My Italian experience with the coronavirus: an overview of the current pandemic through feminist epistemologies

Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic may have become today's main global challenge - and no longer a speculation or expectation. In Italy, where I am currently doing my doctoral training, the health crisis has overcome the worst predictions, killing more civilians than in World War II. As a woman and a foreigner experiencing another culture and its codes, I propose to reflect about the Italian coronavirus crisis, guided by feminist epistemologies that allow me to understand this experience and its implications - such as the perspective of the philosopher Chiara Zamboni (2009) of thinking in presence, inviting women to weave their reflections through their own experiences, and that of the black feminist Patricia Hill Collins (2016), her concepts of “outsider within” and “ethics of care”. I thus reflect on the opportunities that the current challenges are offering, both to look at the different situations of social vulnerability in the crisis, and to spread the revolutionary importance of truly caring for all of us.