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.
"The selection of articles, and in particular the combination of paid and unpaid forms of intimate labor, will make a useful contribution to global labor studies. The book is a gateway to understanding how intimacy and labor 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
International Review of Social History
"This volume's ingenious focus on intimate labor encompasses a fascinating range of activities, from egg donation to end-of-life care, from child care to sex work. Intimate Labors makes an extremely valuable contribution to feminist theorizing on care work and reproductive labor by providing fresh insights on the lives of intimate laborers, as well as the impact of race, gender, and sexuality in t
