Coloniality and contagion: COVID‐19 and the disposability of women of color in feminized labor sectors

Abstract

Grounded in the historical conditions of epidemics intertwined with state power, we examine the factors that contribute to women of color's high proximity to contagion. We build on significant contributions to scholarship on the racial and sexual politics of work and the colonial history of contagion to argue that colonialism is key in the state's weaponization of illness against entire populations. This is crucial to decipher how women of color in feminized labor sectors, in our case, cleaning services and nursing, confront death during the COVID‐19 pandemic. This transforms readers' understanding of governmentality within public health crizes and the roles of colonial state institutions in administering death in raced, gendered, and classed ways. We conclude that future studies focused on pandemics, labor, race, and gender must account for the ways in which colonialism positions feminized workers as fungible in structures of response to mass crizes.

In what ways do state institutions render racialized ‘essential workers’ fungible during the COVID‐19 pandemic? To address these disparities in life and death, we utilize historical accounts, contemporary news reports, and U.S government data sets to historicize the conditions that make possible the condemnation of feminized workers, specifically women of color nurses and custodial workers, to realms of death during the pandemic. We ground this work in the colonial‐modern gender/sex system (Lugones, 2007; Nahwilet Meissner & Whyte, 2018; TallBear & Willey, 2019) and racial capitalism (Robinson, 2000) as the primary mechanisms responsible for situating imaginaries that render those who are Black, brown, Asian, and Indigenous as inherently impure, unsanitary, vulgar, and fixated to filth.

We recognize that these racial categories homogenize a vast range of groups that are distinct both within and between communities. We use these terms to render the ways these groups are all categorized under white supremacy in relation to whites, although they experience racialization differently. It is important to note that these categories are not mutually exclusive, as skin color, colorism, gender expression, sex, sexuality, class, immigration status, and other markers of bodily difference distinctly shape the experiences of these individuals and groups (Jordan, 1992; Mohanty, 1984; Moraga et al., 1983). With this consideration, we use the term ‘women of color’ as a political category of solidarity instead of reducing it to biological essentialist imaginaries. This is in line with Loretta Ross's recount of the birth of the term at the National Women's Conference in Houston, Texas, in 1977, in which a group of Black women from Washington, D.C. joined with other minority nonwhite women to establish a Plan of Action that symbolizes a political commitment to cross‐cultural solidarity and collaboration (Mattingly & Nare, 2014; Ross, 2011). These logics are located in opposition to U.S. national identity and its strides toward the resuscitation of an imagined past in which white settler colonizers use biological essentialist and pseudoscientific ideas of racial purity and sanitation to eradicate nonwhite populations (Foucault, et al., 2003; Springs, 2019; Washington, 2006). ¹ As Eurocentrism, racial capitalism, and the colonial organization of sex are co‐constitutive, it is important that we tend to those who are most conspicuously impacted by the intersections of these systems of domination.

Tending to the lived realities of those at the heart of the matter functions not only to extend life where it is needed, but also provides an explicit base to find meaning in the relationship between racialization, sex and gender designation, and the state's necropolitical weaponization of contagion. It is for this reason we attend directly to the conditions of custodial workers and nurses of color in feminized ² labor sectors, whose biomaterialities we make sense of using a feminist analysis of the role of fungibility (Snorton, 2017; Spillers, 1987) ³ in necropolitical capitalist regimes. We begin by positioning ‘realms of death’ (Mbembe, 2019) as a complex of uninhabitable spaces to which certain bodies are abjected within the context of COVID‐19. We then utilize this necropolitical framework to evaluate the ways in which the state's weaponization of contagion and the sexual division of labor perpetuates colonial hierarchies of bodily normality and civility. This historicization lies at the foundation of our inquiry into the ways feminized laborers deemed ‘essential workers’ are rendered fungible, and that this fungibility is a colonial necropolitical apparatus that enables the genocide capitalist institutions perpetrate and their neoliberal supporters prolong. Our paper, therefore, challenges claims of individual responsibility to life, death, illness, and health in favor of a nuanced view of pandemics in which we situate nursing and custodial work during COVID‐19 within a colonial history of the present. Understanding the necropolitical colonial conditions behind state responses to this pandemic will thus clarify the ways in which women of color employed in feminized labor sectors are condemned to death through contagion. Beyond labor and contagion, this analysis will allow readers to identify the colonial mechanisms in all domains of life that impact women of color.

1. SITUATING DEATH REALMS: THEORIES AND METHODOLOGIES

In this section, we address a question Achille Mbembe (2019) asks in Necropolitics to situate the context in which feminized laborers confront contagion during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Mbembe asks, “under what practical conditions is the power to kill, to let live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right?” (Mbembe, 2019, p. 66). Here, Mbembe locates the colonial conditions that allow hegemonies the power to kill, let live, or expose to death, including institutions that claim to aid marginalized communities from criminal “justice” systems and law enforcement to the institution of medicine. In our context, these colonial conditions undergird the pandemic‐related labor practices that nurses and cleaning service workers, the majority of whom are women of color, are subjected to. This subjection renders workers fungible, or easily replaceable and therefore disposable. Fungibility's definition that entails “paying a debt or settling an account” and “satisfying an obligation” reflects an indebtedness to upward mobility, or at least the maintenance of one's status in order to survive under capitalism (Merriam‐Webster, 2022). Essential workers often have no choice in going to work at all, let alone facing contagion in the workplace. Despite the characterization of essential workers as willingly ‘dying for the cause,’ they are more likely paying debts they are condemned to carry. Carrying this “debt” often looks like risking the increased possibility of disease to go to work, instead of adhering to mandated ‘shelter‐in place’ regulations. For nurses, there are a spectrum of ways to look death in the eye, from deceased patients to the rapid changes in safety regulations that make some nurses feel like “a sheep sent to slaughter” (Ali, 2020).

