Search Results

This chapter identifies a theoretical and empirical agenda for care investigators, starting with an attempt to specify the concepts of care, intimacy, and work. What exactly do we mean by intimate labors and carework? It then examines the variability of sites where care exists, both paid and unpaid. Within intimate labor, it distinguishes four different sites for personal care: unpaid care in intimate settings, unpaid care in economic organizations, paid care in intimate settings, and paid care in economic organizations such as hospitals, day-care centers, and doctors' offices. These four sites differ significantly in the character and organization of intimate labor. The chapter emphasizes confusions that have arisen in thinking about differences among these four sites.

This chapter elaborates the notion of bioprecarity as it is utilized in this volume by drawing on three theoretical concepts which have not been ‘thought together’ before. They are intimate labour as discussed in Boris and Salazar Parreñas’ work (2010); bios, as understood in Michel Foucault’s writings (2008); and precarity as originally developed in France in the 1970s, then taken up by Judith Butler (2004) in the context of war, terrorism, survival and grievable lives, and popularized in the relation to new forms of labour by Guy Standing (2011). The chapter develops these three concepts in the context of bodily interventions prompted by opportunities for bodily labour, meaning labour on and with the body, in order to investigate bioprecarity, a new form of vulnerability which is associated with providing and seeking intimate bodily labour in cross-cultural contexts.

This chapter explores how different forms of reproductive labour create different precarities within LGBTQ parenting and kin-making in contemporary Sweden. It especially considers the precarisation of biological labour in a setting where intimate labour is the foundation for kin-making and where the necessary making, gestating and breastfeeding of a child is downplayed in relation to parenthood status. Drawing on ethnographic research, the chapter also illuminates how ‘biology’ produces strong feelings, even in a kinship structure that departs from the notion of intent and intimate labour as equally shared matters. Framing queer reproduction as both a biopolitical question and a question of gender labour the chapter then discusses how gendered and racialised ideas of parenthood and kinship are reproduced and reworked in imaginaries of LGBTQ parenthood. Contributing to critical whiteness studies, it argues that the (queer) nation is repeatedly recreated as white while whiteness remains invisible to those who inhabit it.

The introduction outlines the meaning and rise of bioprecarity and the bioprecariat, here understood as those who seek help with bodily interventions and those who provide such interventions. It discusses core concepts of importance for this volume, including shifting understandings and regulations of the body and bodily interventions, questions of bodily ownership and of agency in the age of the commodification of the body, and the issue of power and unequal relations in the seeking and providing of help around bodily interventions. It also provides an overarching introduction to the chapters presented in this volume.

This chapter explores the intimate labour performed by surrogate mothers in the globalized fertility market. Using her body and providing her womb and uterus, blood and sweat, the surrogate mother engages in a highly embodied labour (Pande, 2014). At the same time, the non-genetic relation between the foetus and the surrogate is used by clients and clinics to reduce the woman to a ‘gestational carrier’ and a ‘mere vessel’ (Gupta, 2008; Pande, 2010). By drawing on interviews with Thai women enrolled in transnational commercial surrogacy, this chapter highlights the surrogate mothers’ precarious and vulnerable position in a process of cross-cultural biotechnological intervention with inherently differential power relations among the stakeholders.

The conclusion outlines how the different chapters in the volume have contributed to elucidating the concept of bioprecarity. This involves analysing the complex entanglements created by the relationship between the body, life, the production, maintenance and application of categories, and intimate labour. These entanglements exist in a context of uneven distribution of power which means that particular social groups and individuals are rendered more bioprecarious than others through their positioning as bio-subjects. The volume shows that bioprecarity extends beyond contemporary, disenfranchised groups. It was also a key dimension of eugenicist histories, for example. At the same time however, we also indicate that bioprecarity is sometimes co-produced by those who install it and those who seek to benefit from bodily interventions and intimate labour. This means that questions of bio-citizenship needs to be addressed more widely since biotechnologization will remain a fact of contemporary life.

This chapter explores the use of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) by queer and transgender people and how they have to perform particular bodily and intimate selves in the processes of seeking ART (Mamo 2007, 2013; Armuand et al., 2017). The bioprecarity of queer and transgender people is produced by the enactment of certain kinds of categorical framing (Foucault 1966, 1976; Summerville, 1998) in the laws regulating ARTs. Prohibitive laws in some states are often circumvented by going abroad. This chapter therefore argues that queer and trans people’s bioprecarity also results from the intimate labour queer and transgender people have to undertake to overcome prohibitive laws and hetero- and cisnormative medical institutions as shown e.g. in studies about trans people’s experiences with ART (James-Abra et al., 2015, Armuand et al., 2017).

Much research on IVF, assisted reproduction and gamete donation has centred on their medical, legal and socio-cultural processes and meanings. Here, quite frequently, little attention is paid to the donors themselves other than in the context of their selection. However, donation is a corporeal process in which body parts are produced and given or sold. This chapter analyses the bioprecarities that derive from the process of sperm donation. It draws on empirical online and social media materials, as well as other texts, in which men who donate sperm for the purposes of assisted reproduction articulate their sense of the meaning of this process, and further, considers responses to the revelation of sperm donation from people both known and unknown to the donor. These responses show how sperm donation as a form of intimate labour in which a man also parts with somatic material produced by his body, and involving negotiated journeys, is managed and talked about. In the chapter I argue that responses to sperm donation indicate deeply gendered views of reproductive intimate labour in which a sense of bioprecarity masks strongly gendered views of sexuality, intimacy, and reproduction.

