WGSS Spring Colloquium Series - "Thinking with the Intimacy Contract: Migrant Labor and US Military Bases"

Abstract: 

This paper examines how the conceptualization of an “intimacy contract” can add a transnational dimension to existing critiques of the social contract tradition. In doing so, I draw from feminist, queer and critical race critiques of liberal democratic discourse that demonstrate how liberal conceptions of “the body politic” mask the coercive racial, sexual and capacity-based contracts that exist between subjects and the state. Using the example of migrant laborers on U.S. military bases, I ask how the lens of intimacy can create a more expansive understanding of how these invisible contracts operate across borders by treating interactions between subjects and the state as a continuum of psychic and bodily activities, affective exchanges and power relations that are inextricable from transnational capital formations.  As an illustrative example, I ask how the affective labor done by migrants on U.S. military bases—from construction to sex work to domestic labor—has sustained and enabled the expansion of U.S. empire since 2005.  I thus treat the daily glances, bodily gestures and words exchanged between U.S. employers and migrant workers as enveloped in the ideological construction of migrant workers as ‘mobile’ and ‘flexible’ transnationally and in mundane, bodily forms of boundary-making. At the same time, I suggest that the affective exchanges between base employees and migrant workers are connected not simply through the visible labors done within the territorial confines of the military base, but rather, through multiple labors across geographic spaces that exceed a particular physical site of empire.