What does “¡Quédate en casa!” (‘Stay at Home!') Mean for a poor woman?Analysis of an online debate conducted by an ecuadorian feminist group

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is the discursive analysis of the online debate carried out in April 2020, in the middle of the confinement period of the COVID-19 pandemic, by a feminist group from Ecuador. The topic was to discuss the impact on poor women in the country of the consequences of the government order to be confined to the home: “¡Quédate en casa!” (‘Stay at home!'). From a constructivist perspective, the most relevant discursive-argumentative resources of the debate are analyzed, with the aim of revealing the participants' “framework of interpretation” or “narrative construction” based on their reflection of what was supposed to be an order issued by all governments, at the behest of the WHO (World Health Organization), but whose concrete materialization could not be realized in a similar way in all social contexts.