Bodily interventions and intimate labour

Understanding bioprecarity

Gabriele Griffin, Doris Leibetseder

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526138583
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

How have rapid changes in biotechnologisation, for example around assisted reproductive technologies or (re)constructive surgery, effected those seeking help with fertility treatment or clitoral reconstruction? What is involved for queer people in making a family of their own, or for trans people to access the relevant surgery? This volume argues that contemporary cultures foster bioprecarity by categorizing groups of people in certain ways and/or by denying them access to the treatment they seek or need. Drawing on original empirical data with trans and queer people, but also other minoritised and racialized groups, this volume explores how bodily interventions, their regulation, and the intimate labour the interventions involve, create vulnerabilities.

Part I

Theorizing bioprecarity and the body

1

Intimate labour and bioprecarity

Gabriele Griffin

Introduction: understanding bioprecarity

This chapter elaborates the notion of bioprecarity as it is utilized in this volume by drawing on three theoretical concepts that have not been ‘thought together’ before. They are intimate labour as discussed in Boris and 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 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 form of vulnerability that is associated with providing and seeking intimate bodily labour, not least in cross-cultural contexts. While separating out intimate labour, bios and precarity for analytical purposes, we recognize and argue that they are deeply imbricated.

Bioprecarity conjoins the notion of bios as derived from Michel Foucault’s (2004) work on biopower and biopolitics and precarity as this has been developed in the works of Judith Butler (2004) and Guy Standing (2011). Foucault’s writings on the topic, as elaborated in the section on ‘Thinking about bios’ later in the chapter, concern the governance or regulation of life (= bios) at individual and institutional levels. This regulation structures subject positions in differential and discriminatory fashion. Such subject positions are entangled with the bodies of those they seek to regulate since individuals as people with certain bodily traits are regulated according to those bodily specificities. Foucault (2004: 249) talks of two technologies of power in this context: ‘Both technologies are obviously technologies of the body, but one is a technology in which the body is individualized as an organism endowed with capacities, while the other is a technology in which bodies are replaced by general biological processes’. Biological processes such as sexuality, fertility, health, etc. become the objects of regulation or control through regimes and institutions such as medicine. These categorize individuals – as healthy or ill, for example – and thus exercise regulatory force. This force produces norms that ‘can be applied to the body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize’ (Foucault, 2004: 253). In this volume we are interested in the meaning of bios both as it relates to the Foucauldian idea of biopolitics and biopower, and in bios as it references ‘life’, ‘bare life’ or life itself (Rose, 2009).

But we conjoin this with precarity since we want to foreground the fact that the regulation of bodies and of life brings with it certain precarities. Precarity, as we discuss it below, has its roots in labour politics and refers to the casualization and generally rendering insecure of workers and their livelihoods in capitalist cultures. This is important for us because in this volume we relate bioprecarity specifically to one form of casualized and insecure labour: intimate labour. We are interested in particular forms of intimate labour, as detailed in the next section of this chapter, and in how those who engage in and benefit from intimate labour, are put into and find themselves in bioprecarious positions. We interpret bioprecarity as a form of vulnerability, vulnerability in one’s embodied self as this is used in intimate labour. The demand on sex workers to perform sex acts they are not willing to undertake and the threat that they may be bodily harmed or not paid if they do not comply constitutes such bioprecarity. The appeal to ‘being needed’ from nannies’, carers’ and domestic workers’ employers to their workers, which pressurizes such workers to put in unreasonably long hours, constitutes another example of such bioprecarity. That embodied self has both somatic and psychosocial components. As we show below, sex workers as much as carers, for example, are exposed to bioprecarity through the manner in which they have to put their bodies to work.

Intimate labour

Intimate labour and bioprecarity, the latter a concept to be developed theoretically in this and the next chapter, are closely intertwined. In their path-breaking anthology Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (2010) discuss the notion of intimate labour in relation to three particular kinds of work that are normally treated discretely but have become increasingly co-discussed: sex work, care work and domestic work. They define intimate labour as ‘tending to the intimate needs of individuals inside and outside their home’, where intimate needs include ‘sexual gratification but also our bodily upkeep, care for loved ones, creating and sustaining social and emotional ties, and health and hygiene maintenance’ (Boris and Parreñas, 2010: 5). This tending to the intimate needs of individuals is what binds together the three work arenas that Boris and Parreñas’ volume addresses. It involves, importantly, corporeal as well as psychosocial dimensions, both for those conducting intimate labour and for those on the receiving end. This is evident in the boundary work done by sex workers, for example, to secure a distinction, albeit a precarious one, between their private and their professional selves. Elizabeth Bernstein (2010: 153–4), for example, cites a Swedish street prostitute who said: ‘If you work like this, you need to have unseen borders you don’t let people trespass. If you do [let them trespass], then you start to drink or use drugs … There are things that you allow and … things that you won’t do for money. There has to be a private place inside you.’ Sex work involves intimate bodily labour for the worker as well as the client. From the sex worker’s perspective, who acts here in a professional capacity, that corporeal intimacy has to be off-set by ‘unseen borders’, possibly both bodily ones (such as not allowing mouth-on-mouth kissing) and psychological ones that maintain the worker in the worker and the client in the client position, relative to any other kind of relational situation. In the quote above the maintenance of borders between self and client is articulated as crucial to the maintenance of the self. That maintenance of the self is tied to the notion of ‘a private place’, a spatialized sense of inviolability. Violation, the occurrence of trespass, is also explicitly and directly connected by the sex worker to the production of self-harm in the form of drinking alcohol or taking drugs. Negotiating boundaries with clients is evidently a tricky process; a lack of boundaries is experienced as a violation of self that in turn promotes self-violation.

