CHAPTER 16

From Disaster to Exhaustion: The Politics of Care Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Danya Glabau

As I sat down to write the first draft that turned into this chapter, I found myself thinking, “I am finally catching up.” The summer of 2022 featured two daycare COVID exposures and illnesses in June; hand, foot, and mouth disease for my toddler and I in July; and driving the whole family from New York to Chicago with a non-COVID cough and fever in August. In the spring of 2023 I was back to work following a lucky eight months of rest after having a baby but was still sleeping in forty-minute sprints at night; eighteen months of breastfeeding with a baby who refuses to eat or drink when she is ill and still cannot sleep at night without being close to my body; gestating and birthing a baby in a pandemic; having two miscarriages in a pandemic, one of which was surgically treated in March 2020 mere hours before the end of elective procedures in New York hospitals; and a fall and winter of a manic schedule of talks, revisions, submissions, and planning. That wild pre-COVID winter of 2019 to 2020, I realized, was the last time I could confidently say I was “caught up,” the last time I slept through the night, and perhaps the last time I will be caught up for a decade still. Since then, I have always been tired, overextended, depleted, behind, and catching up.

I am not alone in this. Indeed, I had a very privileged version of the pandemic experience. The COVID-19 pandemic has made falling behind, catching up, and still being behind a kind of existential state in the United States—systematically worse for those who started out with less capital, less education, less family wealth, and less prestige distributed throughout their social networks. Fall behind because your kids or your spouse are sick and you have to stay home to take care of them; fall behind because you need two days to recover from a vaccination in order to minimize days spent ill in the future; fall behind because of supply-side price hikes amid waves of disruption to global industrial supply chains; fall behind as price hikes persist for months, years, and then turn into over 9 percent annualized inflation;1 fall behind because the restaurant where you work closes as a public health precaution, and then fall behind more when your bosses reopen too soon but the public still rightly remains at home, where you deserve to be too; fall behind because, because, because. Catch up in the rare moments when the stars align and everyone is healthy, local COVID rates are low, your workplace has enough customers, your paycheck arrives on time, and the store shelves are full enough that the capitalists must drop prices. But the time and resources to catch up never match all the time spent falling behind.

Are you tired just reading about all the ways people have been falling behind? People living in the United States are exhausted too, though to different degrees. As a feminist medical anthropologist, I am particularly interested in the structures that lead to pandemic exhaustion for two types of people: people who get and stay sick due to COVID-19 and people who are exhausted taking care of other people. That is, I am interested in people who need and give care. In this chapter, I will focus on people who take care of children and what the pandemic might mean for them (us).

I propose a “politics of exhaustion” as a way to think through the (infra)structural contributions to exhaustion among people who care and need care that was heightened or intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Exhaustion is a result of appallingly thin, inadequate, and privatized resources for care work and disability in the United States. The idea that family-based care, particularly for children, could serve as some kind of solution without public funding and support existed well before 2020. Public forms of care have always been inadequate. Families have always come up with private workarounds that require family members to work off the clock. Both the limitations of public care and the lengths that families must go to in caring for each other have become more apparent since the pandemic hit the United States in full force in March 2020.

Pandemic Childcare, a Disaster in Waiting

Let’s consider pandemic childcare for a moment. Schools, which had previously doubled as free childcare, closed for months or even years at a time, creating difficult situations for families, children, and school administrators alike.2 In New York City, the number of children enrolled for in-person public school instruction for the 2020–2021 school year plummeted as details of the in-person schedule and safety protocols were gradually revealed and as teachers’ unions launched strong public opposition to the plan. At the start of the school year in August 2020, over 500,000 students, about half of the city’s 1.1 million public school students, enrolled for two to three days per week of in-person instruction. But by the end of October, only 283,000 had actually attended face-to-face instruction.3 The lowest rates of participation were among Black and Asian families, while white families sent their children to school in person at the highest rate.4 As elementary, middle, and high school participation remained low, overstretched private and subsidized preschool capacity also became even more limited due to state and city health measures.

