Intimate Labors
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Intimate Labors

Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Eileen Boris, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Eileen Boris

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eBook - ePub

Intimate Labors

Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Eileen Boris, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Eileen Boris

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About This Book

What do home health aides, call center operators, prostitutes, sperm donors, nail manicurists, and housecleaners have in common? Around the world, they make their livings through touch, closeness, and personal care. Their labors, both paid and unpaid, sustain the day-to-day work that we require to survive. This book takes a close look at carework, domestic work, and sex work in everyday life and illuminates the juncture where money and intimacy meet.

Intimate labor is presented as a comprehensive category of investigation into gender, race, class, and other power relations in the context of global economic transformations. In chronicling the history of intimate labor in light of the rise and devolution of welfare states, women's workforce participation, family formation, the expansion of sex work into new industries, and the development of institutions for dependent people, this wide-ranging reader advances debates over the relationship between care and economy.

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Yes, you can access Intimate Labors by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Eileen Boris, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Eileen Boris in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Ciencias sociales & Estudios de género. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

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Year
2010
ISBN
9780804777278

1

Introduction
Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
ONE OF THE MOST STRIKING FEATURES of contemporary global capitalism is the heightened commodification of intimacy that pervades social life.1 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, sex partners, children, and elderly, ill, or disabled people. They comprise tasks for daily life, including household maintenance (cooking, cleaning, washing, shopping) and personal existence (bathing, feeding, turning over, ambulation). They rely on clean sheets and swept rooms. They involve bodily and psychic intimacy: manipulating genitalia, wiping noses, lifting torsos, and feeding mouths, but also listening, talking, holding, and just being there. The presence of dirt, bodies, and intimacy, however, helps to stigmatize such work and those who perform it.2
Characteristics that sociologist Paula England and economist Nancy Folbre attribute to care work apply to the broader arena of intimate labor: “The worker provides a service to someone with whom he or she is in personal (usually face-to-face) contact”; “the worker responds to a need or desire that is directly expressed by the recipient”; and, perhaps to a lesser extent, the service“develops the human capabilities of the recipient.”3 These criteria seemingly exclude hotel housekeepers and private household servants, but the lines between tending people and tending their homes are fluid. Home health aides spend a good portion of their time cleaning, cooking, and straightening up, tasks that are essential to enabling an elderly or disabled person to remain at home in dignity. The hotel housekeeper, who has “to get on my knees to clean the bathroom” and provide additional “creature comforts” for guests, produces pleasure and comfort even if she works when the receiver is not present and provides indirect care.4 In sum, the labors of cleaners and housekeepers revolve around the intimate and the bodily, belonging to those intimate labors associated with unpaid tasks done for the household and its members by wives, mothers, daughters, and previously slaves.
What Is Intimate Labor?
These chapters capture a wide range of intimate labors and complicate the space-time continuum under which such work occurs. They include fleeting encounters and durable ties. Regardless of temporality, these labors all rely on the maintenance of precise social relations between employers and employees or customers and providers. Brief encounters under the rubric of intimate labor might comprise nail manicuring, bill collection, street prostitution, and sperm donation. Intimate labors that depend on durable relations might include various forms of sex work, such as bar hostessing and escort service; child and elderly care; domestic work; and various forms of health care. Through ethnography and history, scholars are determining if a job is a form of intimate labor rather than merely drawing a line without considering case studies of actual labor.
