Intimate Labour

Jasmine Gunkel (University of Southern California)

What do sex work, surrogacy, therapy, nursing, nannying, acting, surgery, and home-repair have in common? I argue that they are all intimate labor, that this is a distinct and helpful category, and that intimacy comes with special risks.

I present my ‘Intimate Zones Account’ of the nature of intimacy, and show how it illuminates why this sort of labor makes involved parties importantly vulnerable. I argue that intimate labor exposes hidden, identity-related features. This makes exposed parties vulnerable to having their core persons altered by mechanisms that subvert their rational decision making processes. We’ll see how this gives us new insight into old arguments about sexual and reproductive labor, such as those making reference to commodification and threats to autonomy.

I identify four different ‘vulnerability models’ we find in intimate labor, and propose a set of policies to regulate all of them, some of which require a radical restructuring of our practices. These policies are responsive to the special way intimacy makes us vulnerable, rather than mere prejudice. I examine and defend the (perhaps counterintuitive!) results of these proposals for disciplines such as theatre.