitalize, literally, on the fear, exhaustion and chaos of a crisis to impose “emergency measures” that are, in effect, capitalist takeovers in disguise (Klein, 2007, p. 199). As Marina Vujnovic and Johanna Foster have summarized elsewhere, Klein's work described a global pattern whereby elites have sought to deliberately destroy the economic and political infrastructures of communities, and, indeed, entire nations, in order to establish, through cruel and often brutal means, including violence, ‘clean canvasses’ for capitalist reconstructions that not only rely on the state to do the bidding of corporate elites but, even more fundamentally, to privatize governance itself (Vujnovic & Foster, 2022, p. 10).…”
“…have sought to deliberately destroy the economic and political infrastructures of communities, and, indeed, entire nations, in order to establish, through cruel and often brutal means, including violence, ‘clean canvasses’ for capitalist reconstructions that not only rely on the state to do the bidding of corporate elites but, even more fundamentally, to privatize governance itself (Vujnovic & Foster, 2022, p. 10).…”
“…Amidst the national battles over mandatory vaccine and masking policies in schools and workplaces, the scandalous stories of hospitals in bidding wars for ventilators, and the contentious debates over the quality of remote "learning" are equally critical political and economic battles over who owns, or should be able to own, the commonly shared resources of education, healthcare, and critical services necessary for health and democratic society. Prior to the pandemic, for instance, some of the most well-known titans of global capitalism, such as Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan and Bill and Melinda Gates, had already set their eyes on a total digital transformation of public schooling, including higher education, on a global scale as leaders of a global educational industry worth billions of dollars and growing (see Vujnovic & Foster, 2022). Along with legions of other investors in a network of global educational technology corporations, venture capitalists and private equity firms, and for-profit educational consultants connected in a web of predatory educational privatization corporations that see students and their families as life-long customers of "educational" products, they have already profited obscenely off of the disastrous shift to online learning platforms and the increasing ownership of curriculum via a transfer of content to digital space.…”
Section: Workplace Policies and Practices: Latent Retrenchment And Bl...mentioning
In this concluding article, the authors use a global, intersectional feminist political economy lens to reconceptualize disaster response policy and practices that center women's lives. They extend this issue's discussion of the COVID‐19 pandemic's impact on women's health and safety in ways that have exposed and expanded gender inequalities, and differently for different groups of women, to the discourse of how disaster responses have not only failed women, but have also been used opportunistically by elites to enhance racial and gendered capitalism. In the first half of the article, the authors discuss how the previous feminist literature on the gendering of disasters, with important exceptions, largely misses a critique of the ways the crisis of neoliberalism and the role of racial and gendered global capitalism sets the stage for women to be targets for disaster opportunism. At the same time, critical scholars who have taken on the analysis of disaster capitalism often ignore the well‐established feminist social science on disasters. In the second half of the article, the authors bridge these two literatures and provide an intersectional gendered analysis of what they call the political economy of “racialized patriarchal disaster capitalism” as applied to select cases from the COVID crisis as illustrations. Finally, the authors discuss the theoretical implications of their analysis for feminist conceptualizations of disaster opportunism, as well as practical implications for global public health advocates, policy makers, NGOs, and feminist health activists.
“…Although early epidemiological reports highlighted higher morbidity and mortality from COVID‐19 in men than women (Bwire, 2020), COVID‐19 magnified gender inequalities that existed long before the pandemic and continue to disproportionately affect women. As scholars have identified during many previous disasters around the globe, vulnerable populations including women, children, and those oppressed based on their race and class shoulder more burden during and in recovery stages because of pre‐existing disparities, inequitable access to aid, and exploitation by those in power (Chew & Ramdas, 2005; Foster & Foster‐Palmer, 2023; Klein, 2007; Vujnovic & Foster, 2022). Although some economists posited early on in the pandemic that pandemic‐induced changes to work institutions may result in increased equity within the institution of family (Alon et al., 2020), and that increased egalitarian approaches may emerge, our research highlights that many women, particularly women of color, mothers, and women with lower incomes faced increased challenges in the early months of the pandemic in the United States, and that one's gender, race/ethnicity, income level, and motherhood status were intricately tied to household and financial responsibilities, worries about children, finances, healthcare, housing, food security and safety (including domestic violence), stress and psychological distress as well as the coping strategies employed to handle this time of crisis.…”
The current study focused on how the sudden onset of the pandemic magnified existing inequalities for women in the United States. A total of 2115 participants responded to an online survey regarding pandemic‐related changes to household and childcare responsibilities, employment, mental and physical health and safety, housing, worries and stress, and coping strategies. We employ an intersectionality analytical framework to understand how existing systems of oppression differentially impacted women's lived experiences during the early stages of the pandemic in the United States. Particularly, we investigated how gender, race/ethnicity, and class intersected to impact women's adaptability to the pandemic crisis. We also included motherhood status as a possible variable that may change women's pandemic‐related experiences. Finally, we include women's narrative responses to provide context to their quantitative responses and to help fully represent perspectives that can often be rendered invisible. We leveraged the findings of the current investigation of the impact of the COVID‐19 global pandemic on women's lives to make suggestions for changes that can support women with this and future pandemics and disasters.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
