Love of Empire by Dissociations

Abstract

Love of Empire by Dissociations Chien-ting Lin (bio) 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. Specifically, I reflect on the political discourses of love vis-à-vis war and militarism during the pandemic. The goal is to consider the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic mediates our relationship to geohistorical formations of laboring for love, while understanding this labor as care and sex work embedded in the racial structures of nation and empire. It is through this critical reflection on the questions of love, militarism, and geopolitics that I juxtapose the stigmatization of sexual laborers due to community spread in Taiwan's Wanhua teahouses with the Atlanta shooting that killed eight people, including six Asian women. As articulated and debated since second-wave feminism, the labor of love could be expansively understood in relation to the social conditions under which unpaid care services provided primarily by women within the household are utilized to resolve the contradictions of capitalist world order.1 Following the lead of Micki McGee's discussion about capitalism's care problem, a gender-only feminist perspective sees the unpaid labor of love within the household as the patriarchal exploitation of women. Feminist calls for economic independence for (mostly middle-class) women to work for equal pay as men certainly do not resolve the care problem but, instead, further obscure colonial divisions of labor under which the racialized labor mostly from formerly colonized nations is made to fill up the gap.2 I consider the discursive formations of love as a point of departure to review how the global pandemic bears on our everyday practices of intimacy. Pandemic-mediated effects on domestic intimacy, for [End Page 700] example, are often mistaken as simply a social problem about gender divisions of labor within individualized households when it is deeply implicated in the global imperial process. 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. The historical effects of racialized displacement can be seen as consisting of three sets of often-dissociated social relations during the pandemic crisis: archetypical angel-heroines in white (nurses), angels in the house (housewife and mother), and fallen angels (prostitutes).3 During the pandemic, many of us constantly experience fears about the health systems being overwhelmed, even while we express growing appreciation for the essential care provided by health workers. In the meantime, we have come to witness a political discourse of love that occupies a space of primary importance in the popular glorification of professional care providers such as doctors and nurses on the frontline of the anti-epidemic battle. In Taiwan's context, the creation of these new heroines comes at the expense of racialized and devalued, if not entirely demonized, migrant sexual laborers now perceived as "the breach of infection control."4 After having kept the pandemic at bay for quite some time, Taiwan experienced a COVID-19 spike in April 2021. The drastic surge in locally transmitted cases was linked to the China Airlines and Novotel quarantine hotel at Taoyuan International Airport. The virus eventually spread to the teahouses of Taipei's Wanhua neighborhood—also known as an adult entertainment red-light district in Taipei. Since Wanhua was reported as the center of a major cluster, the workers in the sexual venues, in particular, became a singularized target of public criticism. Not only were the hostesses held accountable for the worst outbreak in Taiwan since the...