Intimate Industries: Restructuring (Im)Material Labor in Asia

This issue addresses how laborers within intimate industries—those who do interpersonal work that tends to the sexual, bodily, health, hygiene, or care needs of individuals—are shaping Asia’s growing role in the global economy. The contributors investigate how intimate industries support relational connections for consumers while disrupting laborers’ relationships, as in the case of migrants who perform intimate labor away from their families and communities of origin. The articles collected here include examinations of such trade-offs and their complex meanings and implications for the workers. The authors explore these social processes through the lens of industries that organize, enable, or delimit the trade in domestic labor, marriage migration, companionship and romance, sex work, pornographic performance, surrogate mothering and ova donation, and cosmetics sales. This issue puts people, as embodied subjects, back into narratives of economic change and offers a perspective on globalization from below.

Rhacel Parreñas is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California.

Hung Cam Thai is Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at Pomona College and the author of Insufficient Funds: The Culture of Money in Low-Wage Transnational Families.

Rachel Silvey is Associate Professor of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto and coeditor of Beyond States and Markets: The Challenges of Social Reproduction.