D. (Danelle) du Plessis, MA

My current PhD research project explores gendered responses to the Coronavirus pandemic through a feminist interrogation of media representations of gendered time use. I am interested in the mediated constructions of cultural discourses on the home during lockdown to understand the implications of these discourses for gender (in)equality in the long term. 

Through this project I aim to further develop the concept of ‘time use’ as a measurement of gender (in)equality to be used as a systematic temporal analytical tool during times of crisis. To develop this concept, this project aims to explicate the relation between: (1) the gendered discourses on domesticity produced by news and social media in Norway, South Africa and the United States and (2) the individual reception of these cultural discourses through activities such as co-production, consumption and the unmediated experience of social reproduction during lockdown conditions.

Through this cultural approach to the study of gender dynamics, this project considers how entrenched gendered norms are vulnerable to change when viewed through the lens of time to explicate how mediated representations contribute to the maintenance, change and/or dissolution of gendered inequalities and what this implies for (1) attempts at cultural organization during times of crisis and (2) gender justice now and in the future.