Gender Studies

Drawing on queer of color critique, this paper uses mixed methods including participant observation, interviews, visual and textual analysis, and photovoice to interrogate sex workers’ queer creative practices. Building upon the larger oeuvre of sex working artists, contemporary sex working artists in Los Angeles utilizes queer creativity to thwart hegemonic readings of sex work. Performances at two activist fundraisers drew on the themes and esthetics of sex work to counter mainstream nar- ratives about sex work and workers, and to interrupt their objectification. The cover and graphics of a sex worker zine push back against dominant narratives about sex workers and the power structures that suppress sex worker self-representa- tion. Photovoice methodology allowed sex workers to counter- act objectification by telling their own stories. In their creative products, sex workers show how “queer” is a praxis of sex and gender disruption, rather than a simple identity category sig- naling non-heterosexuality, challenging homonormativity in addition to heteronormativity.

Th e year 2017 marks the fortieth anniversary of the Combahee River Collective Statement. To commemorate and refl ect on the importance of this statement for feminist praxis, Frontiers invited feminist thinkers to respond to three questions: 1. How has the CRC statement transformed feminism? 2. What is the intellectual genealogy of women of color feminisms? 3. What is the relationship among women of color feminisms and other forms of feminisms? From these questions, themes emerged that emphasize the CRC's impact on our collective formations as feminist scholars, the perpetual renovation of feminist concepts, and the new directions in which feminist theories take us. Aft er an introductory section on how some of our roundtablists fi rst encountered the CRC statement, the roundtable then explores two key concepts that the statement articulated, namely intersectionality and identity politics. Our commentators next analyze the genealogy of women of color feminisms as well as the connections and dissonances with Indigenous and transnational feminisms. Th e roundtable concludes with brief meditations on the importance of feminist remembrance and the continued signifi cance of the CRC statement in the current political context.

By examining the affective regimes generated by call center workers in Bangalore, we argue that the forms of alienation and intimacy they generate are co-implicated, rather than in opposition, to each other. In contesting the presumption that the intimate is in contradistinction to the public, we join scholarly conversations that trace how relations of intimacy are constructed through processes of labor (Boris and Parreñas 2010; Vora 2010). In our analysis of intimate encounters and affective labor, we draw upon several years of intensive ethnographic field research in call centers in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. We argue that the affective labor of call center agents is service work but it takes the form of intimate labor provided at a distance. While intimacy implies a proximity that may be physical, corporeal, emotional, and/or geographical, the affective labor of our informants underscored the ways in which it reconstituted their very experience of time and space, proximity and distance. On the one hand, their success at work was contingent on their construction of a relationship of proximity with their clients, eliciting and producing affects that generated intimate encounters. However, although these workers did not engage in physical travel, their virtual and imaginative travel was generative of new modalities of proximity that compel us to review our assumptions about intimacy and distance, and about the relation between intimacy and capital.

Keywords: Affective labor, intimate labor, call centers, India