Adaptation and Agency of Working Women with Disabilities during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Sociological Insight through a PRISMA Review and Cinematic Analysis of the Film Margarita with a Straw

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic magnified pre-existing inequities, sparing neither structure nor identity, and disabled working women emerged at the intersection of compounding disadvantages: spatial inaccessibility, gender bias, and institutional absenteeism (Government of India, 2016; Wong et al., 2022). In response, this manuscript orchestrates a scoping review framed by PRISMA, drawing twenty-five global and Indian peer-reviewed observations, from 2010 to 2024, to disentangle the intertwined discourses of impairment, womanhood, and workplace during lockdown (Houtenville et al., 2021; Jones, 2022). Employment columns that inflamed alarm show, among supported meta-data, three contagions: exclusion from digital home-based productivity traced to inaccessible operating systems (International Labour Organization, 2021), contractual volatility in formal and informal markets, austerity in health apparatus (World Health Organization, 2020), and a topology of choice straitjacketed to kin-based economies (Ne’eman & Maestas, 2023; Evans et al., 2024). The review is contrapuntal to a visual artifact—Margarita with a Straw—whose cinematic grammar expresses asymmetrical longing in a hip contemporary setting (Bose, 2014; Sharma, 2024). Laila, the cerebral-pals formative heroine, carries the thematic weight of desire, curriculum, labour, domestic labour, self-determination, and eroticism in a society that partitions possibility along the lines of impairment and gender (Wong et al., 2022). Interweaving meta-analytic and narrational streams consequently makes manifest the veracity of policy inertia. Legislators, educators, and markets are summoned—cautioned—to co-articulate cross-sectional, intersectional, and convergent spaces that secure, not provide, the unconditional arenas of choice, dignity, and occupancy that disabled women are entitled to (Government of India, 2016; Wong et al., 2022), and indeed, proximate to meriting. The report concludes with policy proposals for inclusive employment, closing the