Love of Empire by Dissociations

In the past two years, as the whole world has been deeply mired in the COVID-19 pandemic, we may have observed neoliberal capitalism's crisis of care: exposed and exacerbated by the global pandemic, made explicit alongside examples such as the collapsing of health systems, the shortage of care labor and overwork of nurses, the serious outbreaks in aged care facilities, the increased burden of domestic labor and care work due to school closures, and the worldwide rise of domestic abuse. In this short essay, I situate neoliberalism's care problems as a displaced process of imperial racialization in long-standing feminist debates over the "labor of love", returned to us by COVID in the form of crisis. I argue that the impacts on domestic care during the pandemic are intimately connected with colonial divisions of labor when outsourced surrogate intimacies are vicariously performed by racialized third world labor. [Extracted from the article] Copyright of American Quarterly is the property of Johns Hopkins University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)