This chapter centres on circumcised women’s experiences of bioprecarity in the context of seeking clitoral reconstructive surgery in Sweden. Female genital cutting (FGC), significant in marking the mature, desirable and marriageable woman in some cultures (Johansen, 2016), is today a significant phenomenon in Europe due to recent migration patterns (Van Baelen, Ortensi et al., 2016). Transcultural migration and societal changes create new perceptions of the body, self and identity. At the same time, new notions of bodily rights, what is perceived as legitimate claims and needs, and advances in biotechnology have enabled circumcised women in some European countries to have their clitoris reconstructed (Foldés, 2003). Based on original empirical data in the form of interviews with FGC-affected women, this chapter seeks to investigate how migrant women who have undergone FGC perceive their bodies and selves, how they construct and negotiate their identity within new social structures and gender norms, and how they understand clitoral reconstructive surgery after FGC, in the Swedish context.

Chapter 5 draws on original research with young men working as “professional fiancés” in the tourist sex industry in Tunisia. Drawing on the author’s autoethnographic experience as a tourist who unexpectedly became a researcher, the chapter problematizes the presumed vulnerability and exploitability of local people within public and academic debates concerning “sex tourism.” By working as ‘professional boyfriends’ in the intimate economy emerging around the tourist industry in Sousse, local young men try to own the material, economic and social terms of their ‘mobile orientations’ - the socio-cultural alignments of models of personhood, mobilities and objects framing their subjectivities. By performing love to female tourists and by migrating as their spouses young men in Tunisia attempt to embody late modern individualised and consumerist lifestyles. They become successful adult men by forming transnational families abroad while providing for their families at home. Chapter 5 also analyzes the making of Mother Europe, the second film in the author’s Sex Work Trilogy, which is about a young Tunisian “professional fiancé” performing love to female tourists. The film explores the material and sociocultural dimensions as well as the politics of visibility that frame the encounter between tourism and intimate forms of labor in Tunisia.

In this chapter, the focus is on the intimate labor that GTAs do, which relies upon care and attentiveness to their bodies, their coworkers’ bodies, and the bodies and emotions of their students. They stand in for actual patients in this way, providing their bodies for medical students to practice on, even as they work as para-professionals in medical education by providing feedback and assessment. The contradictions inherent in their work is captured by an older term for their role: “patient instructor.” Their work relies on both the intimacy and vulnerability that comes with being a patient and the authority that being an instructor in a medical school entails.

In this chapter we witness the local and global encounters between North American patients and Czech doctors. The chapter witnesses the shifting role of the Czech clinic within this global care route, as they provide patient centered care. The Czech reproductive travel industry is profiting from its large supply of anonymous egg donors. I frame the entire industry as a global care route and trace global technologies, finance, images, and people enmeshed in “intimate labor” (Boris and Parreñas 2010).

This chapter examines the Direct Funding Program of Ontario's Self-Managed Attendant Services. The evident willingness of self-managers and personal attendants to engage in relational work and the still unmet labor market security of workers were both necessary for self-managers to realize the Direct Funding Program's promise of flexibility. However, within a context of insufficient funding and little to no collective backing, this program produced labor market insecurity for workers, in the form of insufficient hours, earnings, and protection. Moreover, the position of workers in the broader racialized and gendered labor market shaped their labor market choices, or lack thereof, and shaped their experience at the intimate level. Failing to address broader racialized and gendered labor market insecurity not only has implications for workers who are less able to negotiate what they do and how. It also limits the progressive potential to value all forms of intimate labor and to rethink skill.

This chapter examines the gendered dimensions of solidarity, carework and activism in multiple contexts along the migrant journey. It links together the highly visible labors of a caravan of mothers of disappeared migrants with the less visible yet no less important labors of local women who sustain migrant shelters on a daily basis. In doing so, I demonstrate the transnational feminist politics and forms of solidarity that undergird these local and transnational economies of compassion and social justice.

This chapter examines the work of diasporic author Wendy Law-Yone to show how she takes up Burmese women's literary exploration of displacement, intimate labor, sex, and contact zones. Law-Yone is the first author of Burmese descent to write and publish fiction in English. To date, she has published two novels in the United States and one in England, in addition to a memoir of her father, a few short stories, and a number of nonfiction articles and book reviews. Focusing primarily on her 1993 novel Irrawaddy Tango, this chapter demonstrates how Law-Yone creatively capitalizes on the Burmese love of puns and wordplay to make explicit transnational connections and less visible forms of epistemic violence and discipline. It argues that Irrawaddy Tango suggests a nonpossessive mode of witnessing and co-occupancy as a Burmese-inflected alter/native to a voyeuristic mode of transnational consumption.