Covid-19, like all pandemics, disrupts our customary ways of living. It is a health problem that has revealed what feminist currents have long considered central for rethinking a project centered around life: we are all interdependent. The rapid spread of Covid-19 and the institutional measures implemented in most countries to produce social isolation have underlined one of the weakest links in our society: care.
People need goods, services, and care to survive. Care is relational and interdependent, and all of us have required or will require care at some moment in our lives, just as all of us have cared for or will care for someone in the stages of our existence. People need food, clothing, shelter, assistance, support, and company, in that we all experience injury, illness, early childhood, and probably old age.
All of us have required or will require care at some moment in our lives.
In spite of the above, however, one of the lessons to be learned from the Covid-19 health emergency refers to the invisibility of care. We wonder how the changes proposed by national measures are affecting individuals' daily lives. The situation presents an opportunity for us to ask – and in fact has been asked by certain members of the media and policymakers – about what has happened to care in the framework of a health emergency.
