Caring like a State: Politicizing Love, Touch, and Precarious Lives in the Time 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 politi-cally 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 ‘con-ditional 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 ‘love-body-care’ constellation as working points to tease out some disciplining and transformative possibilities brought about by love. After discussing Lauren Berlant’s and bell hooks’ reflections on love, 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 that 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 in Quebec. Running through the discussion lie lingering existential, political questions: who cares (in both the practical and emotional under-standings 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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.041 | 0.083 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| 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".