We Are at War. How the Coronavirus Spread within the Gender Based Violence Society

This paper analyses the war metaphor’s immediate and pervasive diffusion during the Covid19 pandemic in Italy and an international comparative key. Italy was the first country to be affected after China, the first to experiment with restrictive measures for the management of the health emergency, which were immediately accompanied by the proposal of war as an interpretative lens of the health state (consequently social, economic and political), through the protagonists of the public scene, becoming the horizon of political action. The war in its inevitability and a-historicity, from the first moment available, has produced a restriction of public space and a re-proposition of the renaturalisation of gendered roles (between male warfare and female welfare). The ‘men of the nation’ dominating the public scene have developed emergency measures that have effectively reduced social participation by gender, as well as an invisibilisation of the female presence. This produced significant effects on political representation, economic and labour participation, as well as on the management measures before and recovery ones now. The gap between myth (representation) and reality (consequences) is analysed here in an interpretative key of excess control over care between frontline and domestic invisibility. The analysis of the public discourse is focused on the identified four “myths of war”: We are at war (there is no alternative), The market does not stop (economic primacy, consequences and contradictions of fact), The heroes (heroes and victims), The safe home place, The myth of post-war reconstruction (post-pandemic management). The relationship between the “weapons of control” used (in the public discourse) and its consequences (data, intervention measures) offers an opportunity to analyse the processes, taking place between exception and paradigm shift.