In prepandemic times, these educational institutions masked a long-term problem in the United States that is now impossible to avoid: There is very little childcare infrastructure outside of schools. In New York City, the prepandemic childcare shortage was so dire that parents often joined waiting lists before their children were even born. What exists is overwhelmingly privately funded, averaging over $18,000 per year for children under age three in 2019 before the pandemic disrupted the market.5 Many care workers left to care for their own families, worsening the situation. Given the low wages in the industry (the median annual wage was $27,490 in May 2021),6 some workers, mostly women, could never make the math work to come back to work.

Indeed, employment rates for mothers remained lower in February 2022 than two years prior, before the pandemic.7 Initial pandemic employment declines were especially sharp for Black and Hispanic women, with Black women still lagging behind all other groups at that time. Economists wring their hands and ask why. As Robert Soden, Jacqueline Wernimont, and Scott Gabriel Knowles write in Chapter 15 of this volume, “the Covid numbers rarely capture another crucial aspect of the disaster: the enormous efforts people have undertaken since early 2020 to sustain, repair, and strengthen their communities.” Whether it is the mutual and community aid groups that those authors write about or the everyday work of caring for relations, the need to care cannot be rationalized via national economic statistics, workforce participation and unemployment numbers, or even an imbalanced household budget.

As a woman, a parent, and an ethnographer who has interviewed dozens of other women about life as a parent, I know some answers to the economists’ unknowable question about why people stopped working in the same way during the pandemic: Who will care for the children? Who will care for the parents and grandparents? Who will care for the cousin with long COVID? While schools offer the promise of free childcare, freeing up women and other caretakers for other types of occupation during the day, they proved to be a too fragile and limited infrastructure in a moment of crisis. Care is not an option. If it can’t be done by teachers, it will be done by relations—most likely women. Yet even when childcare is a burden, it can also be meaningful, joyous, and reciprocal in ways that formal economic exchange cannot. Faced with both heightened obligations to care for others and the moral rewards of doing so, some women no longer work.

Melinda Cooper roots the current crisis of care in the United States in the competition for political dominance between neoliberalism and new conservatism that began in earnest in the 1970s.8 Devolving responsibility for the care of children, the elderly, and disabled people to individual families and their private bank accounts satisfied both politically ascendant groups. Neoliberals could point to reduced spending and the supposed optimization of service provision by market mechanisms when families paid for help and resources out of their household budgets. Conservatives could point to the resilience of the patriarchal family and claim that family was returning to its rightful place, where care for children, elders, and disabled people could most competently be provided.

As Veena Dubal argues, both conservatives and liberals could abdicate responsibility for household well-being by pointing to the past success of the nuclear, patriarchal Fordist family.9 According to this myth, a one-wage earner, most likely a man, could provide for an entire family. Such blame shifting persisted even as labor markets became more precarious with deindustrialization. And it was always a myth for many workers, as Gabriel Winant shows in detail in The Next Shift, a chronicle of the shift from steelwork to care work in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.10 Industrial employment even in the 1950s and 1960s was rarely stable enough to maintain working-class households on a single income worry-free. But if one believed that the myth could come true, what would be the problem with a mother dropping out of waged work to care for children?

Yet the intermixing of new conservative and neoliberal policies has itself produced a situation in which one wage isn’t enough in the best of times. In times of additional need or crisis such as the pandemic, the publicly funded resources that exist are further reduced to a state of dramatic inadequacy. In the New York case, the availability of publicly funded prekindergarten, which now starts as early as three years old, was reduced or paused for several months due to rapidly changing health guidelines.11 Parents who would typically have accessed these services were pushed to pay out of pocket for private services or find a family member to do the care work at home.

Moralizing demands for family self-sufficiency and a mystical belief that women relations are the best caretakers continue to dominate discussions about social services by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. At the same time, wage compression, skyrocketing health care costs, and increases in household debt have made a joke of the idea that many families can cover their necessary costs without government support. Only financially fit families, it seems, deserve to have access to needed resources for their young, old, and frail relations at any time and especially in a time of crisis.

These problems around care, particularly childcare, are not new or unique to the pandemic. In fact, the current crisis of childcare infrastructure in COVID-19 times echoes aspects of what I saw in my multiyear ethnographic study of food allergy advocacy.12 Food allergy families had limited support from outside institutions such as schools. Adults had to organize around the need for one well-paid adult with health insurance benefits, usually a man, and a second adult who could act as the full-time caretaker of the family’s allergic children, usually a woman. In the context of a sudden disaster such as the pandemic, the slow-burning struggles of US families, such as the ones that I observed in my earlier research, have become a second-order disaster in their own right.

