Nothing is Normal, Everything is Normal: Disruption and Continuity in Guayaquil’s Pandemic Experience

This chapter offers a critical reflection on the meanings of the “new normal” in Ecuador. Our analysis focuses on the first months of 2020 as they transpired in Guayaquil, the Andean country’s economic capital. The experience of Guayaquil offers a compelling opportunity to address some of the issues raised by the discourses of normality in a time of crisis. We explore how the pandemic caused an unprecedented disruption in the imaginary configurations of everyday life in Ecuador while, at the same time, it facilitated the continuity of patterns of gender-based violence normalised in Ecuadorian society. In this light, we argue that the pandemic shaped a context where what was “new” and what was author proofs “normal” coexisted and clashed simultaneously to articulate a paradoxical order that was disruptive and continuous at once.