Theorizing racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism in the age of COVID-19: A framework for feminist policy change

Abstract

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.