No Credit: The deep-seated exploitation of women and migrants through intimate & sexual labours, care work, and art under late stage capitalism

Abstract

Intimate and invisible labours form some of the most fundamental social mechanisms we rely on to continue as a functioning, healthy society. The category of intimate labour encompasses numerous fields, including but not limited to nurses, child minders, carers for the elderly, cleaners, home aids, sex workers and egg donors. ‘Each of these labors represents work assumed to be the unpaid responsibility of women, and, consequently, is usually considered to be a non-market activity or an activity of low economic value that should be done by lower classes or racial outsiders.’I will be looking at the culture that has allowed such an emotionally intensive set of work fields to go unrecognised and undervalued, the guilt economy that exists around working within high/low calling employment and the pressure women face to discreetly care for their own intimate and sexual health while also being subjected to the full responsibility of physically, intimately and emotionally maintaining others. The private has always been a political space, but now, with the increasingly ‘heightened commodification of intimacy that pervades social life’ these work forces, where the private becomes public, has shown the extent to which privatised interactions are constructed to seem of little to no value. Much the same as sex work, there are multiple inconsistent legal definitions of care work and intimate labour with a great deal of ambiguity surrounding the terms. The work that these labours produce activates 'the physical, intellectual, affective and emotional needs of strangers, friends, family, sex partners, children, the elderly, ill and disabled' and is necessary in the reproduction of a socially capable society. The underlying public understanding that adjunct to these services of companionship, listening, holding and talking is the presence of dirt, bodies, fluids and touch that stigmatize the work and those who perform it, especially the labours of cleaning and housekeeping, which are deeply entrenched in the association of unpaid tasks with household members, wives, mothers, daughters and continually within contemporary slavery. The introduction of relatively low cost personal technology has increased the ability of care workers and individuals to ‘freelance’, enabling the creation of a new wave of post-industrial sex work which has opened up more opportunities than ever before; sometimes unfortunately, increasing the economic anxiety around class division and the acceptance of race, culture and gender diversity to the free market and within globalization.