Postcards from the Pandemic: Women, Intersectionality, and Gendered Risks in the Global COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 crisis created, and continues to produce, unprecedented challenges globally. Marginalized and racialized families, communities, and nations are experiencing their worst impacts, and in particular, women and girls are the hardest hit. The most pressing concerns raised by COVID-19 include a surge in gender-based violence, a rise in care burden, the feminization of poverty, and growing unemployment, largely in the Global South and conflict-affected regions. Drawing on feminist security studies and intersectionality literature, this forum explores gendered risks in the COVID-19 era, focusing on the security of women and girls from racialized and marginalized backgrounds in both the Global North and South. This forum presents seven short papers providing rich data on a range of case studies that include Yemen, Sri Lanka, Liberia, Canada, India, and Burundi. The contributions draw attention to the multilayered, diverse, intersectional, complex, and contextual gendered risks associated with the pandemic. The through line themes of intersectional identities, patriarchy, conflict, post-conflict, militarization, and marginalization are used to illustrate how gendered risks are (re)constructed during and after the COVID-19 crisis. This forum launched what we hope will offer a new research agenda and support to provide scholarly terrain for future research. This forum section not only provides insights into the vast and complex gendered impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic but also sparks broader thinking about everyday forms of insecurity that women and girls face in global crises.