The category “intimate labor” places in a continuum the discretely examined categories of care, sex, and domestic work. These forms of labor are quite varied and diverse. In our discussion, care work entails not only the tending of the elderly or the sick as described by Maria de la Luz Ibarra or the watching of children as discussed by Ellen Reese but also the care of transgender subjects. As Jane Ward illuminates, care work can embrace the “gender labor” of feminine partners who bolster the masculinity of their transgender female-to-male partners with their performances of femininity. Likewise, sex work comes in diverse forms and would include the labor of sexually titillating customers in hostess clubs, as seen by Rhacel Salazar Parrenas; the street work of transgender sex workers, as presented by Becki Ross; fleeting encounters between working-class prostitutes and their customers, as recorded by Kimberly Kay Hoang and Elizabeth Bernstein; but also the purchase of the girlfriend experience, also analyzed by Bernstein. Lastly, domestic work entails not only cleaning but also various forms of care work that are performed inside the home, as Ibarra and Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein suggest. Even domestic labor makes social relations that involve forms of intimacy, as Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray found for Kolkata and New York and Premilla Nadasen, for Atlanta. Notably, there are porous boundaries between these various work categories. Sex workers do a great deal of care work, and likewise domestic workers provide care.
Attentiveness appears as a key to understanding intimate labor, but this does not necessarily entail face-to-face interactions. The work of tending encompasses a wide range of activities from taking care of one's reproductive needs—for instance, the provision of children through adoption or the giving of an orgasm via sex—to tending to bodily care—from the provision of a manicure by a working professional, as Miliann Kang shows here, to the giving of a sponge bath to an elderly patient. It includes the upkeep of homes as well as people. Tending need not entail face-to-face encounters because technological advancements facilitate communication across time and space. Attentiveness could entail tending to the materials and objects that improve the quality of our lives. Ariel Ducey magnificently points to this in her description of the ways hospital workers ensure the comfort of their patients by adjusting equipment, regulating the hot water tap, and supplying them with adequate toiletries.
Intimate labor stands alongside other conceptions. In this volume, Dorothy Sue Cobble speaks about “personal service workers” interchangeably with “intimate workers.” Intimate labor might not involve face-to-face interaction, though many types of personal service work do entail intimate labor. At the same time, not all types of interactive service occupations would fall under the rubric of what we mean by “intimate labor.” A fast-food worker, a stamp dispenser at a post office, or a concierge in a hotel need not do intimate labor. However, bill collectors could arguably be categorized as intimate laborers because their work requires them to know intimate details about another person that could be embarrassing to that person if known to others. Building from Viviana Zelizer's theorizations on the purchase of intimacy, intimate labor would lead to “knowledge and attention that are not widely available to third persons.”5 The knowledge generated by intimate labor would include “such elements as shared secrets, interpersonal rituals, bodily information, awareness of personal vulnerability and shared memory of embarrassing situations.”6
Some forms of labor clearly fall under the rubric of intimate labor more than others. Why would a bill collector in India, as described by Kalindi Vora in this volume, engage in intimate labor while, let us say, a concierge in a five- star hotel in San Francisco, as described by sociologist Rachel Sherman, would not necessarily do so?7 A sex worker is clearly an intimate laborer because, after all, intimacy is a euphemism for sexual intercourse.8 Likewise, a domestic worker because of access to the intimate space of the home and knowledge of its inhabitants' habits would be an intimate laborer. But what makes a nail salon worker an intimate laborer? And how do the labor of foreign adoption and the construction of good and bad motherhood, as considered by Laura Briggs, advance the formulation of intimate labor?
Intimate labor involves tending to the intimate needs of individuals inside and outside their home. Our intimate needs would include not just sexual gratification but also our bodily upkeep, care for loved ones, creating and sustaining social and emotional ties, and health and hygiene maintenance. Meeting one's intimate needs would include not only child care but also the bearing of children for others, as Briggs astutely points out in this volume. Under this definition, work that is as wide ranging as prostitution, nail salon work, surrogate mothering, and housecleaning would be considered intimate labor. Intimate labor also refers to work that exposes personal information that would leave one vulnerable if others had access to such knowledge. Such work would arguably include bill collection, domestic work, elder care, various forms of therapy, and prostitution.
Doing Intimate Labor
