The Social Justice Research Institute of Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, announces a call for papers and artistic contributions for an upcoming symposium (October 15–16, 2015)
Consuming Intimacies: Bodies, Labour, Care, and Social Justice
Intimacy, as a concept and as a set of practices, has a long-standing history in the study of families and kin relationships, friendships, sexualities, romantic partnerships, and the “sociology of personal life” (Gabb, 2008; Jamieson, 1998, Morgan, 2011; Smart, 2007). More recently, scholarly attention to intimacy has widened to embrace complex conceptual pairings with labour, economies, and social justice; these include, for example, studies on “intimate labours” (Boris & Parreñas, 2010), “intimate economies” (Wilson, 2012; Zelizer, 2005), “the commodification of intimate life” (Hochschild, 2013), and “body shopping” (Dickenson, 2008).
This two-day symposium aims to re-think concepts and practices of intimacy and social justice issues through a wide spectrum of twenty-first-century intimate labours and their associated economies. We envisage two interconnected streams for papers, artistic contributions, and discussions. While underpinned by diverse transdisciplinary approaches and problematics, these two streams share a focus on intimacies and embodiment; entanglements of care, work, consumption, and commodification; varied forms of “global-intimate pairings” (Wilson, 2012); gender, class, and racial inequalities; and attention to matters of epistemic justice and injustice.
The first stream focuses on intimate labours as “work that involves embodied and affective interactions in the service of social reproduction” (Boris & Parreñas, 2010, p. 7) and which entangle production, social reproduction, and consumption. These interactions include a wide array of paid and unpaid labours done mainly by women but increasingly by men, including new and reconfigured forms of intimate and commodified labours that have arisen in contexts of neoliberal restructuring and within “global care chains” (Hochschild, 2000), “care diamond(s)” (Raghuram 2012), and the “international division of reproductive labour” (Parreñas, 2000, 2012).
A second stream centres on intimate labours and their economies, including exchanges involving organs, body tissues, and body fluids (e.g., milk, sperm, blood, kidneys). These corporeal exchanges fuse intimacies and economies, serving to both reify and contest notions of altruism, exploitation, and commodification (Dickenson, 2007). This stream will interrogate how value is created in intimate labours and examine how these exchanges entail a “pushing back at the limits between production and social reproduction, production and consumption, production and circulation, to turn even the most intimate of bodily functions into exchangeable commodities and services” (Cooper & Waldby, 2014, p. 5).
These two symposium streams will engage critical social justice issues that arise from the melding of intimacy with labour, exchange, and commodification. What conceptual transformations emerge through these entanglements? What do these reconfigurations mean for re-thinking neighbouring concepts of care, social reproduction, work, bodies and embodiment, mobilities, modes of exchange, consumption, and subjectivities? How are new forms of embodied, intimate labours and exchanges governed? When, where, and why are forms of intimate labours and exchanges contentious (Hoeyer, 2013), exploitative (Dickenson, 2013), or “bioviolent” (Moniruzzaman, 2012), and for whom and with what effects and affects? What challenges arise for critical social justice scholarship and activism from these new conceptual syntheses? How are topics of embodied labour and exchange addressed in cultural productions? What new frameworks – theoretical, epistemological, ontological, and/or methodological – can assist us with making sense of these fusions of intimacy, commodification, bodies, labour, care, and social justice?
Keynote speakers for this symposium are Donna Dickenson (Emeritus Professor of Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of London), Monir Moniruzzaman (Michigan State University), and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (University of Southern California).
We encourage contributions from across the humanities and social sciences, as well as interventions from artists and activists. Submissions are invited on (but not limited to) the following themes:
- Care, work, and consumption
- Transnational care giving and care work
- New and reconfigured forms of intimate labours
- Queer intimacies and the queering of practices of care
- Social reproduction and intimate labours
- Commodification of intimate life
- Commercialization and commodification of bodily exchanges
- Assisted human reproduction
- Organ demand, donation, and sale
- Human tissue and fluids demand, donation, sale, and banking
- Ontological, epistemological and methodological issues
Paper proposals of 300 to 500 words, accompanied by a short biography (100 words), should be submitted to consumingintimacies@gmail.com by April 1, 2015. We are also interested in artistic contributions for which an artist’s statement of 300 to 500 words should be submitted along with a short biography (100 words) and any other relevant materials. Proposals will be peer-reviewed and only 15-20 participants will be selected. Adjudication results will be announced by April 15th. Draft papers are to be submitted by September 15th. The symposium will be held October 15–16, 2015. Travel and childcare subsidies may be available.
For further queries, please contact Dr. Robyn Lee at rlee2@brocku.ca or Professor Andrea Doucet at adoucet@brocku.ca. Papers will be considered for a special issue of the journal Studies in Social Justice, as well as for a possible second publication.
For more information visit www.consumingintimacies.com.
References
Boris, E., & Parreñas, R. S. (Eds.). (2010). Intimate labors: Cultures, technologies, and the politics of care. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Cooper, M., & Waldby, C. (2014). Clinical labor: Tissue donors and research subjects in the global bioeconomy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dickenson, D. (2007). Property in the body: Feminist perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
—. (2008). Body shopping: Converting body parts to profit. Oxford, UK: Oneworld.
—. (2013). Exploitation and choice in the global egg trade: Emotive terminology or necessary critique? In M. Goodwin (Ed.), The global body market: Altruism’s limits (pp. 21–43). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Gabb, J. (2008). Researching intimacy in families. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hochschild, A. R. (2000). Global care chains and emotional surplus value. In W. Hutton & A. Giddens (Eds.), On the edge: Living with global capitalism (pp. 14–38). London, UK: Random House.
—. (2013). The outsourced self: What happens when we pay others to live our lives for us. New York, NY: Picador.
Hoeyer, K. (2013). Exchanging human bodily material: Rethinking bodies and markets. Basel, CH: Springer.
Jamieson, L. (1998). Intimacy: Personal relationships in modern societies. London, UK: Wiley.
Moniruzzaman, M. (2012). “Living Cadavers” in Bangladesh: Bioviolence in the human organ bazaar. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 26(1): 69–91.
Morgan, D. J. H. (2011). Rethinking family practices. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Parreñas, R. S. (2000). Migrant Filipina domestic workers and the international division of reproductive labour. Gender & Society, 14(4), 560–80.
—. (2012). The reproductive labour of migrant workers. Global Networks, 12(2), 269–275.
Raghuram, P. (2012). Global care, local configurations – challenges to conceptualizations of care. Global Networks, 12(2), 155–174.
Smart, C. (2007). Personal life. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Wilson, A. (2012). Intimacy: A useful category of transnational analysis. In G. Pratt & V. Rosner (Eds.), The global and the intimate: Feminism in our time (pp. 31–56). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Zelizer, V. A. (2005). The purchase of intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