We therefore utilize Mbembe's concept of ‘necropower’ as a framework to elucidate the current processes rendering racialized women disposable. Mbembe extends Foucault's ‘biopower’ to conceive of necropower as forms of subjugating life to the power of death that deeply reconfigure the relations between resistance, sacrifice, and terror. These relations are reconfigured hierarchically based on classifications of different bodies, social locations, and positionalities. Mbembe also posits that necropower accounts for the various ways in which regimes of power deploy weapons to maximally destroy bodies, “creating death worlds” in which populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of living dead (Mbembe, 2019).

We deploy a decolonial ⁴ feminist methodology (Arvin et al., 2013; Lugones, 2007; Mendez, 2015) to situate feminized laborers within legacies of colonialism during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Our historical approach to epidemics and pandemics as well as a decolonial feminist methodology allows us to recognize the continuities of colonial structures and power relations of race, gender labor, and contagion. Specifically, colonial capitalist labor positions workers of color in feminized labor sectors within realms of death—a structural relation that has continued since European colonization of the Americas and the transatlantic enslavement of African people. In other words, the reproduction of racialized bodies that labor in feminized spaces under the modern colonial state maintains the continued eradication of people by any means, in our case through laboring in a pandemic. The reproduction of racialized gender operates differently among specific groups of humans in ways that confer distinct yet relational experiences of privilege and oppression. Nurses and custodial workers of color in our analysis are thus rendered fungible through modern colonial sex, gender, and sexuality systems that are facilitated by the necropolitics of contagion.

The prominence of death has generated a swift change in the normative order of sociality. Due to the airborne nature of the virus' travels, all people in contact with one another are interconnected in the potential to become ill, and some bodies are more susceptible to a higher severity of harm than others. This places an onus on disparate communities to put the lives of others on par with or above their own comfort or convenience through daily hygienic practices. While there are elements of individual responsibility involved in this community care and relational reliance, it is ultimately the responsibility of government institutions to provide resources catered to communities that need them (Rosner & Museum of the City of New York, 1995). Institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (2020‐2022), which are essential and foundational for accurate responses to health crizes, have been complicit in misinforming the public on the severity of COVID‐19 (Stein, 2020). Guiding information released by the U.S. government, the World Health Organization (WHO), and CDC regularly fluctuates, with most safety‐related updates in direct contradiction to advice they had given prior. It is unsurprizing that guidance fluctuates when dealing with a new disease, but it heightens anxiety in those without the luxury to quarantine or self‐contain. This is a system that requires a politics of disposability, in which colonial modern society's least valued bodies' labor in direct contact with the likelihood of death. Disabled people, undocumented people, incarcerated people, those who face homelessness, and other populations that have been historically marginalized bear the brunt of higher numbers of death than other populations during COVID‐19 (Carlise & Bates, 2020; Clark et al., 2020; Shapiro, 2020). Evaluating these life‐or‐death conditions through a necropolitical lens will help in framing our analysis of the ways in which contemporary U.S. America achieves and maintains its colonial power through the racialization of nonwhite bodies through contagion. This historical analysis will then enable us to make sense of the ways essential workers in feminized labor sectors are rendered disposable through fungibility.

2. BODIES, COLONIALITY, AND CONTAGION

What we find most pressing is that communities of color have been hit hardest by COVID‐19 (Golden, 2020; Hatcher et al., 2020; Johnson, 2020), and that their location as perpetually associated with pathogens, germs, and contagion is being magnified in the social imagination. The coronavirus has disproportionately affected these racialized minority groups who must continue to provide labors of care in public space, in our case, cleaning & disinfectant services and nursing (Anderson & Olson, 2020; Najmabadi, 2020; The Associated Press, 2020; Thorbecke, 2020). This is why we address their imposed status as fungible bodies to reveal the location of essential feminized workers as disposable under the authority of the colonial capitalist state.

As moral impurity is envisioned through deviance of the flesh, nonwhite people, Indigenous people, women, and gendered and sexual minorities become imagined as in close proximity to contagion, and are rendered concurrently dangerous and expendable. While the threats posed by mass illness and contagions are publicized, we argue that the ways specific racialized groups are marked as the source and spread of contagion through colonial legacies has been obscured. This scapegoating, or refusal of responsibility, ensures that Native people, people of color, immigrants, and poor people bear the blame, and often brunt, of disease. This analysis becomes critical when we apply it to the rise in violent attacks against Asian Americans, the majority of whom are women, and many of them elders, in major cities across the nation during the pandemic (Lang, 2021; Lee & Waters, 2021; Yam, 2021).

Coloniality (Kauanui, 2018) ⁵ has standardized those racialized through sexual deviance as associated with vulgarity and filth. Being condemned to the colonial imaginaries of contagion is different than being located in close proximity to contagion. Relatedly though, the colonial imaginary of racialized people as already in close proximity to contagion further motivates, affirms, and justifies the settler‐colonizer's restriction of these groups to labor realms that place workers in the vicinity of the likelihood of disease—charging them with the task of scrubbing surfaces, tending to bodily fluids and flesh, and using their own bodies to protect all others from the impacts of the virus these workers confront personally and professionally. Historically, people racialized as Asian in the United States have been excluded from society through particular legislations such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, justified by their imagined embodiment of disease (Mallapragada, 2021). These associations extended beyond federal law and into the perceptions of local communities. Nayan Shah (2001) notes that during the 19th century smallpox, syphilis, and bubonic plague, San Francisco Health officials and politicians conceived Chinatown as the prominent site of urban sickness, vice, crime, poverty, and depravity, and therefore rendered as a “plague spot,” a “cesspool,” and the source of epidemic disease and physical ailments. Chinese bachelors were primarily positioned as a filthy and diseased “race” who did not have hygienic standards and were imagined through racialized sexuality (Vidal‐Ortiz et al., 2018) as immoral, impure, and oppositional to respectable domesticity (Shah, 2001, pp. 12–13). Shah notes that Chinatown was not only considered a cesspool but also as a place where Chinese bachelors frequented opium dens, gambling hotels, and brothels, positioning them as deviant heterosexuals. Women working in the brothels were then marked as the site of literal contagion in the eyes of health officials, in which the flesh and body are where disease resides.