Our formulation of intimate labor builds from a rich feminist literature on women's work. Enhancing our conception of intimate labor are previous discussions on the labor processes of reproductive labor and emotional labor.9 In this section, we situate our discussion of intimate labor in feminist discussions of women's work. We wish to distinguish what we mean by intimate labor from emotional labor, a concept that many of our contributors draw from when explaining specific intimate labor processes, and reproductive labor, a category that one would argue also encompasses the provision of sex, care, and domestic work, which are the three types of discretely examined occupational categories that we wish to bring together in this volume. By distinguishing intimate labor from these other forms of labor identified in the literature, we wish to further contain our definition of intimate labor. Moreover, we wish to clarify that not all forms of interactive service occupations would be forms of intimate labor.
The process of intimate labor is not uniform. As we noted earlier, intimate labor in some cases entails face-to-face labor, and in other cases it does not. In this volume, our contributors introduce various labors constituted as intimate labor including for example the work of “gender labor” identified by Ward and “entertainment work” highlighted by Parrenas, which refers to the labor of sexually titillating customers via song, dance, and conversation in hostess clubs. These examples show that intimate labor manifests in different forms, requires different labor responsibilities, and entails diverse labor processes.
In many situations, intimate labor would entail emotional labor but not always. Coined by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, the term emotional labor refers to a form of face-to-face labor in which one displays certain emotions to induce particular feelings in the client or customer.10 Emotional labor relies on the manipulation of one's emotions. Various intimate laborers do emotional labor, including bill collectors who must act stern or empathetic so as to pressure customers to pay their bills, hostesses and high-class prostitutes who must display emotions of joy and love to heighten feelings of specialness among customers, and domestic workers who must suppress their emotions so as not to make their employers uncomfortable.
In explaining the process of performing emotional labor, Hochschild draws from the work of Konstantin Stanislavski to distinguish “surface acting” and “deep acting.” In “surface acting,” one merely pretends to be the character. For instance, a domestic worker would pretend to feel grateful that her employer offered a hand-me-down of furniture instead of a raise at the end of the year. In contrast, in “deep acting,” one embodies the traits and emotions of his or her character, becoming the actual character. In this scenario, the domestic worker would feel genuinely happy to have received old furniture instead of a salary increase. According to Hochschild, emotional labor often results in “emotional dissonance” for workers unable to feel the emotions they must display but who have no choice but to feign them.11 Those suffering from emotional dissonance are more likely to be persons in low-status occupations who are without “status shields” against the poor treatment they may experience at work from those with greater access to money, power, authority, or status in society. Thus, domestic workers, street prostitutes, and bill collectors are those more likely to suffer from emotional dissonance. Hochschild's notion and discussion of emotional labor gleans insight into the labor process of intimate workers, as their performance of their work often relies on the manipulation and control of their emotions. However, emotional labor is not a prerequisite or requirement in intimate labor. In many cases, intimate laborers need not regulate their emotions. Sperm donors, considered by Rene Almeling in this volume, and surrogate mothers do not engage in emotional labor, though their jobs may involve emotional labor that would occur in private and not public spaces. Lastly, emotional labor is not always the central marker that defines the experience of intimate laborers. Emotional labor may be an aspect of the job for, let us say, a housecleaner or a nail salon worker, but it need not be a significant aspect that defines the job.
Another way to characterize intimate labor is to define it as work that involves embodied and affective interactions in the service of social reproduction. According to sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn, social reproduction encompasses the “array of activities and relationships involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and intergenerationally.” She defines reproductive labor to include “activities such as purchasing household goods, preparing and serving food, laundering and repairing clothing, maintaining furnishings and appliances, socializing children, providing care and emotional support for adults, and maintaining kin and community ties.”12 Political economist Isabella Bakker provides an even more expansive definition that includes the biological, including “the conditions and social constructions of motherhood”; labor force replication, including “subsistence, education and training”; and “provisioning of caring needs,” including aspects “wholly privatized within families and kinship networks or socialized to some degree through state supports.”13 Not all of this work entails relation and emotional labor, closeness or touch, but a considerable amount does. Social reproduction refers not only to the care of others but also to the care of the self.
Care and domestic work are clearly included in the wide definition offered by Gl...

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