In interviews with dozens of parents of food-allergic children and attendance at numerous events by and for people with food allergies in the United States and through reading all the memoirs and articles about living with food allergies that I could get my hands on, I heard time and time again about the lengths that women had to go to in order to ensure the basic health and safety of their food-allergic children. Schools were a common flashpoint. Women often had to fight to force public schools to recognize their legal requirements under the Americans with Disability Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act to ensure safety measures or appropriate alternatives for food-allergic children. It could be a part-time job in itself to attend meetings, take children to doctors to receive required medical documentation, seek outside review of proposed safety measures, and educate individual teachers and other parents in implementation after a plan was approved. All of this work was uncompensated. The bureaucratic burden of coordinating with schools and other care providers outside the home even led some women to quit waged work to oversee the care and education of their children, even when a child attended school full-time.

Ultimately, a school’s inaction in providing more comprehensive support for food-allergic children creates invisible work for their parents. But it doesn’t seem like work is being done when everything works and no one gets sick. Parents are not demanding compensation for their time or knowledge, so it seems free to school administrators. Everyone wins—except the parents (again, especially women) working behind the scenes to make it all seem effortless.

This is just one small example of how care for children in the United States is treated as a problem to be solved by individuals—particularly women—within families in ordinary times. Allergen safety is not guaranteed, given the current status of food safety regulations in the United States. Allergen safety is supported in only a lackluster way by the public education system, largely on a case-by-case basis, and requires significant intervention by mothers to get even imperfect results. For some, the burden is such that it is easier to stay home and become a full-time caretaker than to work or pursue other endeavors. Such reliance on women to orchestrate and carry out appropriate care work for vulnerable family members arises time and time again in the history of families, medicine, and disability. The pandemic did not create these problems, but it did supercharge them.

Women Hold Things Together

Comparing the current situation to my research on food allergy advocacy shows that the crisis of access to support for caring for children is not new, just adjusted in form and in whom it affects. It is now a generalized crisis mediated by school and childcare facility closures rather than one primarily felt by parents of the lower income and wealth strata and parents of children with disabilities or chronic illnesses. But those who were already vulnerable are feeling the effects even more acutely, with fewer options of private childcare and school available and less flexible work arrangements. This latest crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic compounds long-standing, slow-burning crises organized by race, class, gender, and nationality, or what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence” in the context of environmental activism.13

The COVID-19 pandemic also points to how, in a disaster, the most easily available solution can rise to the top with little critical or creative thinking on the part of officials and policymakers. Schools were closed—rightly so from the perspective of limiting transmission14—with little thought to who would do care work in their absence or how non–care work tasks in the economy and society would get done. Mothers and other family members had cobbled together care for children before, so perhaps this private, hidden system would save the day once again. This type of thoughtlessness about downstream consequences also seems to be a signature attitude of our times. Yet a crisis, more than any other moment, is a time for careful thought about how policy and action affect opportunities for freedom and oppression, marginalization and inclusion. As Donna Haraway argues, an existential crisis of care and life is the most necessary time for critical thinking, which should prioritize seeing from the perspective of the actors most prone to being forgotten. In a crisis, “think we must.”15

Was the state of care in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic a disaster? It depends on who you ask. For those who are not dealing with the effects of a lack of childcare, care for disabled family members, and elder care, it may seem like a distraction from bigger problems, such as vaccine distribution and the overall economic outlook. But for parents at home juggling parenting and work, as digital humanities professor Miriam Posner said, the pandemic has been a “giant fucking impossible disaster hanging over all of our heads.”16 This is especially the case for women. With parents thrust back into caring for young children full-time, often on top of waged work for outside employers, seemingly flexible gendered divisions of labor in the home are likely to fall back on patriarchal assumptions about responsibility for childcare.