During COVID‐19, Asian communities have been racialized through contagion in their essentialization as associated with what major media outlets and the Trump administration label ‘China/Chinese virus,” “Wuhan Flu,” and “Kung Flu,” along with “advancing an unsubstantiated claim that [the] virus is a Chinese state‐engineered bioweapon” (Mallapragada, 2021, p. 281). This led not only the loss of business revenue, and therefore impacted individual, familial, communal, and generational livelihood, but also led to targeted harassment that ranges from verbal intimidation to escalated murder. Attacks on Asian Americans increased by 164% in during the first quarter of 2021 (Farivar, 2021; Kaur, 2021) and immigrant women and elders have been made especially vulnerable (Ishisaka, 2021; Lah & Kravarik, 2021; Levenson, et al., 2021; Westervelt, 2021). We also cannot speak about the violence placed on immigrant women racialized as Asian without highlighting the fatal attacks on massage parlor workers in Atlanta, Georgia that took place on March 16th, 2021, and killed eight people in total, in which six of them were of Asian descent and four of them were Korean immigrants (Fausset & Vigdor, 2021; Laughland & Beaumont, 2021). These attacks were not only fueled by anti‐Asian racism in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic, but those killed were targeted for ostensibly embodying the projected imaginary of racialized sexual deviance in their ties to capitalism as sex and body care workers (Kim, 2021).

On the impact of the rhetoric of contagion on Asian American communities, Malapragada (2021) notes that, “When racists view Asian Americans, especially Chinese Americans, as embodiments of the COVID‐19 disease, they are reproducing entrenched ideologies, attitudes and practices about Asian immigrants, illness, and epidemics in the United States (and globally)” (p. 282). Although contagion is most visibly associated with Asian racialization at this time, other minority races experience the reverberations of their own histories of being rendered a plague. One example lies in commodity racism in the United States, in which the narrative of imperial progress was converted in mass‐produced consumer spectacle, such as Pears’ Soap, a soap marketed through advertisements set in the domestic sphere that claim to ‘lighten’ the White Man's Burden through sanitation (McClintock, 1995, pp. 32–33). It is obvious in this regard that people racialized through their distance from whiteness have been marked steadily near or at the epicenter of contagion, or as contagions themselves due to an array of ‘racial’ practices, such as frequenting brothels, engagement with vices, or sanitary practices in their living spaces. Similar to those racialized as Asian, other groups face high rates of infection and death due to their imposed distance from whiteness.

The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) reported that “Black, Hispanic, and American Indian/Alaska Native people have experienced higher rates of COVID‐19 infection and death compared to White people” (Hill & Artiga, 2022). Native communities like the Navajo Nation in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico are also confronted with high rates of infection and limited resources. While Utah has not released this data on its cases, the KFF shows that despite Native Americans making up only 9% of the population in New Mexico, they make up more than a third of cases, while in Arizona Native Americans are only 7% of the population, yet account for 21% of deaths (Nania, 2020). In New York City, Black and brown people are reported to be twice as likely to die from the virus as whites (Mays & Newman, 2020).

McClintock (1995) affirmed that scientists used degeneration ideology to position nonwhite people as lower on the pseudo‐scientific evolutionary chain than whites. Degeneration functioned by positioning Black and Native Americans at the lowest of the evolutionary scales, in which humanity was imagined to evolve from either Native child to adult white man, or from “the possibility of racial decline from white fatherhood to a primordial Black degeneracy incarnated in the Black mother” (McClintock, 1995, p. 49). This hierarchical organization of racialized bodies is deeply intertwined with the empire's obsession with mythologizing and controlling the imaginary of sexual deviancy, and most importantly—reproduction and purification of the species. The concept of degeneration relies on anti‐Blackness, anti‐Indigeneity, xenophobia, sexism, ableism, classism, human supremacy, and moral purity in its use of biological essentialism as justification for state‐sanctioned eugenic projects. These eugenic projects set out to prove nonwhite people as other‐than, and inherently lesser than human. If eugenicists could prove nonwhite status as nonhuman through biological essentialism, then they would have justification to commit mass sexual and reproductive violence on those they marked unworthy of life and legacy. These genocidal projects serve to establish and preserve U.S. national identity on the bases of the cult of domesticity, ⁶ paternity, and the white nuclear family.

In medical settings, patients of color, and especially those who have darker skin, are women, immigrants, sex workers, or are gender non‐conforming are regarded poorly within medical institutions due to its role as the facilitator, regulator, and designator of the normative body and its moral values (Barbee, 1993; Blankenship et al., 2005; Erickson et al., 2011). Not only have medical ‘discoveries’ been founded upon the experimentation and the violated autonomy of Black, brown, & Indigenous people's bodies (Leason, 2021; López, 2008; Pegoraro, 2015; Washington, 2006) but the fact race as biological is a social construct means much of the medical information these institutions rely on are based on racialized tropes and imaginaries that often result in the pathologization of those who embody spiritual, gendered, sexual, cultural, and ontological norms away from Eurocentricity. The social structures & institutions that shape the social, economic, and geographic location of people in communities with limited testing and treatment resources also contribute to Native people's susceptibility to dying from COVID‐19.

Due to lengthy histories of medical institutions both causing and denying ailments (Washington, 2006), and the feat of navigating a vulnerable social location, marginalized groups have inherited higher risks of illness and death. In true colonial modern fashion, the U.S. government once again clarified its stance on the worth of Indigenous life when a Native American health center asked county, state, and federal health agencies for COVID‐19 supplies in March of 2020 and received nothing but cadaver bags in return (Ortiz, 2020). Although refuted as a “mistake,” it is difficult not to root this action in a blatant continuation of necropolitical order as the materials reservations needed in March would have curbed the illness and death rate if received earlier in the pandemic's development. What is uncanny is its relation to the “legend” in which early European settlers utilized the smallpox outbreak as a necropolitical tactic by sending Indigenous people infected blankets to enforce the mass obliteration of Native life. Both cases are brushed off as myth, but argue these selective public health responses are tailored to uphold white Western colonial order.

