What Happens When Care Workers Enter the Marketplace?

An anthology devoted to the “cultures, technologies, and politics of care” might not be a popular leisure reading choice, but Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, edited by Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, is an interesting and timely read. The idea for the anthology was conceived of during a 2007 conference funded by a consortium of University of California departments, institutes, and centers. All the contributors are women, which is befitting of a collection described by its editors as situating the discussion “of intimate labor in a feminist discussion of women’s work” (p. 5).

The opening line of the introduction establishes the anthology’s thesis: a striking feature of contemporary capitalism “is the heightened commodification of intimacy that pervades social life.” Boris and Parreñas consider a continuum that includes the categories of “care, sex, and domestic work” (p. 93).They argue that the “process of intimate labor is not uniform” (p. 6). Some forms entail face-to-face contact. Intimate labor often includes emotional involvement, but not always. What remains consistent, however, is that intimate labor is a primary source of livelihood for women, and its recognition and compensation in the marketplace are growing. No longer is it confined within the boundaries of heterosexual matrimony or parent-child relationships.

According to the editors, the essays “seek to understand what happens when intimate labor enters the marketplace and becomes paid both in terms of working conditions and the value of the worker herself” (p. 11). The extent to which these essays reach this end remains, like intimate labor itself, inconsistent and variable, dependent upon accessibility and experience.

The anthology’s first section considers the effects of technology and globalization upon intimate labor. Ariel Ducey’s “Technologies of Caring Labor” examines health care work in New York City hospitals that, beginning in the 1990s, underwent a “restructuring” that embraced policies “premised on neoliberal principles of an expanded role for markets and profit making [which] drove health care politics and policies” (p. 19). I experienced that shift early on in my nursing career—though without a vocabulary to describe the seismic upheaval rocking the health care industry, I internalized this restructuring. Those policies, Ducey acknowledges, rely on fear to induce worker loyalty. Comparing the different types of training that health care workers receive to respond to post-9/11 “threats” signaled by the terror alert system, she maintains that “rather than working through reason or emotional appeal,” the programs encourage workers to “expect—and accept—anything at all imposed in the name of the market” (p. 26).

Subsequent essays in this section include examinations of foreign and domestic adoption, the business of sperm banks and egg “agencies,” and the commodification of genetic material. In “Selling Genes, Selling Gender,” Rene Almeling considers the sexual politics surrounding the donation and receipt of gametes for the purpose of reproduction. Not surprisingly, she discovers that all is not equal in the arena of reproductive donation. Because of the intricacy of the harvesting process, egg donors receive much higher compensation than do their male counterparts. Expectations about physical attractiveness and emotional makeup also differ by gender—women donating eggs are required to be more attractive and to display “well-worn patterns of ‘natural’ caring, helpful femininity” (p. 76). Perhaps the most immediately accessible essay in this section is Kalindi Vora’s “The Transmission of Care: Affective Economy and Indian Call Centers.” Vora does not specify the particular areas of work these callers are engaged in, but she includes them within the “care work” umbrella because these forms of labor—debt collection attempts, for example—intersect with people’s lives in a very personal way. She intertwines her portrayal of the Indian call center agents’ intimate labor with excerpts from A Terrible Beauty Is Born, a monologue written by former call center agent and accent trainer Arjun Raina. Vora’s analysis relies on a “Marxist view of commodity relations” (p. 35).

Part Two of the anthology...