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.
ABSTRACT
The vexed relation between law and age/ageing is most apparent in the context of older prisoners. Late life may be accompanied by disabilities and dependencies. So, access to appropriate forms of care including medical care becomes even more crucial in custodial institutions like prisons where older prisoners live isolated from society. Since the spread of COVID-19, there have been attempts to decongest Indian prisons. However, older political prisoners charged (not convicted) for anti-state, terrorist activities continue to suffer in prison due to denial of bail. I argue that elderliness and the condition of health ought to be factors on which bail should be given irrespective of the nature of the charges. By using the framework of ‘law as temporality', I elucidate how the politics around the denial of bail by courts in India and the treatment of older political prisoners by prison authorities lead to the production of a ‘carceral time'. This article discusses how carceral time structures the embodied experiences of ageing in ways that defy the human rights of prisoners. Time not only disciplines but also determines the expendability of ageing bodies, particularly when time is an insidious form of waiting, as in the case of older political prisoners in the Bhima Koregaon case in India. This article highlights the need for the criminal justice system in India to consider elderliness as a ground for compassionate treatment towards older prisoners, and to uphold their rights to healthcare and to live with dignity. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU).