Long COVID: (Non-)Recognition and the Restoration of Reproductive Capacity in Intimate Relationships and Gendered Life Contexts

Long COVID (LC) poses an enormous societal challenge and has massive consequences for those affected, as well as for the labour market and social security systems. Women in middle age—often primary caregivers—are particularly affected. There is a lack of studies examining the interplay of chronic illness, social protection, and the couple/family as a central “producer of health.”
From a recognition-theoretical, couple-sociological, social stratification, and gender-sociological perspective, this project places LC patients—especially women with caregiving responsibilities—within the couple context at the centre of its investigation. Based on our heuristic of precarisation in the gendered life context, we ask how those affected, in the face of employment and care gaps, do or do not succeed in restoring their reproductive capacity—particularly through the social secu-rity system and within the couple relationship:
1) How do caregivers affected by LC experience the socio-legal and intersubjective, but also other forms of (non-)recognition of their illness within the couple and the broader life contexts?
2) What recognition deficits and obstacles exist in restoring their reproductive capacity within the life context? What resources and barriers are represented by their partners?
3) What does this mean for (unequal) gender relations?
In Subproject 2, complementing Subproject 1, around 12 expert interviews and document analyses will examine the socio-legal (non-)recognition of LC in different fields (including reduced earning capacity pension, pension insurance and statutory accident insurance). The aim is to analyse how medical, socio-political, and legal concepts and actors interact to either support or hinder the res-toration of reproductive capacity among those affected. In Subproject 1, extensive semi-narrative couple interviews will be conducted with around 10 affected caregivers and their partners, along with 10 follow-up interviews with the affected individuals. These will reconstruct their perspec-tives on socio-legal and intersubjective (non-)recognition within the couple. Participants should mostly have children and will have undergone various recognition procedures (pension insurance, accident insurance) with and without success. Following the research style of Grounded Theory, we pursue a hermeneutic-sociology-of-knowledge approach, combining a subject- and a social-theoretical perspective: on the subject level, we work with the recognition-theoretically expanded concept of precarisation in the gendered life context; on the social-theoretical level, we draw on Critical Feminist Theory. The aim is to make a theoretical contribution to understanding intersub-jective (especially within couples) and social (particularly socio-legal) (non-)recognition in the (non-)restoration of reproductive capacity among LC-affected caregivers in the gendered triad of fami-ly/couple – paid work – welfare state. In doing so, the project contributes to the recog