Women’s Narratives of Iranian Family’s Experience of Home Quarantine under Covid-19

The chaos and rupture in everyday life caused by the corona virus and the home quarantine caused deep and intence changes in various realms of individual and public life. Taking the Covid-19 in its unique sociological sense as a window to understanding the social phenomena and taking the plurality and diversity of experiences into account, this article seeks to explore the experience of the Iranian family via the narratives of women. Applying a hermeneutic approach, we conduct content analysis to analyze the experience of the first home quarantine in 2020 of 23 married women aged 30 to 52 in two provinces of Tehran and Alborz, based on the data gathered using deep, semi-structured interviews. Formulating the meaning network of the Iranian family’s experience of dealing with the pandemic from a women’s perspective, we found four main meaning patterns: the feeling of abandonment and loneliness in the absence of the State; displacement and fusion of the family and the social everyday life spaces; women’s corporal devotion to home leading to the centralization of family; and the medical disempowerment in favor of family empowerment. Overall, findings show that dealing with the pandemic creates a rupture in the normal rhythm of life that exposes the individual to taking conscious actions, and while the disempowerment of the State, of stereotypes of the family, and of medication as a structure continue under the mortal pandemic, we witness the return of agency and the deconstruction of social and family life in a process of self-construction centered on family as a group.