Danelle Du Plessis | Narratives of Crisis and the Cultural Practices of Coping with Them: Engendering Mediated Time During the Coronavirus Pandemic

From Crisis to Critique

Danelle Du Plessis | Narratives of Crisis and the Cultural Practices of Coping with Them: Engendering Mediated Time During the Coronavirus Pandemic | University of Groningen, Faculty of Arts, Graduate School for the Humanities (GSH) | Prof. Dr. Pablo Valdivia Martín & Dr. Ksenia Robbe

 

The purpose of this project is to explore gendered responses to the Coronavirus pandemic as a process of cultural organization to understand its implications for gender (in)equality. It proposes the development of the concept of ‘time use’ as a measurement of gender (in)equality to be used as a systematic temporal analytical tool during times of crisis. Within this context, it seeks to interrogate the role of the media in the construction of cultural representations of gendered time use in the home under lockdown and how the resultant cultural discourses can contribute to either the legitimization or attenuation of gender inequalities.

To develop this concept, this project will employ a two-stage research plan to understand the relation between: (1) the gendered discourses on domesticity produced by news and social media across Norway, South Africa and the United States and (2) the individual reception of these cultural discourses through activities such as co-production, consumption and the unmediated experience of social reproduction during lockdown.