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Intimate Labors

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................................................................................................ixContributors............................................................................................................................................xi1 Introduction Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreas................................................................................................1Part I Remaking the Intimate: Technology and Globalization..............................................................................................132 Technologies of Caring Labor: From Objects to Affect Ariel Ducey.....................................................................................183 The Transmission of Care: Affective Economies and Indian Call Centers Kalindi Vora...................................................................334 Foreign and Domestic: Adoption, Immigration, and Privatization Laura Briggs..........................................................................495 Selling Genes, Selling Gender: Egg Agencies, Sperm Banks, and the Medical Market in Genetic Material Rene Almeling...................................636 Gender Labor: Transmen, Femmes, and Collective Work of Transgression Jane Ward.......................................................................787 Traveling Cultures of Servitude: Loyalty and Betrayal in New York and Kolkata Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray..............................................1018 My Reward Is Not Money: Deep Alliances and End-of-Life Care among Mexicana Workers and Their Wards Mara de la Luz Ibarra............................1179 Cultures of Flirtation: Sex and the Moral Boundaries of Filipina Migrant Hostesses in Tokyo Rhacel Salazar Parreas..................................13210 Bounded Authenticity and the Commerce of Sex Elizabeth Bernstein....................................................................................14811 Economies of Emotion, Familiarity, Fantasy, and Desire: Emotional Labor in Ho Chi Minh City's Sex Industry Kimberly Kay Hoang.......................16612 Making Home Care: Law and Social Policy in the U.S. Welfare State Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein...................................................18713 Power, Intimacy, and Contestation: Dorothy Bolden and Domestic Worker Organizing in Atlanta in the 1960s Premilla Nadasen...........................20414 Manicuring Intimacies: Inequality and Resistance in Nail Salon Work Miliann Kang....................................................................21715 But Who Will Care for the Children? Organizing Child Care Providers in the Wake of Welfare Reform Ellen Reese.......................................23116 Sex and (Evacuation from) the City: The Moral and Legal Regulation of Sex Workers in Vancouver's West End, 1975-1985 Becki Ross.....................249Part IV Conclusion: Thinking Ahead......................................................................................................................26517 Caring Everywhere Viviana Zelizer...................................................................................................................26718 More Intimate Unions Dorothy Sue Cobble.............................................................................................................280Bibliography............................................................................................................................................297Index...................................................................................................................................................335

Chapter One

Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreas

ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING FEATURES of contemporary global capitalism is the heightened commodification of intimacy that pervades social life. We not only seek to buy love, but also express devotion through goods and depend on services to fulfill obligations or display closeness to others. So did nineteenth-century Victorians in Britain, the United States, and throughout the British Empire. Our historical moment is distinguished by both the intensification of commodification and the subsequent crowding out of indigenous and alternative ways of being. But the monetization of daily life and the privatization of public goods still generate resistance in the broadest sense. People seek solace and joy on their own terms and develop collective challenges to their understanding of the good life.

Against the colonization of the intimate, this volume focuses on the proliferation of labors, both paid and unpaid, that sustains the day-to-day work that individuals and societies require to survive—and flourish. It moves us through the expanding service economy into the crevices of what appears as most private and thus most hidden, even if such locations reflect cultural definitions of the shameful or personal. It reveals acts of love and work for money to be interconnected. That is, the essays in this collection examine the social construction of commodified intimacies, or, more precisely, the intersections of money and intimacy in everyday life, by looking at the ways that intimacy as a material, affective, psychological, and embodied state characterizes such labors. Intimacy occurs in a social context; it is accordingly shaped by, even as it shapes, relations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. And the work of intimacy constitutes intimate labors.

But what intellectual work does the linking of intimate and labor perform? The joining of such terms denies the separation of home from work, work from labor, and productive from nonproductive labor that has characterized capitalist globalization. Intimate labor encompasses a range of activities, including bodily and household upkeep, personal and family maintenance, and sexual contact or liaison. It entails touch, whether of children or customers; bodily or emotional closeness or personal familiarity, such as sexual intercourse and bathing another; or close observation of another and knowledge of personal information, such as watching elderly people or advising trainees. Such work occurs in homes, hospitals, hotels, streets, and other public as well as private locations. It exists along a continuum of service and caring labor, from high-end nursing to low-end housekeeping, and includes sex, domestic, and care work. Against a scholarship that considers nurses, nannies, home aides, cleaners, prostitutes, and hostesses apart from each other, we explore intimate labor as a useful category of analysis to understand gender, racial, class, and other power relations in the context of global economic transformations.

Through the category of "intimate labor," we consider various occupations—usually subsumed under the often discretely examined categories of care, domestic, and sex work—as sharing common attributes. Each of these labors forges interdependent relations, represents work assumed to be the unpaid responsibility of women, and, consequently, is usually considered to be a non-market activity or an activity of low economic value that should be done by lower classes or racial outsiders. These activities promote the physical, intellectual, affective, and other emotional needs of strangers, friends, family,...