The arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, accused of sexually harassing a chambermaid in a hotel in New York in May 2011, brought into the limelight a group of workers who rarely receive any attention in journalism or academic literature. Hotel housekeepers, or chambermaids, are a typical example of “intimate labourers”, people whose work “revolves 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” (p. 3). This type of worker, but also forms of unpaid labour involving intimacy, are the focus of the volume “Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care”, edited by Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas.
Intimacy and labour are often considered as having hardly anything in common, intimacy belonging to the private sphere and labour to the public sphere. Whereas historically there has always been a close relationship between labour and intimacy, as the existence of the age-old professions of prostitution and domestic work show, contemporary societies, and in particular those that are affected by global capitalism, are characterized by an intensification of the commodification and proliferation of intimate labour. Home health aides, hotel housekeepers, hostesses, escorts, manicurists, and massage therapists are examples of a large variety of workers who are involved in intimate labour.
In their introduction the editors define intimate labour as activities that “promote the physical, intellectual, affective, and other emotional needs of strangers, friends, family, sex partners, children, and elderly, ill, or disabled people” (p. 2). This type of labour includes not only various forms of care work, domestic work, and sex work, but also a wide range of other forms of paid and unpaid work which do not normally fall within the category of “labour”, such as the donation of sperm to IVF clinics, the care of transgender individuals, and the adoption of foreign children. The wide variety of activities that can be categorized as intimate labour shows the fluid boundaries between home and work, productive and non-productive work, care and economy, the public and the private. Intimate labour differs from emotional labour, which refers to “a form of face-to-face labor in which one displays certain emotions to induce particular feelings in the client or customer” (p. 6).Footnote 1
As the editors state, intimate labour may include emotional labour, yet emotion is not its main characteristic; many intimate labourers do not need to regulate their emotions to perform their jobs. It also differs from reproductive labour, as it involves much more than the “invisible” work of women carried out to sustain households and families. Intimate labour is productive labour, as the authors in this volume claim, because it involves the exchange of money: it is situated in the (formal and informal) labour market, and subject to market forces (p. 9). Economic globalization and neo-liberalism have equally affected the proliferation of intimate labour in many different ways, leading to new forms of social inequality. The authors further try to understand “what happens when intimate labor enters the marketplace and becomes paid both in terms of working conditions and the value of the worker herself” (p. 11). Gender, race, and class are used as key concepts to explain the ways in which power relations have changed as an effect of global economic transformations.
The book is divided into three parts, each being preceded by a short introduction in which the articles are placed in a broader context. The first part, entitled “Remaking the Intimate: Technology and Globalization”, focuses on the ways in which technologies have redefined intimate relations. Technology and intimacy have long been seen as opposites, but the articles in this part show the close relationship between the two in contemporary society. New technologies, such as in-vitro fertilization and digital ways of communication, have led to new forms of intimate labour.
Kalindi Vora describes, for example, how call-centre workers in India perform “affective labour” in their relationships with American customers. She argues that this type of work adds value to the employers’ economic performance but it has little to no effect on their own communities and daily life. Rene Almeling analyses the ideas of commercial agencies and donors of sperm and eggs about “cells and bodies, supply and demand, and motherhood and fatherhood”, to explain why eggs and egg donors are valued more highly than sperm and sperm donors. She concludes that the commodification of eggs and sperms is highly gendered, with agencies approaching male and female donors in very different ways. Men are seen as “distant and calculating donors” mainly interested in the financial aspect of the transaction and not attaching emotional value to their sperm, whereas women are seen as “altruistic helpers” for whom donation is an emotional experience.
The second part, “Creating Intimate Boundaries: Cultural and Social Relations”, looks at the relations of various types of domestic and sex worker and their clients and employers. The authors show the complexities involved in these encounters and reject the idea that combining personal relations with economic transactions would automatically “contaminate and corrupt intimacy” (p. 95).
María de la Luz Ibarra discusses, for example, two cases of Mexican-American providers of private elderly care in California who have formed relationships of “deep alliance” with their wards. She discovered that many elderly-care workers prefer to work in the informal sector because they can establish emotional ties – “deep alliances” – with their patients and assist them in the last phase of their lives. Although their “emotional labour” is unrewarded, their moral fulfilment is, according to her informants, much greater. Rhacel Parreñas describes the work of Filipina hostesses in Tokyo and the different ways in which they deal with intimacy and sexual relations with customers. In principle hostesses are not allowed to have sex with customers, but the boundaries are fluid and women have varying attitudes towards intimacy. One of the main conclusions of the chapters in this part of the book is that workers are able to maintain their identities as workers although the boundaries between public and private are sometimes blurred.
The third part of the book, “Organizing Intimate Labor: Politics and Mobilization”, focuses on the different ways in which people who perform intimate labour organize themselves to protect their own rights. A brief look at the history of domestic and sex work shows the challenges and obstacles that workers experience in these sectors. In many cases domestic and sex workers have been consistently neglected by the mainstream labour movement. The fact that women from lower socio-economic classes and of immigrant background dominate these sectors has not facilitated their inclusion. Yet, “intimate labourers” have organized themselves in their own ways, achieving remarkable successes, as some of the chapters in this part illustrate.
Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, for example, describe the struggle for the recognition of home care as professional care in the United States, and the consequences for the protection of home-care workers. Miliann Kang looks at Asian manicurists in New York and the different ways in which their customers have responded to their attempts to improve their working conditions. She argues that a better understanding of the dynamics of intimate labour will help to support the efforts of workers in the service sector.
The book ends with two general chapters, in one of which Viviana Zelizer reflects on the complex relationship between care and labour, and the other by Dorothy Sue Cobble about the ways in which “intimate labourers” have organized themselves and the implications for labour unions and other forms of collective worker mobilization. She argues that labour unions should recognize the value of intimate labour, as intimacy and economy are increasingly conflating in the twenty-first century.
This book, with case studies from the United States and Asia, offers an interdisciplinary contribution to the field. It contains fascinating essays, most of which have already been published as book chapters or journal articles. All the authors have used qualitative methods to study their topics, resulting in detailed ethnographic and historical descriptions and strong interview quotes. Those interested in quantitative data will be disappointed, but intimate labour is a type of labour that has not been documented well as it often takes place in the shadow of the formal labour market. Statistical data are therefore lacking in many cases.
The selection of articles, and in particular the combination of paid and unpaid forms of intimate labour, will make a useful contribution to global labour studies. The book is a gateway to understanding how intimacy and labour organize themselves in both formal and informal social structures. In addition, it illustrates the ways in which intimacy has become linked with issues of ethnicity, sexuality, race, class, and other power relations in the context of globalization as well as continued socio-political and economic transformations.
