Unconditional Love and Precarious Lives: Politicizing Love, Touch, and Care in Times of COVID-19
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay builds on the extraordinary circumstances brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic to tease out some of the ways in which love has been played out politically in relation to migration. In Canada, as elsewhere in the world, the pandemic suddenly rendered visible the oft-invisible care work traditionally performed by women, and now increasingly so by women of color and asylum seekers. Building on queer theorist Sara Ahmed’s understanding of immigration policies as a form of “conditional love”, I investigate various processes of (de)politicization that occurred when love and care became politically mobilized in response to the health crisis. I use the “care-body-work” constellation as working points to tease out some disciplining and transformative possibilities brought about by love. After discussing Ahmed’ reflections on love and immigration, I then examine how the pandemic unexpectedly made visible, and sometimes challenged, the politics of touch, love and care between state-sanctioned hierarchized bodies. While so doing, I notably unpack the “guardian angel” metaphor which was mobilized to speak of those doing care work, and especially those working as continuing care assistants for the elderly – overwhelmingly asylum seekers and women of color here in Quebec. Running through the discussion lie lingering existential, political questions: who cares (in both the practical and emotional understandings of the term), and how do we care about each other – with what political consequences?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.113 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".