The Neighborhood Emergency Committees:

From the Crisis of Social Reproduction, to the Feminist Struggles for Limits

Abstract

The Neighborhood Emergency Committees (CBE) emerged in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to combat different demands associated with gender violence and food assistance. The central hypothesis is that the pandemic deepened the crisis of social reproduction, particularly, by making women’s lives precarious and that the CBEs questioned both the limits associated with the distinction between public and private, production and social reproduction, providing feminist approaches associated with the egalitarian community. We discussed it from the social reproduction paradigm, associated with capitalism complex crises and struggles over “limits”. For the analysis we used interviews, sociodemographic statistical data, as well as official data associated with gender violence. We concluded that the CBEs are expressions of the crisis of social reproduction that falls mainly on women but also that they are feminist political stakes that call into question the limits between the private and the public, family, the community, and the State. In addition, it is noted that, although the crisis associated with social reproduction, may have a notorious gender dimension, the tensions within the struggles are important. One of them is that despite the protagonism of women, those struggles associated with the forms of political representation and the demands for recognition for unpaid work are still very incipient.