Author ORCID Identifier

Fay Faraday: 0000-0003-3519-9315

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2021

Source Publication

University of New Brunswick Law Journal, vol. 72, 2021, pp. 222–56.

Abstract

A common narrative during the COVID-19 pandemic correctly observed that lockdowns which stripped public interactions to the bare minimum exposed the economic and social fault lines of Canadian society. Since March 2020, women— particularly racialized women in jobs with low pay—have disproportionately borne the brunt of the pandemic’s negative economic impacts. The fact that racialized women face systemic economic inequality and marginalization in Canada is not new. It is the structural foundation of an economy and sex-segregated labour market rooted in racial capitalism. The pandemic merely made the disparities impossible to ignore. At the same time, a reckoning with the roots of structural inequality has become ever more pressing because, coincident with the pandemic, mass politicization and mobilization accelerated on a global scale in response to police killings of Black people, state violence against Indigenous land defenders, rising fascist movements, anti-Asian violence, and the climate emergency. Intertwined social solidarity movements have forged deeper connections in the heat of these collective traumas. And the pandemic-induced period of reflection and questioning brings urgency to widespread demands for deep social and economic transformation. These movements demand that we confront who the imagined “we” is in the mantra that “we're all in this together” and who benefits from that depoliticized narrative framing.

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