ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the fault lines in societal structures that place immense burden – material and emotional – on marginalized communities. This chapter draws on a qualitative analysis of focus group discussions and interviews with 208 women from various communities – Muslims, Dalits (marginalized caste groups), women in sex work, women with disabilities – to address the question: What emotional practices do marginalized women engage in as they navigate the demands of care work during a crisis? Our analyses highlight three ways in which marginalized women from India navigate such emotional demands during a crisis: anticipatory emotion work, attributing distress to intersecting power structures, and solidarity as emotional care. Women engage in anticipatory emotion work to protect themselves from more severe emotional conflict and compensate for the absence of support. However, years of grassroots mobilization enabled some women to attribute the cause of their distress on intersecting social structures rather than engage in emotional regulation. Finally, these mobilization structures also enabled women to express solidarity as emotional care to those struggling through similar distress. In these emotional practices, we see communal resilience.
