SDG 5 aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Browse books and journal articles relating to this SDG below and find out more on the UN Sustainable Development Goals website.
Goal 5: Gender Equality
The speed and force with which COVID-19 spread across the globe caught governments and public health authorities utterly unprepared. Despite their initial belief that the pandemic would be ‘an equalizer’, infection and death rates proved disastrously higher along the hierarchies of race, gender, class, age, disability, religion, caste and sexuality, North/South among other relations of power.
This book brings into focus the socio-economic relationalities that link national and global communities, yet are overlooked in current public health debates. The authors study the devastating effects of this neglect on the uneven distribution of viral risk and death across populations. Going beyond the immediate concerns of the moment, they raise troubling questions about the world that will emerge from the pandemic. The book demonstrates that the COVID-19 pandemic is not only deepening, but actually transforming the forms of racial citizenship and gendered inequalities that shape our research sites.
This pioneering book demonstrates the disproportionate impact of state responses to COVID-19 on racially marginalized communities.
Written by women and queers of colour academics and activists, the book analyses pandemic lockdowns, border controls, vaccine trials, income support and access to healthcare across eight countries, in North America, Asia, Australasia and Europe, to reveal the inequities within, and between countries.
Putting intersectionality and economic justice at the heart of their frameworks, the authors call for collective action to end the pandemic and transform global inequities.
Contributing to debates around the effects of COVID-19, as well as racial capitalism and neoliberal globalization at large, this research is invaluable in informing future policy
The coastal enclaved Gaza Strip has been particularly vulnerable even prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, due to years of Israeli blockade and successive wars which have devastated Gaza’s economy, education, health, and livelihood. This meant that preventive measures such as social distancing and self-quarantine were impossible in a place with an estimated population of 5,800 people per square kilometre. This chapter briefly reviews Gaza’s pre-pandemic health sector, explores the barriers to adequate responses to the pandemic and highlights some of its socio-political and health implications on Gaza’s vulnerable population. Considering Israeli military aggression against Gaza in May 2021, this chapter argues that an analysis of the medical and health response to a global pandemic should address the context of a systematic de-development process in the Gaza Strip.
Situating the COVID-19 pandemic in ongoing processes of racial capitalism and cultural globalization, this introductory chapter discusses the overall impact of the health crises within, and across, the North/South divide. Demonstrating how states have failed most of their populations in our research sites, this chapter argues that the pandemic has become an opportunity for states to restructure relations of exploitation and violence within their respective national and international domains.
COVID-19 presented the UK government with the impossible choice between prioritizing lives or livelihoods. This chapter probes the dilemma, arguing that it is undergirded by the structural disjuncture between economy and society in liberal democracies. The chapter draws attention to parallel developments in economic and social regulation in which labour markets are deregulated and at the same time equality and non-discrimination laws are strengthened and codified. The two parallel processes are paradoxical as the legal regime takes away with one hand what it gives with the other. Consequently, marginalized communities remain marginalized despite equality laws. Paradoxes reveal unresolved theoretical problems that require further study. UK’s post-COVID-19 economic recovery plans fail to address the relationship between labour market deregulation and its impact on marginalized communities.
The speed and force with which COVID-19 spread across the globe caught governments and public health authorities utterly unprepared. Despite their initial belief that the pandemic would be ‘an equalizer’, infection and death rates proved disastrously higher along the hierarchies of race, gender, class, age, disability, religion, caste and sexuality, North/South among other relations of power.
This book brings into focus the socio-economic relationalities that link national and global communities, yet are overlooked in current public health debates. The authors study the devastating effects of this neglect on the uneven distribution of viral risk and death across populations. Going beyond the immediate concerns of the moment, they raise troubling questions about the world that will emerge from the pandemic. The book demonstrates that the COVID-19 pandemic is not only deepening, but actually transforming the forms of racial citizenship and gendered inequalities that shape our research sites.
The pandemic has changed the lives of everyone, especially those working in the informal sector, including women domestic workers. They have been among the workers most affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. In India, they were the first to face the threat of dismissal from jobs during the pandemic, as they were not covered under any labour law. The onset of travel restrictions not only impacted their livelihood and income security but also their overall health. Moreover, crowded homes, substance abuse, limited access to services and no access to formal support further aggravated their vulnerabilities. The present study aimed to map the multiple vulnerabilities in terms of loss of livelihood, health consequences and domestic violence faced by domestic workers during COVID-19, their coping mechanisms, and the role of the state in providing support. This study is both qualitative and quantitative in nature comprising of 100 respondents aged 18–45 years, from Delhi/National Capital Region (NCR), undertaken through purposive sampling. An interview schedule and in-depth case study method was used. The analysis is descriptive with some narratives.
The concurrency of quarantine and protest has highlighted the trappings of a modernist realism whose conservative solutions reveal a paucity of methods and dreams. The wins that the uprisings against anti-Black police violence have put on the horizon, from the dismantling of carceral institutions to the uplifting of alternatives, have been long seeded by social movements that demanded the impossible. This includes ancestors, many of whom Black, queer and abolitionist, who prepared to take fantastic leaps, in the words of the Combahee River Collective. The following meditation holds up this legacy in order to reckon with the racism accompanying this latest crisis, from the Orientalist origin story of the coronavirus to a global quarantine paradigm that is haunted by racial capitalism. At the dystopic crossroad of the pandemic and the uprisings, a multiracial and multi-species spectre of planetary interdependence appears. This is illustrated by a mutual aid movement that uses digital and offline tactics in order to norm beyond the normal. In the place of a state-led surveillance and a single-issue environmentalism that are hostile to those most vulnerable to the virus, an urban environmental justice becomes palpable whose methods are queer.
Walking, as Michel de Certeau noted, is also rhetoric. The selection of a path is an act of composition akin to the turning of a phrase. A style of walking, like style in writing, ‘connotes a singular’, a ‘way of being in the world’ and a particular ‘processing of the symbolic’. In the annals of COVID-19, walking narratives already have their own special subset.
This brief chapter takes the form of a walking journal during lockdown in the Western Australian port city of Fremantle (Walyalup) in Western Australia in the first months of the pandemic in 2020. Taking as a point of departure Rebecca Solnit’s discussion of walking as a form of investigation, not only of landscapes but of broader histories of place, the essay connects the Australian past and present to contemporary global intersections of the pandemic. At a crossroads of temporalities and topographies, the chapter explores the connections between landscapes, names and histories in a settler colonial society. It reflects on borders, local and global, as they are remade and unmade by the pandemic, in the context of Australia’s self-identity as an ‘island nation’.
The speed and force with which COVID-19 spread across the globe caught governments and public health authorities utterly unprepared. Despite their initial belief that the pandemic would be ‘an equalizer’, infection and death rates proved disastrously higher along the hierarchies of race, gender, class, age, disability, religion, caste and sexuality, North/South among other relations of power.
This book brings into focus the socio-economic relationalities that link national and global communities, yet are overlooked in current public health debates. The authors study the devastating effects of this neglect on the uneven distribution of viral risk and death across populations. Going beyond the immediate concerns of the moment, they raise troubling questions about the world that will emerge from the pandemic. The book demonstrates that the COVID-19 pandemic is not only deepening, but actually transforming the forms of racial citizenship and gendered inequalities that shape our research sites.
