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
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 JournalVolume
38Issue
5Pages
391 - 403Publisher
SageVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The authorsPublisher 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
2020-06-15Publication date
2020-08-07Copyright date
2020ISSN
0264-6560Publisher version
Depositor
Dr Angela Dy Deposit date: 7 August 2020Usage metrics
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