The development of vaccines and mass inoculations has been another necropolitical move. The colonial state's racial projects of segregation and domination among other colonial structures have failed to adequately facilitate the inoculation of nonwhite, poor, and colonized people around the globe. As it has been reported, the people who have been vaccinated first or who have access to it are white and affluent populations. According to the CDC (2020‐21), white people have received a first dose or have been fully vaccinated before other racial groups. What this indicates is not a ‘backwardness’ of nonwhite people in regard to their beliefs about science and health but rather indicates where racial groups are positioned in a hierarchy of power, access, and privilege. State officials have even announced that certain groups will not be receiving vaccinations, even when populations of color need them the most because of their proximity to contagion. For instance, the Nebraska governor made it a point that undocumented people would not be getting vaccinations due to their legal status (Armus, 2021). Undocumented people then are denied life through vaccination and are rendered already dead or waiting for death. Reports have also noted the hoarding of vaccines and privatization of vaccine production of wealthy countries (Bhutto, 2021). In sum, these bio‐ and necropolitical projects not only administer death by and through contagion but also through the set barriers and racialized capitalist practices that prioritize white citizens.

Kahn (2009), Christopher et al. (1997), and Gould and Connell (1997) have traced the uses of epidemics or contagions as weapons of war to antiquity. In the societal imaginary, the use of biological warfare to eradicate people, control populations, and appropriate land and bodies considered resources is generally deemed archaic, with a few instances in the modern world. In the 20th and 21st century, nation states were still in control of deadly contagions such as anthrax spores for use in biological warfare (Koblentz, 2011; Leitenberg, 2001). As the scholars above note, power regimes have historically utilized contagions to kill opponents. We argue that epidemics and contagions, whether a natural occurrence or weaponized as biological warfare, have always served to exterminate specific populations. In this light, we follow the work of epidemics historian Paul Kelton (2007) who posits that the processes of colonialism created and incubated the conditions for which many diseases were spread, first through the arrival of infected Europeans and then through the enslavement of Indigenous populations that led to massive death tolls. Kelton argues that the spread of the deadly smallpox epidemic in the 17th century was not due to the lack of exposure of the virus among Indigenous people, but rather, that the quest for labor and the Native slave trade facilitated the spread of this virus to Indigenous populations who were previously isolated from the world. If we take Kelton's arguments seriously, it is clear that epidemics or contagion crizes can be framed as directed biological warfare, utilized to exterminate populations that are rendered disposable for the benefit of capital accumulation, and for the benefit of white capital accumulation in the context of COVID‐19.

In this regard, epidemics and pandemics around the world and throughout time, and specifically through colonization of the North American continent, have served to uphold Western imperialism. While historians argue about the number of Indigenous people in Mesoamerica killed by epidemics such as smallpox, salmonella, measles, mumps, and other contagions, new genome studies suggest that during the 16th century epidemic period which killed at least 15 million Indigenous people in the Oaxaca Mexico region can be traced to Salmonella enterica found in bodily matter (Vågene et al., 2018). What is clear here is that mass death by epidemic was obviously facilitated by the conquista and subsequently the colonization of the region, which demanded the extraction of capital through natural resources. In the context of COVID‐19, the colonial modern state has deployed necropower to let non‐white populations die while allowing capitalist corporations to maximally profit from the pandemic (Kelly, 2020).

Human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) as an epidemic is dominating the public conversation right now in relation to discourses around COVID, as it has also largely impacted and killed queer people and African Americans. Blankenship et al. (2005) report that the HIV/AIDS virus has disproportionately affected Black people, and specifically incarcerated men who face a high risk of exposure. Incarcerated people, of which the mass majority are Black men, have faced a disproportionately high risk of contracting the virus during the coronavirus pandemic as it continues today (Hooks & Sawyer, 2020). The recent H1N1 pandemic in the United States has also proved the disparate susceptibility of infection and access to medical healthcare in Black and brown communities compared to white communities. According to Sandra Crouse Quinn et al. (2011), there was a greater risk of exposure to H1N1 for ‘Spanish‐speaking people’ and Black people were the most susceptible to the flu virus. Not only were these groups at greater risk and higher susceptibility but the disparities in access to health care remained significant. Quinn et al. (2011) provide clear data of the underlying conditions that make these communities more susceptible to H1N1. These populations' conditions are attributed to racism and other structural inequalities, as well as inaccessibility to adequate health care. There are clear links of racial susceptibility to pandemics, which highlight systemic racism and classism responsible for heightened risk factors in Black and brown communities, including the fact that low‐income families often must continue to work during the outbreak of highly contagious and deadly viruses.

While pandemics and epidemics do not discriminate in terms of who gets infected, the structures and processes that render people more susceptible to infection and death are always highly racialized, classed, and gendered. What is central in this regard is the colonial structure that not only facilitates but is rooted in the domination and extermination of racialized groups. For instance, Ryan C. Eyford (2007) argues that during the 1876‐77 outbreak of smallpox in the southwest of Canada, the state utilized the epidemic, quarantine, and sanitation practices to exert control, to racially segregate aboriginal groups alongside settler groups, and to reify a new spatial order mandating the compartmentalization of land and people into a system of racially segregated reserves. In short, the bio‐ and necropolitical colonial state, institutions, and structures have utilized pathogens for war, have facilitated the spread of pathogens for upholding and maintaining hierarchies of power, and have administered death and disability to the most marginalized sectors of the population. Reading pandemics through this framework helps reveal that pandemics have always been and continue to be in service of colonial settler states' maintenance of racial capitalism. The COVID‐19 pandemic has enunciated these eugenic legacies, in which care, access, and the right to live are determined and deployed by bio‐ and necropolitics.

3. FUNGIBILITY AND FEMINIZED LABOR

What is feminized labor? Lisa Adkins (2001) offers crucial insight into the cultural feminization of economic life by tracing shifts in discourses around gender mobility in the labor force. Adkins describes the ways in which 1980s scholarship on the feminization of work was used to describe an increase of women in the workforce, labor considered “women's work” in public sectors, and altered family arrangements until the term itself became used so widely its meaning was obscured to the point of losing its particularity. Despite that, it was picked up by scholars who developed theories of the ways jobs are gendered, which expanded economic understandings of work to include the power dynamics of sexuality (670–671). By the late 1990s—early 2000s, feminization and work was conceptualized through the performance of feminine aesthetics and building economic cultures of stylized self‐presentation despite the gender designation of the worker, especially if that sector or role had been associated with traditional femininity, such as service work (674). Adkins ultimately warns against reading this mobility of gender in the workplace as liberation without examining how it restructures power relations (690).

