Intimate Labor

Focusing on the representation of a Moldovan prostitute in a Romanian recessionary film, Bardan uses a postfeminist framework to analyze how a female character from a country to the east of Romania is deployed by the film to renegotiate the emasculation of a Romanian man who has just lost his job and financial resources. Drawing on discussions of intimate labor, sexual subjectification, and whiteness, the chapter shows how Exchange mediates the recession through the ambivalent portrayal of an accented prostitute who functions as an insider-outsider in an economically precarious country that has recently joined the EU. Bardan zooms in to analyze the various tensions and fantasies at play in the main characters’ shifting positionalities. As she argues, the Moldovan woman, though seemingly more autonomous than the vulnerable Eastern European prostitutes often depicted in Western European films, merely disavows her own desires, thus interpreting her rejection by the Romanian protagonist as a manifestation of her calculated self-management. Within the economy of the film, she serves as an agent of regeneration for the national male subject at a moment of crisis and real and symbolic impotence.

This thesis explores transnational commercial surrogacy in the context of Thailand, with the specific purpose to examine Thai women's motives and experiences of being a surrogate mother. The study is based on two months of fieldwork in Bangkok between June and August 2014 during which interviews were conducted with eleven former, current or future surrogate mothers. The analysis take a postcolonial feminist approach, and draw upon theory of motherhood, intimate labor and stratified reproduction.

Based on ethnographic research in an US military camp town in South Korea, this article examines camp town sexual commerce as a manifestation of shifting global hierarchies amid Asia's economic ascendance and the decline of US hegemony. Challenging the dichotomous constructions of US GIs as powerful agents and of migrant club hostesses as trafficked victims, the author highlights their shared conditions of “indentured mobility” as constrained subjects bound by migrant labor contracts in their quest for mobility. Revisiting the persisting power asymmetry between US GIs and migrant hostesses, the author's ethnography reveals the ways in which power differentials are deployed by hostesses and club owners as a resource to incite the discourse of benevolence and rescue that attracts US GI customers to the clubs. By engaging the US military camp town as a space of migrant encounter, this article illuminates how global geopolitics, uneven capitalist development, and transnational migration are entangled with intimacy, power, and emotions to shape intimate labor at a critical juncture of the changing global order.