Intimate Economies

Bodies, Emotions, and Sexualities on the Global Market

Susanne Hofmann, Adi Moreno, Susanne Hofmann, Adi Moreno

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781137560353
• eBook ISBN: 9781137560360
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book illustrates how intimate workers in different socio-cultural contexts negotiate the commercial uses of their sexuality, identity, affect, and bodies, thereby often defying inequality, impoverishment,  and resource depletion in their regions. The studies shed light on the multi-faceted experiences of subjects involved in intimate economies, oscillating between personal empowerment and agency, as well as the required subjection to the demands of the current market regime, entailing participation in precarious employment, often involving bodily risk, economic exploitation and stigmatization. The contributions demonstrate the interrelatedness of market intimacy, family economies, and transnational care arrangements, and thereby challenge Western notions of the subject and the free market.

© The Author(s) 2016

Susanne Hofmann and Adi Moreno (eds.)Intimate EconomiesPalgrave Studies in Globalization and Embodiment10.1057/978-1-137-56036-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Global Intimate Economies: Discontents and Debates

Susanne Hofmann¹ and Adi Moreno²

(1)

University of Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany

(2)

Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives, Manchester, UK

End Abstract

This book is concerned with intimacy that has become part of market exchanges, or intimacy that in some way has become integrated into laboring processes to increase the value of labor. We understand intimacy in the most broad and basic manner as a form of connection. The Latin word intimus can be translated as innermost. Privacy, familiarity, sexuality, love and personal connection are notions that are generally understood as related to intimacy. Being intimate with somebody, for instance, involves “being close” or “closely connected” to somebody, which can be understood in physical, emotional and cognitive ways. An underlying premise that guides our understanding of intimacy, and subsequently the selection of the contributions and the structure of this book is that a “close connection” (intimacy) exists between a person and their own feelings, sexuality and body. Hereby, however, we intend to not determine or morally judge individuals’ relationships to their own feelings, sexuality and body, or whether intimate practices or aspects of the self should or should not be part of market transactions.

Fundamental for opponents of commercial intimacy is that by exchanging intimacy for money, the integrity between the body and the self becomes severed, which allegedly carries grave psychological consequences, and therefore damage the seller or provider of intimate services (Barry 1995; Jeffreys 1997). Accordingly, for such scholars, it is not just services that are sold in commercial intimate practices, such as prostitution, for instance, but sellers place their selves on the market, because the embodied labor cannot be stripped from the person who sells her sexuality (Pateman 1988). However, many providers of commercial intimate services strongly disagree with that view, as the following extract from an adult performer’s blog demonstrates:

One time I gave a guy a dance and he goes, “thank you for sharing yourself with me.” The other girls thought it was sweet and I thought it was sick as fuck.—The wide-spread idea that we are selling, renting, sharing some integral part of ourselves is so gross to me … no one thinks that nannies are selling some vital part of themselves as they give your child (pseudo?) affectionate attention and wipe their asses (Red, adult performer). ¹

Core to our book is the recognition of the understandings and experiences of commercial intimacy by those involved in such relationships and processes. Commercial intimate practices have often been accompanied by discontent in both public debate and academic discourse. Although discussions of the commodification of sexuality (Van der Veen 2001; O’Connell Davidson 2002; Liechty 2005; Thu-Huong 2008), intimate labor (Wilson 2004; Boris and Salazar Parreñas 2010; Wolkowitz et al. 2013) and bodily substances (Franklin and Ragoné 1998; Scheper-Hughes and Wacquant 2003; Waldby 2006; Waldby and Cooper 2008; Kroløkke et al. 2012; Vora 2015) are certainly not a new field, our book aims to reopen this debate, and get to the bottom of the inherent discontent guided by the results of new empirical studies and the voices of individuals engaged in commercial intimate exchanges. As a response to this debate, our collection emphasizes the lived experiences of persons who take part in markets for intimate and embodied trade. We present different viewpoints and a variety of geographic locations in order to explore the multiplicity and diversity of experiences which have often been batched together under the monolithic concept of “bodies for sale.”

To situate embodied commerce and intimate labor within the geographic, temporal and cultural context they operate within is crucial. We suggest that: (1). technologies, legal regulations and social contexts matter to the experiences of subjects involved in intimate exchanges; (2). in different intimate markets, different notions of commodified bodies and their capacities are employed; and (3). these differences entail variegated significations regarding personal experience, material possibilities and outcomes for persons involved in the intimate and bodily trade. We refuse to encompass the complex and varied intimate economies that appear in this book with one overarching theorization, instead, in this introduction, we focus on discussing a range of theoretical concepts that recur in debates on intimate labor and bodily commerce. Most of those concepts, such as gifts, commodities, exploitation, harm, alienation, commodification, subjectivity, market, consent, choice or freedom have originated in philosophy, political science, economics, feminist writings or anthropology and traversed into other academic disciplines in the course of debates on human bodies and intimate capacities. We insist on the significance of these concepts as commonly applied to intimate labor and bodily commerce. However, we also assert that they urgently require a revision in dialogue with the lived experiences and reasoning of subjects involved in intimate exchanges.