To be sure, a return to the home is sometimes welcomed by working women themselves, because parenting can be enjoyable and meaningful work. This is a perfectly reasonable choice if it could be made freely and with control over the timing and conditions under which a parent stays home full-time. COVID-19 has removed any semblance of agency from such “decisions” that parents, especially women, might make. As Jessica Calarco put it, in moments of need, “other countries have social safety nets. The US has women.”17

From Crisis to Exhaustion

In December 2020 when I wrote an earlier version of this text,18 I conceptualized the issue at stake as a crisis or even a “disaster” of care. This is because in the first weeks and months of the pandemic, finding care was an emergency, especially for essential workers: grocery store clerks, truckers, maintenance workers, restaurant kitchen staff, and medical personnel. But as the pandemic dragged on and on, the sense of emergency dulled into everyday fatigue, stagnation, and dread. We’ve gone back to work with even flimsier care infrastructures and even more needs for care than ever before. And we’re exhausted. The pandemic may have been declared over politically and economically.19 But experientially, its physical, demographic, and psychic wounds continue to unfold. Amid this ongoing crisis, the politics of care has shifted from the politics of disaster to exhaustion.

Exhaustion, according to Anna Katharina Schaffner, has always been with humanity, though its physical, psychic, and spiritual manifestations have changed over time. “On an affective, emotional, and spiritual level,” she writes, “we can describe the symptoms of exhaustion as weariness, disillusionment, apathy, hopelessness, and lack of motivation. Exhaustion can also result in restlessness and irritability.” This moment in the history of the United States shares a feeling of “lateness” with “the decline of the Roman Empire and the nineteenth-century fin-de-siecle.”20 It is not only that so many people are tired of what’s been happening to us. It is also hard to remain hopeful that things could ever get better. The pandemic did not improve our quality of life, but it sharply increased the downward slope of an already slippery slide downward, especially for those already vulnerable to exploitation and neglect.21

Lauren Berlant draws an explicit connection between exhaustion and the everyday experience of capitalism. “This is the material context for so many: working life exhausts practical sovereignty, the exercise of the will in the scene of the contingencies of survival. At the same time that one builds a life, the pressures of its reproduction can be experienced as exhausting.”22 Caring for children, elders, disabled kin, and ourselves is necessary to sustain society and is hard enough. But add in waged work on top of fragile care systems that crumble in the midst of a pandemic due to likely fewer family members alive to share the load, and the exhaustion multiplies.

Berlant goes on to argue that “eating is a form of ballast against wearing out, but it is also a counter-dissipation.”23 Eating grounds existence in an antifat, overworked world; it offers a way to reclaim pleasure and time into the open corners of everyday life. Fat bodies become evidence of sovereignty over one’s self. Similarly, bell hooks points out that while white feminists are not wrong to observe that caretaking work is hard, even depleting, it can also be pleasurable, desired, and a respite from alienated, productive labor outside of the home. Black women’s experiences of being denied the ability to care for their children—first in the context of chattel slavery24 and more recently in the oppressive grip of child welfare agencies that disproportionately break up Black families25—underscores the value that reproductive labor can have for the people who do it.

Even so, everyone deserves a break from work. In a Marxist feminist frame, caretaking work is reproductive labor, essential to capital yet not rewarded with wages. Reproductive labor reproduces workers, values, and society itself, in contrast to waged labor that produces goods and value to be extracted by capitalists. Even though this work may be done within our own households and for family and friends, caretaking work can still deplete us. If caretakers give more than they get—materially or spiritually—there will only be less to give in the future.26

What Politics Are Possible When We Can’t Even?

A generalized state of exhaustion creates a politically tricky situation that all the theory in the world cannot solve. Layered exhaustion weighing us down over time erodes our ability to do anything about it. We were so tired in the late pandemic that most in the United States appeared willing to accept the baseless claim from the Biden administration that it’s “over.” Most of us were too tired from all the bad news and too much work to look up the current case rates, the death rates, the rates of COVID-related disability.27 I saw this in myself, even though most people might have found me overly cautious. In 2020 I was a gadfly for my institution’s COVID policies and took on a leadership role in a unionization drive. In 2022 I kept one eye on the clock, counting down to daycare pickup, and declined phone calls from everyone except my closest colleagues and family. I didn’t speak up or email anyone when my institution dropped its mask mandate in September 2022. I simply pleaded with my students: Wouldn’t you prefer to have class in person? Yes? Then don’t get me and my baby sick. Please wear a mask.

It’s done, we’re tired, time to move on.

