“Hunger doesn’t wait”: the struggle of women in the peripheries of São Paulo during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This article examines solidarity networks that have been organized during the Covid-19 pandemic in the peripheries of the city of São Paulo to respond to the overlapping of economic and sanitary crises, which particularly affect families in precarious living conditions. The objective is to argue that these articulations reveal a context marked by the state’s abandonment of its responsibilities to guarantee social rights, and by resistances and struggles that articulate race, gender, class and territory, which have grown in the past decade in the peripheries. Finally, it emphasizes the fundamental role of women who construct these networks through their daily experiences providing care. Care is not understood here as being restricted to the domestic dimension, but as a gendered practice that produces relations and struggles.