ABSTRACT
Intimate labor encompasses a range of activities, including bodily and household upkeep, personal and family maintenance, and sexual contact or liaison. It entails touch, whether of children or customers; bodily or emotional closeness or personal familiarity, such as sexual intercourse and bathing another. Against a scholarship that considers nurses, nannies, home aides, cleaners, prostitutes, and hostesses apart from each other, the authors explore intimate labor as a useful category of analysis to understand gender, racial, class, and other power relations in the context of global economic transformations. Intimate labor also refers to work that exposes personal information that would leave one vulnerable if others had access to such knowledge. Such work would arguably include bill collection, domestic work, elder care, various forms of therapy, and prostitution. Intimate labor remains a primary source of livelihood, which women increasingly gain by being paid for it in the marketplace rather than through performing it within a heterosexual marriage in exchange for support.
