Your Body Is Their Offering: Sacrifice, Essentiality, and Labor During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Abstract: Using the response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, this paper addresses the ethic of self-sacrifice within the neoliberal order from the perspective of queer theology. Existing studies have analyzed the invention of homo economicus as interchangeable, sacrificial units of neoliberal-ism. However, failing to acknowledge how workers marked for sacrifice craft their own theologies of life under neoliberalism forecloses the opportunity to investigate what it feels like to be asked to self-sacrifice. This paper offers a queer theological intervention for analyzing how an essen-tial(ized) worker interprets her newly valued labor in this time of pandemic. Essential workers are asked not to bear witness to the failures of the neoliberal response to COVID-19, but to sacrifice themselves to redeem the moral and financial debt the state incurred in failing to guard against the pandemic. To what extent is neoliberal agentive discourse in American pandemic responses belied by teleological projects of sacrifice? What does the response reveal about the politico-moral con-struction of the subject under neoliberalism?