Rethinking Intimate Labor through Inter-Asian Migrations: Insights from the 2011 Bellagio Conference

Over the past quarter of a century, women and men have migrated with greater frequency within Asia as the continent increasingly plays host to major im/migration sending and receiving countries. Countries across the region are grappling with powerful economic changes that have produced booming economies in some areas and severe economic pressures in others. These material disparities are coupled with radically divergent population trends as Asia includes countries with the world’s lowest birth rates and those with the largest populations. The convergence of these disparate trends has generated richly varied forms of migration and immigration, the preponderance of which involves some type of intimate labor, whether domestic and care work, sex work, or marriage. Intimate labor underscores the bodily, emotional, gendered, and sometimes invisible dimensions of labor that forges and sustains families, interpersonal relations, class statuses, household life, and the integrity and dignity of those in need of care.1 While wealthier parts of Asia increasingly depend on migrants to perform this intimate labor, poorer regions face their own “care deficit” as growing numbers of women migrate abroad. Hence, these intimate labor migrations require new efforts to understand cross-border movement, intimate life, family relations, and gendered labor in an increasingly mobile Asian context.