Potentialities of intersectional heuristics to analyze the pandemic context in terms of gender

Four years after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the sociologist Anthony Giddens published a reference work, The Consequences of Modernity, which continues to provide adequate guidelines for interpreting the succession of events that have confirmed, updated and refined the perspectives of the British sociologist since then. Giddens situationism in a scenario of uncertainty has the remarkable virtue of having turned risk into a unit of observation. Thus, the detection of Covid-19 is allowing us to assist in the evolution towards societies in which reducing and preventing catastrophes generated by modernity itself become central issues. In this sense, it would seem that we can observe a universalization of risk insofar as the danger of the virus evidences a type of global threat that no member of society can avoid due to its omnipresent nature. However, it is worth pausing on the etymology of the word "pandemic" to point out that it is a cultism derived from the combination of the Greek morphemes pan - totality and dēmos - people. Consequently, it can be understood that classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle used this notion in their writings as a synonym for "what is public" or "what concerns the population as a whole." If we pay attention to this philosophical position, it is understandable to fall into the trompe l'oeil of isonomy and think that risks easily flow across national, class and, as far as we are concerned, gender borders. However, the almost dystopian situation of biopolitization and restriction of human mobility has accentuated the deep (and growing) inequalities in the living conditions of the population, offering us a framework that reveals the heuristic potentialities of the "matrix of domination" proposed by Patricia Hill Collins that allows us to perceive and understand the different crossroads of structures that affect individuals. Precisely, Coronavirus has managed to put the care crisis on the board that, contrary to what many thought, is not temporary but structural. Why else have they collapsed during this crisis? The visibility of this claim is raising the need for a paradigm shift that allows us to place lives at the center: looking our neighbors in the face; guaranteeing the sustainability of collective human life; vindicating styles and rhythms of life that are compatible with our well-being; guaranteeing, after all, the good human and the planet life. This revolution of the functioning and social organization as we have known it so far, which has been promoted in just a few days by Covid-19, and which seemed immutable due to the denialism of many, will allow us not only to be alive, but to be alive with a prosperous quality of life. But, in order for such a framework not to falter in the long road that we still have to travel, citizens have to articulate many questions and demand that the different challenges that the pandemic is imposing be addressed.