Week 8 | Borris and Salazar - Intimate Labors Flashcards
Intimate labor
Category of analysis to understand sex, care and domestic work. This kind of works involve “knowledge and attention that are not widely available to third persons”: household upkeep, personal and family maintenance, sexual contact or liaison, touch or emotional closeness. This does not necessarily entails face-to-face interactions.
It can include “gender labor”, “entertainment work”, “emotional labor” (but not always).
Commodification of intimacy
Intimate labor is increasingly being paid in the marketplace rather than through being performed in a heterosexual marriage in exchange for support.
The commodification of intimate labor raises feminist contentions over the relationship of “care” and the economy. Some bemoan an increasing commodification of the intimate. Others, insist that relations of intimacy already involve the exchange of money
Personal service workers
Term used by Dorothy Sue Cobble as a synonym of “intimate labor” .
Entertainment work
It “refers to the labor of sexually titillating customers via song, dance, and conversation in hostess clubs” (Parreñas)
Emotional labor (Hochschild)
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. 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)
Surface/deep acting (Hochschild)
In “surface acting,” one merely pretends to be the character (a domestic worker would pretend to feel grateful that her employer offered a hand-me-down of furniture instead of a raise).
In “deep acting,” one embodies the traits and emotions of his or her character, becoming the actual character. (The domestic worker would feel genuinely happy to have received old furniture)
See: emotional dissonance.
Emotional dissonance (Hochschild)
It is often a result of emotional labor. “Workers are unable to feel the emotions they must display but who have no choice but to feign them”. Often “persons in low-status occupations”
Social reproduction (Evelyn Nakano & Isabella Bakker)
Nakano: “Array of activities and relationships involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and intergenerationally”
Social reproduction (Evelyn Nakano & Isabella Bakker)
Nakano: “activities and relationships involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and intergenerationally” (preparing and serving food, laundering and repairing clothing, socializing children, providing care and emotional support for adults, etc)
Bakker: “the conditions and social constructions of:
- Motherhood
- Labor force replication (subsistence, education and training)
- Provisioning of caring needs
Social reproduction (Nakano & Bakker)
Nakano: “activities and relationships involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and intergenerationally.” (preparing food, laundering clothing, socializing children, providing care and emotional support for adults, maintaining community ties, etc)
Bakker: “the conditions and social constructions of:
1) Motherhood
2) Labor force replication (including “subsistence, education and training”)
3) “Provisioning of caring needs”
Bernstein: + sex work
Devaluation thesis
“When intimacy becomes employment, it loses status as a labor of love and becomes regarded as unskilled work that anyone can perform because women have undertaken such activities without payment. Call this the devaluation thesis: double devaluation because of the lack of pay and the “nature” of the doers. Those who have performed such paid jobs are of lower status, often men and women of color and/or recent immigrants.”
