November 26 (M), November 28 (W), November 30 (F)

Read: Mankekar and Gupta, "Intimate Encounters: Affective Labor in Call Centers" (Moodle article)
Padios, "Call Center Agent" (Moodle article)
Hoang, "Flirting with Capital: Negotiating Perceptions of Pan-Asian Ascendency and Western Decline in Global Sex Work" (Moodle article)
Robert, "Prostitute" (Moodle article)
Rudrappa, "What to Expect When You're Expecting: The Affective Economies of Consuming Surrogacy in India" (Moodle article)
Deomampo, "Race, Nation, and the Production of Intimacy: Transnational Ova Donation in India" (Moodle article)

1. According to Mankekar and Gupta, what kind of affective labor occurs in business process outsourcing (BPO)? What is produced? How does their analysis differ from Hochschild's critique of emotional labor?

2. In Padios's account, what kinds of opportunities and constraints do call center workers in the Philippines face? How does this service industry fit into the broader economy?

3. How, according to Hoang, do different segments of sex work in Vietnam relate to different forms of masculinity, femininity, national identity, and global financial status? What forms of Asian modernity and Third World dependency were performed in the four different bars that Hoang studied?

4. According to Robert, what kinds of fears lurked behind Vietnamese moral panics about prostitution in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s? How does his account of the figure of the prostitute compare to Hoang's?

5. What dilemmas of affective labor does Rudrappa identify for commercialized surrogacy in India? Why does she use the term "cross-border reproductive care"?

6. What relationships and constructions of race, kinship, and genetics emerge in Deomampo's analysis of the intimate industry of ova "donation" in India?

 

Topic for RESPONSE PAPER #9 (2-3 pages, double-spaced, due on November 30 by email before class to Professor Leshkowich.) Please remember to submit your paper as a Microsoft Word document named lastname9.docx.

Outsourcing Affect
The readings for this unit consider the provision of intimate forms of labor that are occurring through global regimes of labor that permit services to be disaggregated and outsourced. How does the concept of affect or affective labor help us to analyze the growing demand for these globally provided services, the hierarchical structures that shape their provision, and the consequences of this global division of labor for those involved as clients or workers? Address these questions through a comparative discussion of two of the four longer articles (Mankekar & Gupta, Hoang, Rudrappa, and Deomampo) that we are reading for this unit. Be sure to include a discussion of the key terms through which each author analyzes the dynamics involved in the forms of intimate or affective labor described.