Intimate Labour and Bioprecarity
Intimate Labour and Bioprecarity
This chapter elaborates the notion of bioprecarity as it is utilized in this volume by drawing on three theoretical concepts which have not been ‘thought together’ before. They are intimate labour as discussed in Boris and Salazar Parreñas’ work (2010); bios, as understood in Michel Foucault’s writings (2008); and precarity as originally developed in France in the 1970s, then taken up by Judith Butler (2004) in the context of war, terrorism, survival and grievable lives, and popularized in the relation to new forms of labour by Guy Standing (2011). The chapter develops these three concepts in the context of bodily interventions prompted by opportunities for bodily labour, meaning labour on and with the body, in order to investigate bioprecarity, a new form of vulnerability which is associated with providing and seeking intimate bodily labour in cross-cultural contexts.
Keywords: bioprecarity, intimate labour, bios, bodily labour, vulnerability
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