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Bios Mythoi Women Entrepreneurs - Martinez Dy & Jayawarna 2020.pdf (206.45 kB)

Bios, mythoi and women entrepreneurs: A Wynterian analysis of the intersectional impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed women and women-owned businesses

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posted on 2020-08-10, 08:46 authored by Angela DyAngela Dy, Dilani Jayawarna
Decolonial philosopher Sylvia Wynter theorises the human animal as formed by both bios and mythoi, or matter and meaning. This article adopts this ontological perspective to explore the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on UK self-employed women and women-owned businesses through an intersectional lens accounting for race, class and gender. We argue that unequal health outcomes from COVID-19 are not solely biological; rather, they are also the outcome of social inequalities. Drawing upon the Wynterian elaboration of Fanon’s work on sociogeny – the shaping of the embodied human experience by the norms of given society – to explain this phenomenon, we contend that the same inequalities emerging in health outcomes will be reflected in entrepreneurship and self-employment. Drawing on Labour Force Survey data for the past decade, we peer through the Wynterian prism of bios and mythoi to argue that marginalised entrepreneurs are likely to experience extreme precarity due to COVID-19 and so require targeted support.

History

School

  • Loughborough University London

Published in

International Small Business Journal

Volume

38

Issue

5

Pages

391 - 403

Publisher

Sage

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Sage under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Acceptance date

2020-06-15

Publication date

2020-08-07

Copyright date

2020

ISSN

0264-6560

Depositor

Dr Angela Dy Deposit date: 7 August 2020

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