Gifts and Commodities

Some of the existing literature on the commerce of intimacy have envisioned the private or domestic sphere as a bulwark that defies the harsh and impersonal world of market capitalism (for instance, Hochschild 1983, 2012). According to this approach, intimacy should be shared out of altruistic motives, and therefore be exchanged between persons or groups as a form of gift exchange, never as commodity. Many nostalgic approaches to understanding intimate relations that have influenced academic studies can be traced back to Marx’ idealistic notion of the “social character” of familial labor in precapitalist peasant families (Marx 1978, 326). Intimacy is presumed a gift in common idealizations of precapitalist social relations, unmarked by inequality or instrumentality. However, gift exchanges do also involve complex and ambiguous processes and relationships that are not free from conflict. Describing the exchange of gifts through cycles of reciprocity, Bourdieu (1998), for instance, speaks of the dual truth of the gift. The concept of the dual truth relates to a gap between the subjective intentions and perception of each individual gift-giving event, and the objective reciprocal and power relationship embodied in gift-giving. Based on the inequality of power that constitutes the backdrop of many gift-giving processes, social actors “have an interest in ‘disinterestedness’” (Bourdieu 1998, 93). Marcel Mauss (2002) focused rather on the “spirit” of the gift that compels to reciprocation by possessing the person who receives it and thereby connecting her or him to the giver. In Mauss’ interpretation, the spirit helped conceal the long-term reciprocal function of the gift and the embeddedness of gift-giving into existing power relations.

While gifts and commodities are often imagined as opposed to one another, a range of scholars have emphasized that empirically (in lived reality) the two cannot always be as neatly separated from each other as we might like (Zelizer 2005). In their article “Love as a fictitious commodity,” the authors Swader et al. (2013) explore the meanings of women’s gift-for-sex barters in contemporary Russia. The gift-for-sex exchanges that women pursue are contractual, and as such, they no longer are “pure gifts.” However, the authors stress that the act of giving a gift, even a monetary one, by definition conveys the symbolic meaning of the desire to enter into a reciprocal relationship, rather than paying a salary, which stands for an economic transaction that equalizes labor or goods with a specific monetary value. Yet, the authors also emphasize that women’s often specific gift-requests time and again “puncture this veil of assumed altruistic or independent intent” and easily appear as “bald-faced exchange,” despite the fact that it is women’s intention to subjectively disconnect their barter practices from market transactions or commodity exchanges. Hence, such gift-for-sex barters are “hybrids that embody both some degree of the emotional-romantic transfers made possible through the gift form and also the contractual nature of the barter” (Swader et al. 2013). A broad number of anthropological and sociological studies have described such sexual-affective economic exchanges in different parts of the globe, emphasizing that the realms of the altruistic-intimate (gift) and the economic-public (commodity) cannot neatly be separated (Cabezas 2004, 2009; Brennan 2004; Bernstein 2007; Piscitelli 2007, 2008, 2013; Nieto Olivar 2008; Cheng 2010).

Similar to transactions that involve intimate emotions and sexual practices, the commercial exchanges of human body parts are often articulated through gift symbolism, whether in the context of organ transplantation, medical testing, reproductive services or gamete supply. In particular, gamete provision and surrogacy are regulated as a form of “donation” or altruistic exchange in most countries of the Global North (Spar 2006; Kroløkke et al. 2012; Nahman 2013), while the sale of live organ donation is prohibited by international legislation (Scheper-Hughes 2003; Mor and Boas 2005). These transactions, which often nonetheless involve monetary endowments for body parts, tissues or reproductive capacities, are defined as compensation or return for expenses to the persons providing their organs; and as payment for service or professional knowledge on the receiving end. These trades in the body exemplify therefore the multiple and dynamic ontologies of objects and subjects within intimate markets, as their meaning often alters within chains of production and consumption, according to the social values that are imbued within them (Thompson 2005; Nordqvist 2011; Nahman 2013). Participants in the body trade perform an intricate and nuanced “ontological choreography” (Thompson 2005) in order to ensure that the exchanges are framed according to existing moral norms and human dignity. In the process, human subjects, body parts, future persons and raw materials shift between different ontological statuses and subject positions, according to the desires of participants and the outcomes of the trade (ibid.).

Medical-legal mechanisms for sourcing, storing and distributing vital materials from healthy donors to persons in need date back to the development of blood banks during World War II (Waldby 2006; Thompson 2007). Titmuss (1970) linked the “gift ethics” of blood donations with the emergence of redistributive ethics of the welfare state, and with a form of national social cohesion and solidarity. The anonymity of the gift, according to Titmuss, engenders reciprocal ties not between the receiver and giver, but among members of the nation state who are all potential receivers and givers (ibid.). In the contemporary world, these mechanisms include the development of organ donation schemes for transplant purposes, gamete and embryo banking, and the sourcing preservation and growing of live tissues for the purposes of scientific research (Cooper and Waldby 2014; Parry 2015). In these sites, the gift ideology still carries on as significant discursive frame for the provision of embodied materials, as for instance in the provision of samples of human tissue for research purposes, which is expected to be based in voluntary donations rather than monetary payments (Waldby 2006; Thompson 2007; Gottweis et al. 2009). At the same time, over the last few decades, an advanced and ever growing market for body organs, reproductive cells and tissues and in vivo processes has developed into a global industry. These markets include the sale of gametes, surrogacy, live-donor organs and the market for drug testing and medical experimentation in healthy subjects. These industries are based upon global chains of production and consumption, often servicing the needs of persons in the Global North, and based on the vitality and capacities of bodi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Global Intimate Economies: Discontents and Debates
• 1. Commodifying Affects, Emotions and Selves
• 2. Sexualized Bodies on the Market
• 3. Global Reproductive Commerce
• Backmatter