Contemporary precariousness and recognition in the pandemic
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https://doi.org/10.20336/rbs.1137Keywords:
pandemic, precariousness, recognition, ontological inequality, Covid-19, public healthAbstract
The article analyzes the unequal effects of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, Brazil, and India, highlighting how the health crisis intensified already existing social precariousness. Based on the notion of recognition and the ontological categories of subject – ontopoliticized, exontologized, and anontologized – the paper discusses the different forms of access to state assistance and protection. Mortality and exclusion statistics reveal that the pandemic not only affected biologically vulnerable bodies but also reaffirmed already established social and ontological hierarchies. The analyzed data show that racial, territorial, and class inequalities have defined the type of care received and the worthiness of life from both the state’s perspective and the society as a whole. Drawing from editorials and opinion articles in the Washington Post (United States), Times of India (India), and O Estado de São Paulo (Brazil), the article offers a critical reading of the pandemic as a catalyst for exclusionary regimes of recognition, in which precariousness is not the exception but policy.
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