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. 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.