The Commodification of Intimacy: Marriage, Sex, and Reproductive Labor

Abstract

Over the past three decades, scholars have paid greater attention to the intensification and complex interconnectivity of local and global processes. Anthropological studies of cross-border marriages, migrant domestic workers, and sex workers have burgeoned, demonstrating growing scholarly interest in how social relations have become evermore geographically dispersed, impersonal, mediated by and implicated in broader political-economic or capitalist processes. At the same time, intimate and personal relations—especially those linked to households and domestic units, the primary units associated with reproductive labor—have become more explicitly commodified, linked to commodities and to commodified global processes (i.e., bought or sold; packaged and advertised; fetishized, commercialized, or objectified; consumed; assigned values and prices) and linked in many cases to transnational mobility and migration, presenting new ethnographic challenges and opportunities. This review highlights contemporary anthropological and ethnographic studies of the transnational commodification of intimacy and intimate relations, related debates, themes, and ethnographic challenges.

Mediated intimacies: bodies, technologies and relationships

“…More recently, a range of social and cultural theorists who have theorized the relationalities that became possible in the conditions of late modernity, have argued, in different ways, about the democratization of intimacy. 'Elective intimacy' (Chambers, 2013;Davies, 2014), 'pure relationships' and 'plastic sexuality' (Giddens, 1992), non-normative, casual and promiscuous intimacies (Berlant & Warner, 1998: Reay, 2014 have become the focus of interest, as have forms of intimate labour (Boris & Parrenas, 2010) that involve personal care, physical closeness, or familiarity and private knowledge (Bernstein, 2007;Boris & Parrenas, 2010;Constable, 2009;Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2003;Wolkowitz, 2006;Zelizer, 2005;see Burke, 2016 for a discussion). These have drawn attention to the expansion of the range of others that late modern subjects can legitimately be intimate with, as well as the modes of intimacy they might practice.…”

Diasporic Dreams, Middle-Class Moralities and Migrant Domestic Workers Among Muslim Filipinos in Saudi Arabia

“…Though there are new forms of family arising from adjustment to absent spouses, institutionalised norms and regulatory ideals of sexuality, marriage and the family both in the home and host societies continue to stigmatise and exacerbate the inequalities and difficulties of migrant women's transnational reproductive labour (see also Manalansan 2006, Constable 2009). Extending that analysis, I emphasise the class dimensions of the idealised heteronormative nuclear family, especially in the context of migration and diaspora where residence with one's spouse and children in the migrant destination society is often both an aspiration and measure of middle class achievement.…”

Repensar los cuidados a la luz de la reproducción social: una propuesta para vincular los circuitos migratorios

“…La importancia del empleo de mujeres migrantes y de minorías étnicas en la mercantilización y ampliación geográfica de la reproducción social puede verse en los trabajos estadounidenses a lo largo de la década de los noventa (Colen, 1995;Nakano Glenn, 1992). Asimismo, la confluencia de diversos flujos migratorios, como el empleo y el matrimonio, tanto a nivel regional como global, ha sido estudiada más recientemente por autoras asiáticas (Constable, 2009;Lan, 2008;Palriwala y Uberoi, 2005). A pesar de que estas perspectivas no han sido tan utilizadas en el ámbito europeo, en el tercer apartado hago mención de algunas tendencias que están empezando a establecer vínculos entre distintos tipos de migraciones, lo cual resulta primordial para poder complejizar los cuidados o la reproducción social.…”