The Covid-19 Crisis and the Necessity of “becoming-woman”

It is more than obvious that the Covid-19 pandemic has reshaped the face of the world. Beyond the main issues regarding the health crisis, a number of vulnerabilities, such as gender, race or social class discrimination, have deepened during this crisis. The ruminations of modern-Western thought, built around white male exceptionalism as homo-universalis, seen as the privileged referent for thinking subjectivity, have once again strengthened this position of the otherness of the feminine gender—as ‘the Other’ of the male—throughout the Covid-19 crisis. The loss of jobs, especially among women and people of color, or the difficulty of women’s work performance due to the agglomeration of domestic duties that has come with remote working, underlines both the hierarchical male-female structural dualism, and the pyramidal relationship between the majority (white male) and the minority (female gender and other human alterities) in terms of power, in the Deleuzian paradigm. Thus, the general objective of this paper is to analyze the need for the practical application, at the societal level, of the Deleuzian concept—that of “becoming-woman”, in order to reduce these inequalities and the forms of exclusion found at the human level in the context of the current pandemic. The implementation of a policy of care, tolerance and solidarity within Western societies, requires an ethic involving a fluid, rhizomatic and immanent co-existence of individuals, by deconstructing the fixed structures of identity/power, along with a cartography of life itself, beyond any present-day taxonomies. Thus, this process of ‘becoming-woman’, in Deleuzian terms, is one of ‘becoming-minority’ which is also related to the ‘nomadic’ horizon that aims to deconstruct the Western individualistic legacy, constructed around a series of sub-categories of Being(s)—i.e. feminine gender, people of color, migrants, the poor, etc.—which makes this process of ‘becoming-woman’ to refer not to the woman in herself, but to a process of ‘becoming’ which involves both sexes, by the virtue of affirmative ethical transformations, opened to a rhizomatic consciousness, that is meant to eliminate negative differences and hierarchical dualisms through the multiple processes of becoming. This is an aspect which, in the present situation, requires the activation of the phenomenon of ‘deterritorialization’ of ‘minorities’ by opening the ‘plane of consistency’ responsible for the reformation of the ‘systems of the strata’ (that of the majority) which is taking place due to the dissolution of dominant practices, from the level of socio-cultural ‘macropolitical’ power relations that are situated in the framework of sexual/racial polarization and the gender-dichotomy paradigm. In addition, these structural inequalities which have been precipitated during the course of the pandemic, require a critical review of the dualistic tradition in order to redistribute the power-relations—found inside the minority/majority dialectrics—along the horizontal axis of ‘becoming-minority’ (woman), seen as a transversal movement that affects and traverses the inner surfaces of the multiple interactions between humans, in a dynamic unity.