Pandemic Policies and Resistance: Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of Covid-19
Llavaneras Blanco, Masaya and Damien Gock (Eds. on behalf of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, DAWN) (2025).
Pandemic Policies and Resistance: Southern Feminist Critiques in Times of Covid-19, Co-Edited Volume with Damien Gock.
Bloomsbury Academic. Open Access.
Offering Southern feminist assessments of detailed case studies from 12 countries, this open access book provides crucial insights into the gendered repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic on macroeconomics, labour, migration and human mobilities, and care and social protection throughout the Global South. The chapters provide a comprehensive and intersectional perspective on how the pandemic affected, and continues to affect, women and girls of different ages, classes, races, ethnicities, and abilities.
Contributors across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific consistently find that the pandemic offered unique opportunities to tackle long-standing global inequalities, but they also highlight how, in reality, what often emerged were “regimes of exception” that compromised democratic practices during this global crisis. Various movements and organizations developed important new forms of resistance to such regimes and, by also bringing these to light, these chapters make important interventions into critical debates on the role of the state, the market, and civil society in addressing pandemics and their aftermaths. This ultimately challenges dominant narratives that overlook or marginalize the gendered implications of these crises, and in doing so provides an original, gender-aware analytical framework for understanding Global-South policy trends – one that offers concrete policy and practice recommendations for promoting gender equality and justice in the future.
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https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/pandemic-policies-and-resistance-9781350513617/
Do you really want to know about this?: Critical Feminist Ethics of Care as a Project of Unsettling
Llavaneras Blanco, Masaya (2024) “‘So, you really want to know about this?’: Race, power and the potential of a subversive Critical Feminist Ethics of Care,” In Bourgault, S., Fitzgerald, M., and Fiona Robinson (Eds.) Decentering epistemologies and challenging privilege: critical care ethics perspectives, Rutgers University Press, NJ, USA.
Early in my research about care and human mobilities among Haitian domestic workers in the Dominican Republic (DR), I realized that my interest in how Haitian domestic workers provided care for themselves and for one another took most interlocutors by surprise. One interview stood out. After I explained that, among other themes, I was exploring the selfcare practices of Haitian women, the interviewee, a researcher and public servant, looked at me with disbelief and repeated as if to confirm what she had heard: “Selfcare?,” before suggesting that it was unlikely that I would find anything about that (KI1, January 2017).
Corporate Capture of Development: Public-Private Partnerships, Women’s Human Rights, and Global Resistance
Rodríguez Enriquez, Corina and Masaya Llavaneras Blanco (Eds. on behalf of Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era, DAWN,) (2023) Corporate Capture of Development: Public-Private Partnerships, Women’s Human Rights, and Global Resistance, Bloomsbury Publishing, UK. Open Access.
Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) have gained renewed momentum in recent years and are viewed by governments and funders alike as a silver bullet for infrastructure development and public service provision. Critiques of the corporate capture of development are well established, yet until now the urgent question of the impacts of PPPs on women’s human rights around the world has remained under-explored.
This open access book aims to fill the gap, providing new insights from case studies across the Global South. Bringing an intersectional feminist approach, these cases enable analysis to inform advocacy and activism, challenge dominant narratives, and resist the negative impacts of PPPs on women and marginalized communities. The examples analyzed cover sectors including health, energy, and infrastructure from countries such as Ethiopia, Peru, India, and Fiji. The eBook editions are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on Bloomsbury Collections, funded by Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN).
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https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/corporate-capture-of-development-9781350296671/
The intimate-mobility entanglement: Subaltern trajectories in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands
Llavaneras Blanco, Masaya (2022) “Subaltern trajectories: The entanglement between human mobility and the intimate in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands.” In Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space.
This article argues that intimacy and human (im)mobilities are interrelated, and that this relationship is integral to the way borders function and are experienced. I propose the concept of intimate-mobility entanglement to describe this relationship of interdependence. Based on primary research conducted with Haitian domestic workers that work in the Dominican Republic (DR), the article illustrates how intimate labour functions as a driver and a strategy for human (im)mobility. The article characterizes the interactions between (im)mobility and intimacy as a relationship of entanglement that is observable in domestic work, childrearing, intimate violence, border crossing and access to the right to nationality. The article centers on the spatial trajectory of Marie, a Haitian woman who works as a domestic worker in a Dominican border town after having lived and worked in several towns in the DR for twenty years. Marie’s spatial trajectories illuminate how the intimate-mobility entanglement is integral to the Dominican border regime. Through individual interviews, participant observation and mapping Marie’s journeys through Haitian and Dominican territories, the article revisits her spatial trajectories and sheds light on the dual relationship between the intimate-mobility entanglement and the border regime. On the one hand, the entanglement intervenes in the way the border is reinforced in the actual border strip while it also stretches out into Dominican territory. On the other, the border regime conditions Marie’s labour, how she moves and settles down, and influences how intimate labours are carried out and experienced. Building on a tradition of feminist and subaltern geographies, as well as on mobilities literature, the article presents a contextualized analysis of the politics of subaltern mobilities and explains how intimacy and intimate labours are critical aspects of how borders work.
Intimate bordering: Intimacy, anti-blackness and gender violence in the making of the Dominican border
Llavaneras Blanco, Masaya (2022). Intimate bordering: Intimacy, anti-blackness and gender violence in the making of the Dominican border. Political Geography, 99, 102743.
This article proposes the term Intimate Bordering to explain the role of intimacy and social reproduction in the active process of border-making and statecraft. The concept contributes to understanding daily experiences of bordering among subaltern subjects who make and contest the border every day and yet are often unaccounted for. The concept sheds light on how racialized and gendered relations of power intrinsic to antiblackness and cis-hetero-patriarchy interweave and condition spatial politics and belonging. These arguments are developed by bridging border studies and black and feminist geographies, and by centering the experiences of Haitian women who work as domestic workers in Dominican border towns. The article is based on fieldwork carried out in four Dominican and Haitian border towns, including interviews, focus groups and participant observation focused on the everyday commutes of Haitian domestic workers who live in Haiti and work in the Dominican Republic (DR). It analyzes two sets of intimate border practices that take place at two official border crossings: the first set includes normalized forms of intimate violence and humiliation at the border; the second examines the failed attempt at institutionalizing the transborder mobilities of domestic workers based on colonial entitlements of control over the bodies of black Haitian women. Centering intimacy in bordering brings transnational livelihoods, social reproduction and racialization into the heart of the analysis of statecraft projects in the space of the Afro-Caribbean.
The travels of an exotic bird: The transnational trajectories of Venezuela’s constitutional recognition of the value of unpaid work
Llavaneras Blanco, Masaya (2017) “The travels of an exotic bird: The transnational trajectories of Venezuela’s constitutional recognition of the value of unpaid work.” In Global Social Policy, 17(3), 328-346.
The 1995 Beijing Platform for Action (BPfA) established a global norm to recognize the economic value of unpaid care work across the world. In 1999, Venezuela became the first of three South American countries to enshrine a similar norm with its Constitution in its Article 88. I argue that despite the temporal proximity of the two events and the global significance of the BPfA, the global norm only served partially as a tipping point for Venezuela. Taking an analytical framework that underscores the role of norm-takers, this article demonstrates that other, national, regional and transnational interactions led by national actors in national and regional arenas were as important as Beijing ‘95 for the development of Article 88.