Lisa Adkins and Eeva Jokinen (2008) later expanded upon the ways early materialist feminist theories of feminized labor are not sufficient to describe the shifting dynamics of gender, class, and the (re)production of value in contemporary capitalism. In what Adkins and Jokinen deem the ‘fourth shift’ within contemporary capitalism, they necessitate an understanding of the development of work and life through a complex engagement with the broad shifts in labor in which the work of entire populations is rendered feminized regardless of the gender identity or expression of the laborer ‐ symbolizing an exploitable labor force comparable to the history of women's working conditions. Although whole populations are rendered through feminized labor, it is important that we center women, and specifically women of color, in this work. We therefore agree with the basis of Adkins and Jokinen's claims that theories of the feminization of work do not offer adequate analyses without an understanding of class and gender, but we choose to intermesh race in that paradigm rather than subsuming it under class politics ‐ hence our focus on women of color in feminized labor sectors. It is in this frame that we understand that the feminization of labor operates through race, class, sex, and gender power to maintain colonial order under global capitalism.

This concept of feminization also points to historical structures that position the feminine as inferior to and property of its opposite and incommensurable masculine other. The domestic nuclear family system is at the root of these normative constructs that designate women's work as insignificant to the political economy, albeit essential, but consider work cis males do as valuable. The “colonial/modern gender system” that sanctions feminization through the values constructed and communicated through the paternal family system and cult of domesticity functions as a primary organizing principle of the U.S. capitalist enterprise (Lugones, 2007). Dating back to European colonization of North America in the 15th century, the feminization of Native people was used to justify their marked degeneracy to give settler‐colonizers rationale to make property of Indigenous ancestral territories, cultures, knowledge systems, body labor, and the land (McClintock, 1995, pp. 19–36; TallBear, 2018). This informs us of the ways patriarchal hegemonies weaponized feminization in order to relegate nonwhite non‐men to lower realms of existence, which is reflected most pointedly in the racial and gendered organization of the political economy.

Replicated through modernity since the onset of colonialism, the colonial/modern gender system continues to place women and people of color within domestic caretaking roles that require keeping children safe, serving as mediator, administering medication, promoting healing, feeding, and cleaning up after others. This culture of feminized caretaking has permeated professional spheres like nursing and forms of cleaning service work. In this regard, Drucilla K. Barker and Susan F. Feiner (2004) frame the contemporary relation of gender and capital in specifying how gender is a structure of power that defines meaning in society. For Barker and Feiner, gender is a constitutive category that organizes practices and procedures along the lines of labor and economics. Gender, in this sense, is a governing code that feminizes women as well as economically, racially, and culturally marginalized men. They assert that the feminization of labor made the consumption patterns of the elite possible and naturalized the type of hegemonic masculinity that characterized the international finance system. Furthermore, Barker and Feiner amplify the precarity of working in feminized sectors and point out that “Third World” economies increasingly depend on women's work.

In Barker and Feiner's case and in our context, the pattern is clear—feminized laborers produce the wealth that keeps the economy running, and the wealthy reap the benefits. Feminized labor is an effect of the global expansion of white Western colonial‐capitalist powers and carries no privilege, status, or prestige. When feminized laborers are recognized for the work they do, the recognition often comes with the motive to encourage workers to continue in positions deemed undesirable, but necessary. During the COVID‐19 pandemic, feminized laborers have been made susceptible to contagion and the likelihood of death. Custodial workers and nurses have been left vulnerable and deemed disposable. However, nurses have been met with a public praise for their work that operates through an illusion of heroic duty, meanwhile, custodial workers are invisibilized as they cannot even attain surface‐level prestige in their life‐defending roles of stripping spaces from contagion. Feminized from multiple intersecting angles, women of color who do this care work, and especially those who are immigrants, disabled, and have children, are underappreciated, undercompensated, and as a whole do not receive care nor gratitude for their essentiality to the sustenance of capitalism and the survival of communities.

The ongoing global phenomenon of COVID‐19 cannot be synopsized as a health crisis, but rather, a health crisis that functions within the capitalist colonial modern organization of institutions, enforcing a necropolitical order that renders ‘essential’ laborers fungible. Despite their valuable contributions to the practice of care, the state has positioned essential workers' bodies as equivalent to their labor, rendering them as fungible commodities that are susceptible to unrestrained substitution. ‘Fungible’ furthermore represents the hegemonically determined quality of being in which the worth of a set of bodies is imagined as quantifiable in such a way that enables the fluid exchangeability of labor (Snorton, 2017, p. 73). In the context of essential laborers during the pandemic, fungibility references the ways in which the lives of those who work in grocery stores, cleaning services, nursing, delivery services, and low‐level government are considered unworthy of saving, or safety, over institutional money making. The essential worker is a commodity herself, as her body and its uses produce capital for the larger system. Her body is fungible in that albeit essential, her position is not considered of high value in the capitalist world, and her body is deemed easily replaceable with that of another who can fulfill the skillset the institution needs for profit. The essential worker's body is disposed of, but the essential worker is still there. Rather than fully replaced after being deemed essentially dead, fungibility functions through its flimsy interchangeability that allows for a process of exchange in which the new worker and the old worker might as well be the same in the eyes of the institution because their life‐value does not exist beyond the value of their labor.

