The Covid and the hidden pandemic of the overflow of the global care crisis
Margot Pujal, PhD in Social Psychology and researcher in the Department of Psychology in the Social Psychology Area of the UAB, reflects on the global overflow of care due to coronavirus and its effects on women's health.
08/06/2020
“We have seen a very biomedical concept of biohealth and linked to the modern metaphor of 'war on nature' now applied to Coronavirus. A model of health focused, above all, on the biological part of life, as if this part were not entangled in a constant interaction-dynamic relationship with the psychological part [...] and entangled in the social and economic part of life". This is how Dr. Margot Pujal enters into the effects of coronavirus from a gender perspective.
Margot Pujal points out the importance of taking care of the discomfort of caregivers, mostly women. She leads us to see how coronavirus is not just a virus to be fought with vaccines and medicine, but has effects beyond what is expected by ‘objective’ science. Effects in sense of mental health disorders and directly related to gender. "What I want to emphasize, because it is hidden, is that many women and not only, in the short, medium and long term, from this crisis will get sick. Not because of the virus, but because of the huge and global overflow of the exercise of care, the result of the double physical and emotional overexertion that care work entails, being forced to neglect oneself and at the same time not receiving care. Those are gender unrest that must be added, introducing an intersectional perspective, the intensification of the feminization of poverty and the precariousness of the labour market”.
Margot Pujal holds a PhD in Social Psychology from the UAB and is a full professor in the Department of Social Psychology at the same university. She has focused his research on topics such as gender relations, power relations and subjectivity and the body as an object and subject of study from a gender perspective.