Intimate Labors : Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care

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. Technologies of caring labor : from objects to affect / Ariel Ducey The transmission of care : affective economies and Indian call centers / Kalindi Vora Foreign and domestic : adoption, immigration, and privatization / Laura Briggs Selling genes, selling gender : egg agencies, sperm banks, and the medical market in genetic material / Rene Almeling Gender labor : transmen, femmes, and collective work of transgression / Jane Ward Traveling cultures of servitude : loyalty and betrayal in New York and Kolkata / Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray My reward is not money : deep alliances and the end of life care among Mexicana workers and their wards / Maria de la Luz Ibarra Cultures of flirtation : sex and the moral boundaries of Filipina migrant hostesses in Tokyo / Rhacel Parreñas Bounded authenticity and the commerce of sex / Elizabeth Bernstein Economies of emotion, familiarity, fantasy, and desire : emotional labor in Ho Chi Minh City's sex industry / Kimberly Kay Hoang Making home care : law and social policy in the U.S. welfare state / Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein Power, intimacy, and contestation : Dorothy Bolden and domestic worker organizing in Atlanta in the 1960s / Premilla Nadasen Manicuring intimacies : inequality and resistance in nail salon work / Millian Kang But who will care for the children? : organizing child care providers in the wake of welfare reform / Ellen Reese Sex and (evacuation from) the city : the moral and legal regulation of sex workers in Vancouver's West End, 1975-1985 / Becki Ross Caring everywhere / Viviana Zelizer More intimate unions / Dorothy Sue Cobble. Boris and Parrenas bring together a collection of cutting-edge research on the many surprising ways we daily mix, split, and stir money with intimate life. Each encounter with the market raises subtle yet important issues for social theory and everyday life. We are all living it; this book helps us understand it."--Arlie Hochschild, author of The Managed Heart and The Commercialization of Intimate Life This collection represents a stellar interdisciplinary contribution to research on work shaped by personal and emotional interaction. The essays embody the best quality of the work they explore--a thoughtful and discerning sensitivity to human need."--Nancy Folbre, author of Greed, Lust and Gender and The Invisible Heart "--Book jacket This book advances debates over the relationship between care and economy through the concept of intimate labor-care, domestic, and sex work-and thus charts relations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the context of global economic transformations.