בלי לחם מחמצת: רגילות משברית, תיעוד עצמי ונשים בעוני בזמן קורונה

This research note presents preliminary findings from a longitudinal study on the lives of families in poverty. In recent years, a poverty-conscious perspective seeks to make the voices of those who experience poverty heard and so to learn from their own life experiences. Expanding this perspective, our research is based on a feminist discourse analysis of eight women’s self-documentation diaries during the first lockdown. Our team, made up of researchers and women political activists who themselves experience poverty, sought to describe and understand the mundane realities — both material and emotional — of children, women and families in poverty during and after lockdown. These families, who are left behind also in routine, have just a little room for maneuver in adapting to the new emergency. Thus, in stark contrast to the emotional structure that characterized the middle class during the lockdown, ranging between joy and estrangement in the face of the forced slowdown and self and family convergence, we found that for families in poverty the pandemic has been the continuation of their habitual unprotected life. This bare reality, characterized by the intensification of the “crisis ordinariness” of living in poverty, is described and articulated here by the women themselves.