Women´s lives in the fragmented cities under confinement. A feminist analysis of the critical issues

Abstract

Three notes for an analysis that situate women and diversities based on the intersection of territories and conditions. It is based on this intersection that women and diversities dispute the constructions of subalternity and omissions. This article is partially based on several reflections shared during the Panel “Arraigo y Equidad Espacial”, organized by the Institute Patria of Rosario in Argentina, the 28th of April 2020. It addresses, from a plural and feminist view, the intersection of women and diversities and the critical emerging issues that impact their lives in the cities. The pandemic is growing fast in the cities, as a result of overlapping powers, such as neoliberalism, patriarchy, xenophobia, racism and colonialism. This forms an analytical contribution from the discipline of architecture and urbanism, in the frame of the predatory production of the environment and spatial injustices, aiming to search for concepts based on evidence of urban inequalities. It’s an analysis related to the field of knowledge on the right to the city intersected with feminism, which takes into account the omission of women and diversities in the way they inhabit and experience social relations in the public space. The pandemic is expressed with more virulence in the cities and exacerbates inequalities. For example, during the pandemic women suffer the burden of care and the use of time, and sexual division of labour has deepened gender biases. Moreover, the pandemic verify that women face higher work pressure and time constraints in their daily life. At the same time, violence and the number of femicides increased, in both the public and private sphere. These issues are a result of the pandemic, that goes beyond the conditions of structuring inequalities. The bodies of women and diversities’ experience these dimensions in different territorial dimensions, in which they mediate in their constructions of diverse power relations and therefore in a permanent dispute and resistance.