AHA Session 13
Labor and Working-Class History Association 1
Thursday, January 4, 2024: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Powell II (Parc 55, Third)
Chair:
Jessica Pliley, Texas State University
Panel:
Jennifer Boittin, Penn State University
Elisa Camiscioli, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Satya Shikha Chakraborty, College of New Jersey
Sandy F. Chang, University of Texas at Austin
Session Abstract
This roundtable explores the intersection of “intimate labor” and modern gendered migrations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It considers artists, entertainers, nursemaids, domestic servants, brothel owners, and women who sold sex, as they circulated within and between Asian, European, American, and African national and imperial spaces. While the concept of “intimate labor” is commonly associated with economic neoliberalism and the feminization of global migration in the contemporary period, our panelists make the case for its historical applicability, allowing scholars to recover previously neglected migration narratives. Intimate labor includes both coerced and chosen services in the domestic and sexual markets: the care of households, bodies, and emotions. We are attuned to the range of experiences that lie on the spectrum between coercion and choice; and in the interstices of productive, reproductive, and emotional labor. Our aim is to consider intimacy as a “matter of the state” (Ann Laura Stoler), moving beyond studies that focus primarily on relationships in proximity, within households or nuclear families. Thus we consider women’s lived experiences in the context of transatlantic, transimperial, and inter-Asian migrations, as well as mobility between metropoles and colonies. We moreover consider how the policing of women’s mobility intersected with efforts to control prostitution, import female household laborers, and manage the racial and sexual order of colonial and national states.
We are especially interested in fostering a discussion on sources and archives. For example, the “trafficking archive”--an accumulation of data on ostensibly coerced migrations–offers many examples that disrupt the narrative of forced movement and sexual slavery. This allows a history of migratory prostitution, of women’s volition in propelling their journeys, to emerge as a counterpart to the trafficking narrative. In a similar vein, the colonial archive is surprisingly revelatory of intimacy, emotion, disruptions, the quotidian and everyday experience of migration, and of individual women's voices, including those who were not literate. We hold that these archives can be mined for intimate data that reveals how gender shaped border-crossing experiences and livelihood opportunities, even though they were assembled to police women’s mobility, target undesirable subjects, document anti-colonial activities, and combat sex trafficking.
The roundtable showcases emerging work in migration, colonial, transnational, and women’s and gender history. It features scholars working with a broad range of archives and in diverse regions, and invites a comparative exploration of new approaches to global migration histories.
