Gender and the Understanding of Women’s Subjectivity in Home Quarantine under COVID-19

The specificity of the coronavirus pandemic is indebted to the ironic fact of returning to the ancient tradition of quarantine at the threshold of the 21st century and the utmost progress of medicine and hygiene. Considering the gender aspects of home quarantine, this research aims at understanding women’s gendered experience of COVID-19. Under the verstehen interpretive paradigm, we analyze the experiences of twenty-three 30-52-year-old, married women who were interviewed during the first home quarantine in 2020. The content analysis of these women’s experiences gave us four conceptual patterns include crisis, female double subjectivity and endurance, feminine suspense and body management under the panic, and masculinity and the deconstruction of the dominant image by returning to the importance of fathers’ status. Overall, the calling of women to the center of the crisis and the disruption of the usual social order offers the Iranian women a historically subjective role and the opportunity to construct a different image of their feminine self in individual, family, and social levels. Meanwhile, the genealogy of pandemics shows that the centrality of the “housewife” as the dominant discourse under crisis is temporal, as the society returns to its misogynist origin with the passage of the crisis..

COVID-19 as a critical global incident in the 21st century emerged in the utmost development of medicine and of global health metrics. The unknown nature of the pandemic and of the preventative and treatment methods, in addition to the fear of the high risk of contamination and death, added to the curiosity of the disease and the mismanagement of the whole condition. In consequence, the most they could do about it has been to apply the traditional Middle Ages method of quarantine. As the sole preventative and even treatment method, home quarantine turned home and family into the main alternative in front of governments in retreating COVIC-19. The social understanding of COVID-19 as a disaster in its primitive treatment framework finds additional gender orientations.
Research Question(s)
The current research answers two questions: 1) what is women’s gendered experience of themselves and the male other during COVID-19? And 2) how has the process of women’s subjectivity in their reflexivity of selves, the other, and the social world during COVID-19 been experienced?

Gender is the most important and original element in the construction and meaning of the self (Wharton, 2012: 37); thus, it provides the major source of knowledge for constructing the male or female self (Goffman, 1977: 301-331). It is constructed through the social process known as tenderization (Macé, 2015: 17-18), representing the social status, and the rationality and legitimacy of one of the fundamental divisions and various social orders that are observed in every society. It is the socio-cultural and micro-political produce (West and Zimmerman, 1987: 125-151) that is maintained in a body of gendered behaviors and expectations constantly obtained and lived as part of the socialization process (Holmes, 2010: 125-151). Understanding gender as a social phenomenon that has stood the test of time, adds to the significance of gender experiences in a crisis-relevant framework.
Disasters expose individuals to conscious action by interrupting the ordinary flow of everyday life and setting them free of the habitual norms of thinking and acting (Schütz, 2003: 19). Crisis is defined as a trial opportunity in terms of encircling people in painful situations that oblige finding new skills and creative problem-solving capabilities, mostly accompanied by pain and pressure (Martuccelli and de Singly, 2012: 73-80). The trial and the social experience that comes with it, are the intersection of individuals and the social structure, in which the rationale for action emerges during the trial situation and the social experience, itself composed of three segments: “integration”, “strategy” and “subjectivation” (Dubet, 1994: 136(. The social world is the context in which effective action takes place in the heart of experience and the knowledge of the surroundings. The individual’s knowledge of the social lifeworld is organized around the meaning of her actions under circumstances where she targets the control of her lifeworld and social relationships and locates herself at the center to recognize and utilize the elements that maximize this purpose (Schütz, 2003: 10-11). The social experience and the improvement of capabilities that are required for dealing with difficult situations are inclusive of the two processes of subjectivity and reflexivity.
Subjectivity is a fulfilled social process formed around the reflexive subject in which, in a process of working on the self, the subject attains new consciousness for the constant reflexivity, redefinition, moderation, and reformation of one’s consciousnesses and actions. In this process, personal life turns into a project open to new restrictions, worries, and concerns as well as new opportunities and untried experiences (Giddens, 2021: 22). Reflexivity is performed in a bedrock of the individual’s critical distanciation from and assessment of oneself, others, and the social lifeworld (Martuccelli and de Singly, 2012: 73-80). Therefore, reflexivity and “the narrative of individuation” in modernity are understood and experienced in the context of internal and external clashes (Bertucci, 2009: 43-55).

After defining the individual and his conception of social reality as the prospects for understanding social phenomena (Martuccelli and de Singly 2012: 76), this research is conducted in the verstehen interpretive framework and constructivist epistemology. The method applied is basic qualitative research (Merriam, 2015: 46-48) and the techniques for gathering and analyzing data are semi-structured in-depth interview and thematic analysis. The sampling method is purposive while the population is made of 23 married women between 30-52 from Tehran and Alborz provinces while maximum diversity in age, appearance and class and religious affiliations has been observed in their selection. Due to the state of quarantine in 2020, the interviews were conducted via WhatsApp application and in the form of oral questions and answers that have been defined based on the research guidelines.

Four dominant meaning patterns and their sub-meanings as identified in the thematic analysis of interviewee’s narratives include: crisis, subjectivity and double feminine resilience (the loss of the functionality of the concept of roles in explaining the complexity of feminine experience, the frustration with being oneself and the resulting duplication of crisis harms, the emergence of woman as the heroin subject), suspension of femininity and body management under disease panic (deference of femininity in the return to the natural body, the unbearableness of the lived time waiting for the disaster, the deferred gendered life in the panic of the moment of crisis), masculinity and the deconstruction of the dominant image in crises (the perplexity of masculinity in the entanglement of the spaces for social familial life, the lack of domestic work skills and men’s avoidance from the private sphere, expectation for disaster and the lack of masculine authority), and the return to the importance of paternal status in the experience of crisis (the absence of paternal emotional authority in waiting for disaster, gendered consciousness in the shared experience of disaster and the demand for the presence of father, financial support as the precondition for good fatherhood).

The COVID-19 crisis as compared to other disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and war, has been experienced around the center of home and family, leading to the disruption of the normal, everyday life order of the house. Defining home quarantine at the core of controlling the disease brings women to the central position in crisis management. At this central position, women begin to work on their feminine self, learn new skills, and improve these capabilities due to the demand that is created by the crisis and the disruption of the previous order of social life. Meanwhile, and especially because of the absence of the government, further pressure, mental and psychological, put on women for appropriate reaction. Overall, in the dominant discourse of social sciences which is defined with pathological approaches, being under such circumstances of extra pressure makes people, especially women, more vulnerable. This is while the COVID-19 crisis has been a historical moment in women’s subjectivity and individuality, especially for Iranian women. Nevertheless, the historical accounts of pandemics as crises and disasters show that though women are the subjects called to the center in all these accounts, as a result of which house and household management around the discourse of the “housewife” turns into the dominant discourse, this centralization of femininity is temporal and restricted to those historical moments. With the return of society to its normal order, women are once again deprived of the central position; in other words, the misogynist genealogy is back there as the dominant discourse.

I am obliged to the Allameh Tabatabae’i University for allowing me to conduct this research. I extend my gratitude to Dr. Dabbaghi, Faculty of the ATU for her kind assistance in compiling the research proposal and completing the interviews, Dr. Shf'ati for joining the team in the initial analysis of data, and Dr. Khazaei, Faculty of the University of Tehran and the main colleague of the project.