What remains for the survivors of COVID-19—including you, reader? What spaces of sovereignty remain to be claimed? What is (y)our ballast? And what evidence exists that (y)our methods of coping are working? It feels as though the counterweights to productivity that made sense in the past have stopped working. The nineteenth century had the rest cure and the travel cure,28 general-purpose panaceas for everything from tuberculosis to asthma to hysteria. While rest cures could be abusive when they confined women and disabled people against their will or preference, autonomy with a lack of rest is taking the pleasure out of life by wearing us down. In the twentieth century, middle-class burnouts left the cities for the suburbs, and the social safety net slowly expanded to support (though not always in real comfort or equitably) the elderly and single mothers. The first two decades of the twenty-first century saw the revival of mass protest movements and other glimmers of imaginings of alternatives to late capitalism, such as localized Occupy cells. But the rent is just too damn high now to take time out to protest or quit our jobs to work the land. And caretakers are too damn tired to try.

The capitalist class, meanwhile, is busy pathologizing the ways people have found to cope. The New York Times recently renamed “working to spec” (that is, just doing your job and going home) as “quiet quitting.”29 Managers see simply doing one’s job as a sign not of conscientiousness, self-care, and staying in one’s lane but instead that people no longer care about their jobs. Quiet quitting is happening alongside the “worker shortage.” Employers claim that they cannot find enough workers for public-facing jobs in the service industry; in agriculture, made many times more dangerous in recent years by climate change; and in high-stress, long-hours, low-autonomy jobs in health care, such as nursing. Employers, incidentally, are also unwilling to raise wages or improve schedules or benefits for these jobs. They do not acknowledge a connection between what is on offer and the thinning ranks of the willing.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, feminist theorist Kathi Weeks wrote about the relationship between not working and political imagination. She noted that “in the . . . political climate” at the time, the demands for basic income and shorter hours could of course be dismissed as ‘merely utopian.’ Rather than waste time on impractical and untimely demands, so the argument goes, feminists and others should conserve their meager energies and set their sights on more politically feasible goals.” She then leads into her defense of utopianism with a series of rhetorical questions that remain relevant to our pandemic times: “What if the utopianism of these demands is not a liability but an asset? What if we were to respond to the charge of utopianism not with embarrassment or defensive denial but with recognition and affirmation? And what might such a utopianism without apology look like?”30

Service workers exiting work may have no other choice, but in light of Weeks’s claims about the function of utopianism, they may also be on the right track, politically speaking. In their exhaustion, “quiet quitting,” and staying home to take care of children, they are doing “nothing” from the perspective of capital: no productive work, only reproductive care. They are, on the inside, acting out of necessity, but from the outside, in the aggregate, their care work constitutes a demand for fewer hours at work.

Not working may be the way out. Like disability activists urge us to do,31 let us sit instead with our relations who need care—those of us who are feminized as well as those who are not. Say “no” to working when our children are home sick or Zooming into class from the recovery room after an elderly parent’s surgery. Capitalism prizes efficiency, constant effort, and the sacrifice of bodies for productivity. Inefficiency, little effort, and the maintenance of bodily integrity put systems of extraction at risk.

The telos of exhaustion isn’t a passive inability to work; it is a refusal to accept what is on offer any longer, an active utopianism.

