Our third issue of 2024 begins with two articles on the pandemic. Olga Matveieva, V. Navumau, D. Galego and A. Baraban investigate COVID-19 policies in Ukraine, where strict lockdowns were implemented and Belarus, which downplayed the severity of the pandemic. They show how both sets of measures worked to seriously worsen the lives of women and men, in terms of work and by increasing levels of stress, conflict and violence, with a particularly heavy burden on women.
Maximiliano Marentes, Mariana Palumbo and Adriel Maroni examine Argentinean gay men’s renegotiation of care practices in their sexual encounters with men during the pandemic. Men sought the possibility of becoming ‘responsible in their own ways’, adapting official safety measures more flexibly to make sex possible, while establishing safe limits, learning to deal with risk, and using networks to create safe spaces for mutual assistance and information sharing.
Tammar Friedman, Smadar Noy and Orly Benjamin investigate how Israeli women’s knowledgeability is developed during the processes of choosing breast augmentation surgery and then having breast implants removed. Despite their development of knowledge and active participation in information sharing groups, participants did not become critical of the role of medical professionals, often instead blaming themselves for not having calculated the possible risks of augmentation and emphasizing the skills of the removal surgeons. As the article shows too, the experience of removing implants was challenging, and despite feeling healthier participants often struggled to accept their new appearance.
Our remaining papers deal with a variety of different work spaces.
Focusing on an under-researched area of violence against women, Beverley Gilbert considers English domestic abuse support organizations, where support workers with experience of abuse are thought to make up more than 50% of staff. Gilbert draws out her participants’ readiness to offer support to other women, their sense of power and hope in doing so, and the significance of their own abuse experiences in relation to their position. Despite the positive impact of being supported by workers with experience of abuse, some organizations have established non-disclosure policies, and the article considers the impact of these.
Verna Alcalde González, Ana Gálvez Mozo and Alan Valenzuela Bustos also consider a group of women who work in care, the Spanish ‘Las Kellys’- a movement of hotel room attendants, who suffer harsh and precarious working conditions and a high incidence of accidents, diseases and abusive behaviour. The article discusses how Las Kellys have reframed cleaning as part of a broader revaluation of care and caring work, and, to some extent, worked to politicize this through the demand for recognition, decent working conditions and fair wages, in alignment with a framework highlighting the critical role of care in social reproduction.
Zenia Simonella and Simona Cuomo consider how laws to introduce gender quotas in boards of directors have impacted on the women who work in them, drawing on interviews with Italian women directors and male CEOs/Presidents. They find that while gender quotas are considered necessary by men – often as a way to enhance a company’s reputation – women encounter different forms of resistance and adopt a range of attitudes to quotas and different strategies for dealing with hostile experiences. Many women experience uncertainty, limitation and exclusion and the potential transformative role of women as board members remains limited.
Finally, Emma C. Murphy, Saerom Han, Hanen Keskes and Gina Porter focus on blue-collar employment in the male-dominated transport sector in Greater Tunis, where work is increasingly presented as being ‘too rough, too hard and too dirty for women’, despite state endorsements of equitable female employment. They show how a growing backlash against the autonomy of women underpins their employment in Tunisia, which remains structured by informal barriers, gender segregation, lower pay and negative work experiences. The experience of women working in the transport sector needs to be understood in relation to debates about gender, development and capital which show that women’s exclusion is a symptom of structural conditions in the contemporary political economy, for which feminist social reproduction theory offers a useful explanatory framework.
Our issue ends with two conversations; Goutam Karmakar talks to Françoise Vergès, the French political scientist, historian, film producer and activist, focusing on decolonial feminism, while Kumari Ruchi and Smita Jha interview the Indian writer Ruth Vanita about her work on same sex relationships and marraige.