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This article discusses women's role in Kerala's small-scale marine fishing industry and changes that took place during COVID-19. Pandemic conditions enabled and accelerated the restructuring of Kerala's fishing industry practices, leaving marginal groups even more marginal. Small-scale producers and sellers were edged out by larger players in a new wholesale market. Meanwhile, female vendors who utilised public transport and face-to-face sales methods found themselves locked out from new retail methods introduced during the pandemic, which made use of smartphone apps, online platforms, and private light vehicles. Underemployed workers with access to digital technology and mobility moved in to fill the lockdown retail gap. The Gulf states' continuing squeeze on jobs and resultant migration slow-down contributed to these trends. Female fish-vending activity has also been affected by Kerala's acceleration of bourgeois respectability norms. The state government's modernisation and centralisation policies also led to the shrinking of women's spaces in fish auction markets. Recent inequalities in digital and mobility access sit on top of longstanding entrenched class and status inequities and conservative gender norms, while the enduring chronic 'wicked problem' of Kerala's unemployment levels demands urgent attention.

In this article, we reflect on the consequences of COVID-19 interventions on coastal communities in south Kerala (India), and the responses of the local population to the latter. In particular, we map out the events which led to spontaneous protests in a number of fishing villages during the second wave of the epidemic in July 2020. We will show that whilst during the first wave of the epidemic, coastal communities remained supportive of government intervention, such an initial support begun to wane as the epidemic unfolded over time and became more aggressive and widespread. We argue that such a shift in fishing communities' attitudes was a response not only to the consequences of a more forceful policy of containment of the epidemic but also to a sudden identification of coastal communities as the main locus of contagion in the district. We suggest that the consequent restrictive measures enforced on coastal communities were driven as much by epidemiological concerns as by a media-driven social panic built upon widespread negative stereotypes that have historically worked to marginalize, and even criminalize coastal communities in Kerala. We deploy the notion of bio-moral marginality to reveal ways through which the attribution of specific—and largely stereotyped and negative— physical attributes and moral dispositions to the bodies and behaviour of people belonging to fishing coastal communities constituted the ground upon which the social panic concerning the spread of the COVID-19 virus unfolded in south Kerala, thus leading to fishers' militant response.