A primary reason we place emphasis on the positionalities of nurses and cleaning service workers is that their contrast helps reveal the ways modern performances of neoliberalism shield public perceptions of reality. ‘Neoliberalism’ describes the modern systems of government that privilege ‘free‐market’ conditions and privatized economic growth over social welfare and environmental protection (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, p. 3). Neoliberal institutions are agents of coloniality that push forth rhetoric of progress in hopes to divert the public from gaining critical insight into the hegemonic administration of violence through racial capitalism. While most agents distance themselves from the realities of janitorial and custodial work during this pandemic, they simultaneously push forth a rhetoric of heroism warranting empty public praise that glorifies health‐care workers as fearless warriors, rather than placing an onus on providing them with adequate supplies, care, and compensation. We posit that nurses and cleaning service workers are socially and culturally considered feminized laborers in the colonial imagination, and that incorporating the politics and histories of ‘women's work’ helps us to examine how the location of femininity within modernity's organization of racial capitalism sustains these laborers' positions as fungible.

4. NURSES

On the organization of labor, Glazer (1990) notes, “I abandon the concept of private and public sphere to reconceptualize health care delivery as a seamless web of social relations” (p. 480). Due to the number of patients sent home sick or barred access to treatment because of the general lack of COVID‐19 testing sites and treatment centers, labor that extends beyond the hospital in the form of home caretaking has been exacerbated. Although exacerbated by the virus, this phenomenon is not new. After changes in hospital policies that enabled the transfer of medical and caretaking work to non‐professionals in the 1980s for money‐making purposes, there was a sharp decrease in hospital admission of people with low income, children who were presumed to have mothers to care for them, and the drop in admissions of African American patients was over double that of white Americans (Glazer, 1990). Consequently, low‐income mothers, family members, and most Black people were sent home sick rather than admitted for care and were forced to administer care on themselves. As public and private care permeate each other's bounds, we cannot ignore the feminized labor of those who work to maintain the home and those who live within it, as well as the possibility they may be essential workers themselves.

All nurses work in close proximity to contagion—even more so now that nurses are required to go to work while they are sick with COVID‐19. According to Allana Akhtar and Aria Bendix (2022), nurses have been pressured to shorten their isolation periods to mitigate staff shortages when they are infected. Although all nurses work in close proximity to the threat of contagion, nurses of different races, classes, and genders experience their location as fungible in different ways. We consider this variance in experience as based within colonial standards of bodily capital and worth, and specifically the neoliberal rhetoric of healthcare workers as willing and heroic martyrs. Said to have begun in Italy where quarantined locals regularly sang songs with one another and cheered thanks to hospital workers from their balconies and windows, dozens of countries have followed suit as evidenced by a series of viral videos reenacting these scenes (Booth et al., 2020). These collective cheers are usually set at a time in the evening when nurses switch shifts to begin and/or end their days on the frontlines. Much like soldiers at war, frontline healthcare workers are regarded with a ‘survival of the fittest’ attitude. Verbally, this attitude may translate to “If you die, you die. And if you did, you are a hero because you died for the greater good.” In this vein, people in the nursing profession have been characterized not as human, but instead, as quantities—nurses are made martyrs in the name of public health, and the relentless clapping infers the public accepts a narrative of selfless autonomy and willingness to die on their behalf without regard for the institutional obstacles healthcare workers face.

Treated as casualties of war, labeling the deceased nurse a hero as if she is a fallen soldier inherently justifies her death. Riotous outbursts each evening are reminiscent of celebrations for troops coming back home post‐war—a cheer for those who have made it another day. This neoliberal wartime rhetoric is only effective in overpowering the pleas of bedside nurses and other hospital staff for the passage of laws that would provide proper safety equipment, and the ability to go on leave without losing their jobs (Kopp, 2020). Frontline workers have no choice in their essentiality, and yet, the capitalist institutions governing the domains of their reach in terms of illness avoidance, preparation, and treatment render these workers largely fungible with one another. We are referring to the ways in which the deaths of those on the ‘front lines’ are characterized as mere numeric casualties and that nurses and cleaning service workers are not of genuine concern under a contemporary Darwinist colonial global social order. Rather than genuine endeavors to take adequate action to keep medical care providers, cleaning service workers, and other essential laborers safe with personal protective equipment (PPE) and mental & physical health support, these workers are positioned as brave and willing martyrs. In the wake of this understanding, nurses themselves have protested the state in favor of the Defense Production Act of 1950 in which the government can warrant and assist companies in mass producing health care equipment for the U.S. market. Reduced to wearing garbage bags for protection, workers' worries have lied not only in protecting themselves, but in avoiding patient‐to‐patient transmission of illness. After prolonged resistance, the Trump administration agreed to put it into effect in early April of 2020, only to realize the cold‐war era mandate could not provide nearly enough supplies as hoped for (Brokaw, 2020; Kavi, 2020; Scott, 2020). Nurses have reported that they initially were awarded one single‐use N95 mask per day but were soon forced to reuse their N95s five times before discarding, as well as wear single‐use eye shields for 12 h (Hopkins, 2020). Due not only to the virus itself but also to these structural barriers, it was reported that more than 3600 U.S. health care workers died in the first year of the pandemic, according to “Lost on the Frontline,” a 12‐month investigation by The Guardian (The Guardian and Kaiser Health News, 2021).

While this characterization of healthcare workers as heroic soldiers may warrant associations with masculinity, we want to pinpoint the legacies of what is constituted as ‘women's work’ as a possible root of the disposable and fungible location of feminized bodies at the frontlines. Historically, women's labor has been devalued, taken for granted, and expected as given (Glen, 2012). In their work, women have been expected to rid themselves of all personal priorities in order to serve their children, spouses, and even the general public at a moment's notice. The feminine, in this way, is about sacrifice. In nursing, feminized labors of care often include body work through touch. Nurses working during the HIV/AIDS epidemic note, “On a day‐to‐day basis, we are not dealing with the overwhelming nature of an epidemic. It is the individual who is sick. In the face of tremendous loss and grief, we believe we can alleviate some of the suffering of those who are ill, by what we have to offer in the simplest way: by touching them” (Fraser & Jones, 1995, p. 294). This alleviation of suffering requires a kind of around‐the‐clock care that mothers tend to perform for their loved ones at home who need them, including bathing, drying, massaging, feeding, and facilitating interactions for their patients.

