Day: 2 Tuesdays, (10/2/07 & 10/9/07)
Time: 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Location: South Hall 4631A
Students will receive a schedule, at the first class meeting October 2, 2007
Enrollment Code: 63453
Description:
This seminar is built around an interdisciplinary conference on the topic of Intimate Labor, to be held at UCSB October 4-6, 2007. The seminar is an exciting opportunity for students to participate in a meeting that will bring together about 50 scholars, with graduate students coming mostly from the UC system. Intimate labor entails bodily or emotional closeness or personal familiarity, like sexual intercourse and personal cleaning, or intimate observation and knowledge of personal information, such as child care or housekeeping. Such work occurs in homes, institutions, urban spaces, and other locations. It exists along a continuum of service and caring labor, from high end nursing and low end housekeepers, and includes sex, domestic, and personal care work. Against a scholarship that considers nurses, nannies, home aides, cleaners, prostitutes, masseuses, therapists, and hostesses apart from each other, we seek to explore intimate labor as a useful category of analysis to look at current economic transformations. Through historical, ethnographical, cultural, policy, and labor force methodologies, the conference and thus the seminar will address four inter
related themes: The Political Economy of Intimate Labor: States, Markets, and Families; Examining Globalization "From Below" through Intimate Labor Practices;
Work Process and the Cultures of Intimacy: Beyond the Binary of Paid & Unpaid Labor; and the Politics of Space and Labor Organizing. The course will consist of an introductory meeting before the conference on Tuesday October 2nd, the conference that weekend, and a follow-up meeting the Tuesday
after the conference. Students will read the papers for selected conference panels/workshops and take notes during the sessions they attend. The assignment is to turn in their notes.
Professor Eileen Boris, Hull Professor and Chair, Women's Studies, teaches Women's Labors; Feminist Theory; The Politics of the Body; Women, Society, and Culture, and related courses.
Email: boris@womst.ucsb.edu