Notes

1. 1.  US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Consumer Prices Up 9.1 Percent over the Year Ended June 2022, Largest Increase in 40 Years,” July 18, 2022, https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/consumer-prices-up-9-1-percent-over-the-year-ended-june-2022-largest-increase-in-40-years.htm.
2. 2.  The School Colors podcast episode “Ms. Mitchell’s Pandemic Diary” brings into sharp relief the trade-offs that parents and administrators made in reopening schools. In this episode, a New York City school principal in charge of a school predominated by students of color walks listeners through her own struggles with health, staffing, and care for students in 2021 and 2022.
3. 3.  Eliza Shapiro, “Only 26% of N.Y.C. Students Attend In-Person Classes, Far from Goal,” New York Times, October 26, 2020, New York, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/nyregion/nyc-schools-attendance.html.
4. 4.  David Cruz, “Who’s Going Back to NYC Public School Next Week? Here’s a Breakdown,” Gothamist, December 4, 2020, https://gothamist.com/news/whos-going-back-nyc-public-school-next-week-heres-breakdown.
5. 5.  Alyson Silkowski, NYC Under Three: A Plan to Make Child Care Affordable for New York City Families (New York City Comptroller, 2019), https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/nyc-under-three-a-plan-to-make-child-care-affordable-for-new-york-city-families/.
6. 6.  US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2021: 39–9011 Childcare Workers,” Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/oes/2021/may/oes399011.htm.
7. 7.  Liana Christin Landivar and Mark deWolf, “Mothers’ Employment Two Years Later: An Assessment of Employment Loss and Recovery During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Women’s Bureau, US Department of Labor, 2022, https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WB/media/Mothers-employment-2%20-years-later-may2022.pdf.
8. 8.  Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017).
9. 9.  Veena Dubal, “The Time Politics of Home-Based Digital Piecework,” C4E Journal, 2020, https://c4ejournal.net/2020/07/04/v-b-dubal-the-time-politics-of-home-based-digital-piecework-2020-c4ej-xxx/.
10. 10.  Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America (Harvard University Press, 2021).
11. 11.  Office of the New York State Comptroller, A Comparative Assessment of New York City’s Federal Pandemic Education Aid, November 2022, https://www.osc.state.ny.us/files/reports/osdc/pdf/report-12-2023.pdf.
12. 12.  Danya Glabau, Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care (University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
13. 13.  Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011).
14. 14.  Tori L. Cowger et al., “Lifting Universal Masking in Schools—Covid-19 Incidence Among Students and Staff,” New England Journal of Medicine 387, no. 21 (2022): 1935–46, https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2211029.
15. 15.  Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016), 34.
16. 16.  Miriam Posner, “Sitting with the Rage,” Miriam Posner’s Blog, October 9, 2020, https://miriamposner.com/blog/sitting-with-the-rage/.
17. 17.  Anne Helen Petersen, “Other Countries Have Social Safety Nets. The US Has Women,” Culture Study, November 11, 2020, https://annehelen.substack.com/p/other-countries-have-social-safety.
18. 18.  Danya Glabau, “ COVID-19 and the Politics of Care,” Items: Insights from the Social Sciences, February 18, 2021, https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/disaster-studies/covid-19-and-the-politics-of-care/.
19. 19.  President Joseph Biden declared that the COVID-19 pandemic was over in the United States in a 60 Minutes interview in September 2022. Scott Pelley, “President Joe Biden: The 2022 60 Minutes Interview,” 60 Minutes, CBS, September 18, 2022, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-joe-biden-60-minutes-interview-transcript-2022-09-18/.
20. 20.  Anna K. Schaffner, Exhaustion: A History (Columbia University Press, 2017), 5.
21. 21.  The two starkest pieces of evidence for decline in the United States are the falling life expectancy and the rising maternal mortality rate. These two markers are used to gauge and compare the efficacy of public health measures between countries.
22. 22.  Lauren Berlant, “Risky Bigness: On Obesity, Eating, and the Ambiguity of ‘Health,’” in Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, ed. Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland (New York University Press, 2010), 34.
23. 23.  “Risky Bigness,” 34.
24. 24.  Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Harvard University Press, 2006).
25. 25.  Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (Basic Books, 2002).
26. 26.  For a Marxist feminist theorization of the political risks and possibilities of depletion as a consequence of care work, see Shirin M. Rai, Catherine Hoskyns, and Dania Thomas, “Depletion,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 16, no. 1 (2014): 86–105, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2013.789641.
27. 27.  For the week ending March 22, 2023, there were 2,060 COVID-19 deaths and 133,521 reported cases. The seven-day average of hospital admissions from March 22 to March 28, 2023, was 2,370. Estimates for long COVID prevalence vary, but Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey data estimated that 14.8 percent of United States adults had ever experienced long COVID as of March 2022. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “COVID Data Tracker,” March 30, 2023, https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker; and National Center for Health Statistics, “Long COVID,” US Census Bureau, Household Pulse Survey, 2022–2023, last modified November 8, 2023, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/long-covid.htm.
28. 28.  Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2007); and Sheila Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
29. 29.  Alyson Kreuger, “Who Is Quiet Quitting For?,” New York Times, August 23, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/style/quiet-quitting-tiktok.html.
30. 30.  Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2011), 175.
31. 31.  Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha emphasizes the political import of disabled people simply being together and going through the motions of everyday life together in solidarity. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018).