Exploring the everyday feminist geographies of the Anthro-No-Pause: vernacular labour, burdens and the (in)visible spaces of women’s foodwork during Covid-19

Wylie, A. and Goodman, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4861-029X (2026) Exploring the everyday feminist geographies of the Anthro-No-Pause: vernacular labour, burdens and the (in)visible spaces of women’s foodwork during Covid-19. Gender, Place and Culture. ISSN 0966-369X (In Press)

Abstract/Summary

The Covid-19 pandemic has been described by geographers as a time of ‘pause’ and ‘reflection’ full of possibility for more sustainable relationships to non-human nature. This has been conceptualised as the ‘Anthropause’ during which an ‘anthropause environmentalism’ (re)configured human-nature relationships. Using a critical feminist lens, we challenge the notion of a ‘paused’ pandemic society by analysing the domestic and community foodwork of minority women in Manchester, England living in states of precarity and the volunteers whose improvised solidarities alleviated the burdens of hunger and isolation faced by many. We propose the notion of the ‘Anthro-No-Pause’ to suggest there was no pause dedicated to more and different connections to non-human nature. Instead, there was a continuing and/or deepening of physical, material and emotional ‘vernacular labours’ during pandemic lockdown periods. These labours and burdens during Covid-19 must foreground any geographical theorising of the uneven geographical, community and personal experiences of the pandemic.