Intimate labour in the form of sex work, but not only in that form, renders the labourer vulnerable to the client and to self-exploitation. This is because of the primary dyadic scene that work entails, because of the intimate, often bodily proximity between worker and client and because of the limited regulation or unregulated nature of the work. Vulnerability is here corporeal but also psychosocial, created in the interpersonal exchange between worker and client where being vulnerable to the client also entails becoming vulnerable to the self. The worker’s vulnerability may be matched by that of the client who is also potentially vulnerable to exploitation and injury, for instance in the context of institutional elder care where client abuse has been widely documented (see Aitken and Griffin, 1996). It is the combination of bodily engagement and one-on-one labour that is largely unregulated in intimate exchange, which promotes what we term bioprecarity through the attendant vulnerabilization of the worker.

In dictionary definitions of intimacy such as that of the Oxford English Dictionary the word is consistently linked to notions of the ‘innermost’, closeness, the personal, the private, the familiar, the informal but also in respect of sexual relations, sometimes described as ‘illicit’. These notions spatialize intimacy both geo-socially and metaphorically, as involving engagement with others and proximity. Such proximity is, however, not necessarily associated with direct body contact: communication technologies and social media allow intimacy through the sharing of virtual space as Kalini Vora (2010) discusses in relation to long-distance call centre workers. It is further a proximity that is not neutral – it is invested, as Lauren Berlant (2000), for example, makes clear, with fantasy, attachment, optimism and emotion. Intimacy is hence associated with a range of emotions and dispositions, and one question to be addressed below is what happens to these associations when intimacy becomes linked with labour.

Conventionally associated with the private sphere, a sphere characterized in modernity by being unregulated, beyond the state and individualized, intimacy has co-occupied the personal and domestic sphere, supposedly separate from the public, collective (state-)regulated domain. But, not least since Anthony Giddens’ (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies has that idea of intimacy been called into question. A series of processes ranging from women’s increasing participation in the workforce globally, the dramatic expansion of the service sector, globalization itself and the mobilities this has engendered, technologization in all its forms, the gradual neo-liberalization of Western and non-Western societies alike with its emphasis on individualism, choice, marketization, monetarization and the decline of welfare, have all contributed to shifts in the labour market that have resulted in conventional binaries such as private/intimate–public, regulated–unregulated, close–distant, being challenged and indeed collapsing into each other. Obvious manifestations of this are phenomena such as air bnb and uber, which utilize the worker’s private or privately owned space (home, car) in an almost wholly deregulated manner (i.e. without public safeguards for workers or clients) for the conduct of business. Boris and Parreñas (2010: 14) argue that the processes described above have led to new forms of intimate labour among which they include ‘call center work, gender labor in the making of transsexual identity, surrogate mothering, and egg and sperm donation’. What these new forms of labour have in common is that they involve monetary reward for the performance of work that involves one-on-one contact and mobilizes direct bodily and psychosocial involvement on the part of the worker for the benefit of the receiving party.

Viviana Zelizer discusses the interrelation between ‘economic rationality’ and ‘intimate ties’ and suggests that there are three views of that relation: one that regards them in terms of ‘separate spheres’, indeed ‘hostile worlds’ (i.e. diametrically opposed to each other); a second view that regards the comingling of intimacy and economy as ‘nothing but … another version of normal market activity’; and a third view that takes a ‘connected-lives’ approach, suggesting that economic rationality and intimate ties are a matter of interpersonal negotiation (Zelizer, 2005: 11, 21, 33).

What is, however, particularly striking when one reads both Zelizer’s and Boris and Parreñas’ work is the asymmetry that governs intimate labour of any kind. In performing intimate labour, people’s – and this is actually mostly women’s – choices are seriously circumscribed. Parreñas’ (2010) account of hostess work in Tokyo, for example, while attempting to show the agency of the women involved (they can, she argues for example, always leave and work somewhere else) indicates very clearly how economic necessity, peer pressure and employer coercion coalesce into a powerful incentive to do the things you do not want to do. As one such hostess, forced together with other hostesses against her will to bare her breasts to clients, said: ‘We would dance for an hour. Then it became ugly. We all started crying. We had to show our breasts … I’m getting upset just remembering it’ (Parrenãs, 2010: 143). Parreñas makes clear that these women felt coerced and unable to refuse to show their breasts because they were on six-month contracts that they did not know how to get out of. Asymmetry of this kind, with unequal power relations between those conducting the intimate labour, those employing them and those who receive that labour, is a shared trait across all intimate labour situations. It arises from the issue of boundaries, how these are drawn and who draws them – boundaries between the labour conducted and the intimacy associated with such labour.

Due to its association with the private and domestic sphere, intimate labour encourages the propagation of certain ideas of intimacy. Domestic help, for example, is often constructed in terms of the relevant person being ‘part of the family’. As such it is expected that intimate labour in domestic settings is conducted in a quasi-familial manner in which, however, differences between those employed and those employing continue to be maintained. Seemin Qayum and Raka Ray (2010), for instance, give a striking example of Indian professionals in New York employing domestic help from ‘back home’, paying them, as is common, minimal wages and at the same time seeking...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Theorizing bioprecarity and the body
• Part II Precarity in the making of kin
• Part III Bioprecarity and bodies as pieces
• Part IV Bioprecarity in the transgression of boundaries of intimacy
• Part V Bioprecarity and eugenicist histories
• Conclusions
• Index