Women’s Narratives on COVID-19 Trauma

Abstract

COVID-19 is a crucial moment in the world’s history, not only because of the life/death challenges our society faces, but communication challenges to deal with fear, panic, and anxiety. Newspapers, TV News, Political Speeches are used to shape our thoughts about this pandemic. In this sense, it is important not only to evaluate them but most of all to understand people themselves and their personal perspective. Therefore, it is necessary to understand their behaviour, similarities, differences and heterogeneities, country, level of education, social position and to understand them simultaneously as individuals and members of society, with a cultural reference and value-sharing systems that portray a collective memory (Halbwachs, 1992). This paper focuses on a specific group – Women - through their own narratives, analysing the way they communicate their thoughts, feelings, and concerns towards this pandemic, analysing the content of their narratives. For this purpose, it was created a blog called WOMANITY at the beginning of March 2020 that gathered testimonies from women of different countries and backgrounds. “Humans are storytelling animals” (Alexander, 2012). In this sense, the central object of this project is on the way in which people and cultures represent and respond to the pandemic. To represent trauma is already to overcome it and transform it into memory, contributing to cultural referencing and collective identity and to the increase of lost social capital (Bordieu, 1986).