Intimacy Double Bind: The Labor Women Workers Put Into Their Supervisors
Abstract
Why do workers appear to participate in their own exploitation? In this paper, I focus on the relationship that India’s women community health workers—called ASHAs (Accredited Social Health activists)—have with their nurse supervisors, also women. ASHAs represent India’s gendered development paradigm in a case of what scholars call the “feminization of responsibility.” Although they are a large and important workforce, the Indian state insists ASHAs are not workers but “paid volunteers.” Using 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, including 80 interviews, I show that this makes ASHAs excessively reliant on their supervisors, creating what I call an “intimacy double bind”: a no-win dynamic in which ASHAs must perform intimacy with their supervisors even though it comes at material and emotional cost to them. Although all ASHAs are subject to it, I show how the intimacy double bind impacts different ASHAs differently. My findings demonstrate how insecure conditions of work—here a result of the partial commodification of women’s care work—can produce feudalistic relations between classes of workers.
Metadata is indexed. Open-access discovery has not completed for this record yet.
No local PDF is available.
GROBID Extracted text; discontinued.
This text is generated from TEI extraction for accessibility, search, and TTS. Formulas, tables, figures, page layout, and references may not perfectly match the original PDF.
No accessible text representation is available. The text extraction service has been discontinued for the time being. If you require this service, for accessibility or any other reason, please submit an issue/request on this page.
Metadata
Issues
No public issues have been filed for this DOI.
Submit an issue
Record history
| When | Event | Field | Old | New |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-18 19:37:53.011249+00:00 | identifier_assigned | DSEID | DSEID-000-8281371 |