The long history of women's work as devalued is present in the nursing profession and has had deadly effects during the COVID‐19 pandemic. According to a National Nurses United report on Feb. 11, 2021, 3200 health care workers have died from COVID‐19, out of those documented deaths “170 RNs of color (54.1%) have died of COVID‐19 and related complication” (2021). Of those 170 nurses of color, “83 registered nurses (26.4%) who have died of COVID‐19 and related complications are Filipino” (2021). It is important to note that these reports only account for a 1‐year period and only from one non‐governmental source, which illustrates the inadequacy or lack of interest of state institutions to measure or record deaths and the effects of the pandemic on populations.

The co‐constitution of feminization with Blackness has amplified ties to sacrifice. Riotous performances of thanks are not fueled by images of reality but instead by the socially constructed image of nurses. Through hegemonic U.S. socialization and media representation, nurses are almost always imagined as white, kind, and professional—these are the nurses locals are clapping for. ⁷ In contrast to this praise of the neoliberal concept of a nurse, Black nurses experience fungibility rooted in the values of race and domesticity during American slavery (Barbee, 1993). This refers to the legacies of enslavement, segregation, and Othering perpetrated by whites who projected their own sins onto the Black body. Commenting on the ways in which Black sexual stereotypes (Collins, 2006) have contributed to nursing's view of Black women, Barbee contextualizes its history saying, “The mammy image of the faithful, obedient servant was created by Euro‐American men to justify the economic exploitation of Black women during slavery” (Barbee, 1993, p. 354). Keisha Jeffries (2020) argues that the underappreciation of hard‐working Black nurses that continues throughout the COVID‐19 pandemic is rooted in histories of racism, colonialism, and gatekeeping from within the nursing profession as “it was believed that Black women did not possess these [Victorian] ideals of “true womanhood.” Semmi W. (2020) also historicizes “Black nurses risking their lives on the frontlines,” stating that “In the United States, Black nurses were banned from the Army, Navy, American Red Cross, major teaching hospitals, and the American Nurses Association” and “were only allowed to assist German prisoners of war” during World War II.” The distancing of Black women as viable care workers in the professional nursing field stands in stark contrast to the forced and low‐wage labors of care Black women have been expected to do in domestic settings.

Conceptualized as mammies in colonial modern capitalist realms, Black women are positioned in a static space and time in which their bodies are still marked as inherent caregivers who live to labor on behalf of others. While images of white women nurses mark them with virtue, generosity, and bravery for their willingness to care for sick people, nurses of color are considered always already meant to exist within a place of filth and contagion. It is likely colonial legacies of slavery that permeate our modern psychological foundations make it easier to justify the location of nonwhite racialized people as fungible in feminized labor positions. This reflects that those who most violently confront contagion are not regarded positively in the same manner that the public performs. Marples (2021) states that Black nurses in particular are not being met with the mental health support they need while facing feelings of defeat and difficulty caring for themselves when they face the instability of their patients' wellness along with the fact that Black nurses are dying at a disproportionate rate, in which 18% of nurses who passed away as of September 2021 were Black but they make up only 12% of the nursing population. Lindy Washburn (2022) reports that an associate dean at the Rutgers School of Nursing, Charlotte Thomas‐Hawkins, has been underestimated and rendered disposable by patients through microaggressions. In conversation with Thomas‐Hawkins, Wasburn reported that “For Black nurses, COVID and racism have meant facing a 'dual pandemic' (2022). Thomas‐Hawkins also made sure to note that while “public health crizes come and go”… “Racism doesn't.” Throughout this “dual pandemic,” custodial and janitorial workers also lack adequate equipment to properly protect themselves, but in contrast to healthcare workers, custodial workers are not met with the same level of performative, neoliberal praise despite the mutual equality of their essentiality. The rhetoric of modernity that hides neo‐colonialism through its facades of positivity and progress has allowed for this narrative.

5. CUSTODIAL/CLEANING WORKERS

In this section, we refer to custodial and janitorial workers as feminized laborers who are employed to clean and disinfect buildings, stores, hospitals, and any space that requires cleaning and disinfecting. According to the Statista Research Department, in 2020, the large majority of the employees in cleaning occupations in the United States were janitors and cleaners (1.99 million). Maids and housekeeping cleaners followed, with 795, 590 workers employed in the United States (Statistica, 2021). Following the work of Barker and Feiner, we can see that custodial work has also been rendered as a feminized labor sector (2004). This is important in two regards, (1) the feminization of this sector positions women of color, undocumented people, poor people, and sexually marginalized folks who usually share identity intersections to be or end up doing custodial work, and (2) since these groups have been historically marginalized compounded by the feminization of the sector, the disposability of these workers is exacerbated. For instance, according to New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer in March 2020, ‘Hispanic’ cleaning service workers represent 60% of the frontline workers in the labor sector. Similarly, 70% of the frontline workers are foreign born and 35% of these workers are undocumented workers.

While the numbers are not clear on how many women or the percentage of ‘Hispanic’ women are undocumented working in the building cleaning sector, we can observe that a high percentage of these women are in a precarious situation and therefore highly susceptible to COVID‐19 infection. It is also important to note that these women are not only highly susceptible to infection at their place of work, but the commute also renders them highly vulnerable since 70% of these workers travel via public transit (New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer, 2020). Around the country, custodial workers have been in demand for cleaning services, with a 75% rise reported in May 2020 (Khemlani, 2020). While the rise of work during the pandemic might represent ‘higher’ wages, ultimately the devaluation of this labor sustains the feminization of poverty, namely in that there are higher numbers of women and workers in feminized labor in poverty even when they join paid work (Hinze & Aliberti, 2007). This exemplifies the workers' essentiality not only for the economy but within the foundational role in which custodial workers fall under, in other words, the fungible and disposable subject.

