Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

labor, migration, and sex trafficking in Tokyo

Illicit flirtations

Eileen Boris

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.

Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care

Intimate Labors

Hung Cam Thai

Rachel Silvey

This issue addresses how laborers within intimate industries--those who do interpersonal work that tends to the sexual, bodily, health, hygiene, or care needs of individuals--are shaping Asia's growing role in the global economy. The contributors investigate how intimate industries support relational connections for consumers while disrupting laborers' relationships, as in the case of migrants who perform intimate labor away from their families and communities of origin. The articles collected here include examinations of such trade-offs and their complex meanings and implications for the workers. The authors explore these social processes through the lens of industries that organize, enable, or delimit the trade in domestic labor, marriage migration, companionship and romance, sex work, pornographic performance, surrogate mothering and ova donation, and cosmetics sales. This issue puts people, as embodied subjects, back into narratives of economic change and offers a perspective on globalization from below. Contributors: Danièle Bélanger, Hae Yeon Choo, Nicole Constable, Daisy Deomampo, Akhil Gupta, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, Pei-Chia Lan, Purnima Mankekar, Eileen Otis, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Rhacel Parreñas, Sharmila Rudrappa, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Rachel Silvey, Hung Cam Thai, Leslie Wang

Restructuring (Im)Material Labor in Asia

Intimate Industries

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

About

Books

Join the club