The Reordering of Daily Life in the Pandemic: Intimacy, Affection and Carection and care

Abstract

The pandemic drastically affected everyday life, modifying times, spaces, movements, connections and ways of working. All routines, domestic and family organization were affected by a new situation that required a series of health care tasks but also the reconfiguration of the ways of life that were known until then. In this article we will focus on the experience of professional women with children under their care during lockdown in particular and the pandemic in general from the City of Buenos Aires, the Metropolitan Area and the province of Buenos Aires. The objective is to reconstruct, through their words, from a qualitative perspective, the subjective experience of the transformations and continuities that the pandemic implied in relation to the domestic, the public and the intimate space. The hypothesis that organizes this article states that the closure of institutions and the domestic confinement were situations of high emotional, work and material burden for women with children, which entailed the loss of personal spaces. This overload would not only be linked to care tasks but also to the worsening of working conditions, their concentration and individualization in the context of the impossibility of mobility. This article aims to contribute to the description and analysis of everyday life during the pandemic and the family, social, work and relational dimensions that unfolded in different ways in the subjective experience of professional women.