In an April 2021 report titled “Janitors: The Pandemic's Unseen Essential Workers” by The Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund (MCTF) (Hayes et al., 2021), a California nonprofit organization found that a majority of janitorial companies did not provide janitors with PPE or follow safety protections mandated by Cal/Occupational Safety and Health Administration. One company even continued to disregard workplace safety requirements including failing to provide PPE despite the death of one of its employees from COVID‐19 and continued to disregard workplace safety requirements. Moreover, the report found a quarter of respondents did not have paid sick days, despite being entitled to them under the 2014 Healthy Workplace Healthy Families mandate. More than half of janitors lost their jobs or had their hours reduced during the first 6 months of the pandemic (19% and 35%, respectively) and struggled to afford basic necessities. Similarly, according to a July 20, 2020, New York Times article, custodial workers have had to prepare, make, and bring their own cleaning supplies (Kantor, 2020). Another article by the Los Angeles Times reports that non‐clinical workers such as janitors have been forgotten as essential to the maintenance of hospitals and of life (Branson‐Potts, 2020). These janitors cannot miss work and fear punitive actions such as hours cut or termination. Even when cleaners are prone or are at higher risk of dying from the virus, hospitals refuse to give masks to cleaners who are in their 70s (Branson‐Potts, 2020). Thus, it is clear from this data that alongside nurses, janitors and other cleaning service workers in close proximity to contagion are left to their own devices. Instead of settler governments taking responsibility for the care of populations in need, the colonial values of individualism that are embedded in its infrastructure are used as justification for the care of some groups over others.

In the case of immigrant women's labor, the American Immigration Council (AIC) (2017) states the top 3 occupations of that subgroup of the labor force include ‘graders & sorters of agricultural products’ (51.5%), ‘misc. Personal appearance workers’ (47.1%), and ‘maids & housekeeping cleaners’ (42.1%) (2015, Figure 9) (2017). The AIC also reported the largest number of low‐wage immigrant working women are from Mexico, taking on undesirable labor at a much higher rate than all other immigrant women laborers in the United States. The statistic states that in 2015, the recorded number of Mexican working women was 1,658,403 while the next largest number are women from El Salvador at a vastly lower number of 221,333, and numbers decrease from there (American Immigration Council, 2017). This shows the U.S.'s occupation with devaluing Mexican women in particular, in line with the expectation that their raced & gendered bodies and relations to legality position them as deserving of underpaid labor and close contact with pathogens on behalf of the masses. In this way, women of color, and especially immigrant women, are posited as already condemned to these realms of death, demonstrating that colonial modernity allows for their participation in pathogenic fields without concern for their survival.

6. CLOSING THE DEATH REALMS

This essay addresses two related questions: In what ways do settler state institutions render racialized ‘essential workers’ fungible during the COVID‐19 pandemic, and how do legacies of colonialism undergird the necropolitical condemnation of these workers to realms of death? Addressing these questions using a necropolitical framework, the concept of fungible feminized labor, and a historical analysis of the management of disease has enabled us to examine the colonial roots that situate women of color nurses and cleaning service workers in close proximity to contagion during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We used necropolitics to elucidate the historical processes in which the colonial enterprise has previously deployed contagions and the rhetoric of contagion in the United States to maximally destroy bodies, which in our context meant feminized nonwhite bodies working in nursing and custodial jobs. Through our study, we found that despite the colonial state and the public's neoliberal rhetoric, the colonial modern capitalist state in itself is the cause of processes bordering biological warfare and extermination, holding strong similarities to the epidemic‐related genocides early European settlers perpetrated against the Indigenous communities they colonized. Those histories underline the structural role of the settler state in terms of capital accumulation, control, and death of not only Indigenous people but, as explored in our study, the control and death of racialized essential workers.

The fungibility of feminized laborers, nurses, and cleaning workers of color as expressed in the numbers of deaths and infections illustrates that for the U.S settler state, these workers are commodities that maintain and reproduce the settler‐state. In this sense, the settler state and its institutions have proven yet again that profits are more important than people. This is exemplified in the CDC's Omicron variant report “Updates and Shortens Recommended Isolation and Quarantine Period for General Population” (December 27, 2021). As of January 11th, 2022, there have been 308,458,509 confirmed cases; 5,492,595 deaths; and a total of 9,194,549,698 vaccine doses have been administered globally (World Health Organization, 2022). The extremely high rates of infection and death as well as the slow rate of inoculations around the globe are indicative of the settler state's necropolitical use of contagion, specifically the U.S recommendations that force people not to quarantine and spread the virus. Our research suggests that future studies on COVID‐19 and other contagions must address not only death but the material lives and fungible position of racialized gendered laborers as well. This is to account for a more holistic understanding of the role of the colonial settler state in administering violence.

This article has sought to reveal the continuities of settler state practices that exploit and enact violence upon women of color laboring at sites of contagion. Intentionally or not, contagion has been used to stigmatize, control, manage, discipline, and eradicate populations through various means in order to steal land, resources, and advance capital accumulation. COVID‐19 and the settler state's response to it is another iteration. The constitutive processes of racialization, feminization, and class that are created, imposed, and maintained by the settler state ultimately sacrifice nurses and custodial workers to the ardent possibilities of death and disease for the sake of institutional moneymaking. We argue that in order to make visible the coloniality of contagion and its necropower on racialized and gendered workers, decolonial feminist approaches are key not only for understanding the positionalities of these workers but are also a point of departure for challenging and changing the colonial organization of the living and the dead. In the context of COVID‐19, viewing crizes as multiple and contextual and recognizing the ways phenomena overlap and endure underlies our claim that the settler state and its necropolitical mechanisms must be seen not only as an event of the past but as an enduring phenomenon that urgently needs to be abolished.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

We have no known conflict of interest to disclose.

Biographies

José M. Flores Sanchez is a Ph.D. student in the department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies at SUNY Stony Brook. He is interested in disability, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, migration, aesthetics, body and embodiment and settler‐colonialism studies. Particularly, he is researching ugliness, the embodiment of ugliness, and ugly bodies through racialization, disability frameworks, and settler‐colonialism.

Jade Kai is a mixed‐race black trans feminist interdisciplinary writer, educator, and doctoral candidate. They specialize in gender & settler colonialism, trans care, and more‐than‐human kinships in the department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University.

Flores Sanchez, José M. , and Kai Jade. 2022. “Coloniality and Contagion: COVID‐19 and the Disposability of Women of Color in Feminized Labor Sectors.” Gender, Work & Organization: 1–18. 10.1111/gwao.12913.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available within this article.