Society for East Asian Anthropology

Oral Presentation Session

Close Encounters: Migrant Beer Sellers and Intimate Labour in Southeast Asia

Presenter(s)

• 

  Denise Spitzer

  Professor
  University of Alberta

Intimate labour, “the work of tending to the sexual, bodily, health, hygiene and care needs of individuals” (Parreñas, Thai, & Silvey, 2016:2) involves the provision of individualized attention, the sharing of trust and experiences between intimate labourers and recipients, and the enhancement of the well-being of, at minimum, one person in the exchange (Zelizer, 2010). Contextualized by neoliberal globalization and contoured by constructions of gender, racialized status, socioeconomic class, and sexuality that intimate labour further re-shapes, this concept helps illuminate broader interpenetrating macro- and meso-level dimensions implicated in micro-level interactions, and destabilise the binaries of formal/informal work, private/public, home/workplace, inter alia.

 

I deploy the lens of intimate labour to examine the experiences of rural-to-urban migrant women employed as beer sellers in Asian urban centres. Drawing from fieldwork with migrant beer sellers in Bangkok, Vientiane, and Phnom Penh, I highlight how intimate labour—through the cultivation of clientele—is critical to migrant beer sellers’ economic survival. Through interactions with predominantly male clients, and surveilled by both venue management and customers, migrant beer sellers learn to monetize particular engendered embodiments that reinforce gender roles and classed hierarchies while individualizing relationships through the construction of intimacy. Consequently, male clients feel free to transgress the bodily boundaries of beer sellers who opine that “touching is a male characteristic.” Reconstituting these interactions as integral to their success in an intimate industry, migrant beer sellers emphasize their economic independence that affords them opportunities to contribute to household coffers and to dream of more prosperous futures