MASCULINITY IN PANDEMIC TIMES: WHERE POWER DECREASES, VIOLENCE INCREASES

Abstract

The emergence of the pandemic caused by COVID-19 emphatically calls for thinking about the narrowing of the man-power-violence relationship and the resignification of the place of men in sustaining reproductive life, emotional ties and care. In this context of social isolation, as an important strategy against the spread of the disease, seeking to understand the increase in domestic violence against women, the objective of this essay is to reflect on the man-power-violence relations from the concepts of Hannah Arendt, problematizing the normalized concept of hegemonic masculinity. Throughout this essay, we seek to deconstruct the idea that there is a single model of hegemonic masculinity and that it proposes a global domination of men over women, since women also present aspects of masculinity, which is a historical-social construction that is transformed continuously. Thus, in the face of historical gender reforms, and the instability caused by the pandemic of COVID-19, there is an increase in domestic violence as an effect of the decrease in patriarchal power, in an attempt to stabilize the masculinity model defined by this patriarchal power, or the attempt to reconstitute it in new configurations. In view of this reality, it is necessary, within the scope of Collective Health, to reflect on the reformulation of the National Policy for Integral Attention to Men’s Health.