Embodied Invisible Labor and Sexual Carework: Women’s Roles in Sexualized Social Reproduction within Intimate Relationships

• In Event: 527 - Regular Session. Sociology of Sexuality: Producing, Policing, and Contesting Sexual Normativity

Abstract

This paper analyzes the embodied invisible labor that some low-desiring women describe providing for the benefit of their romantic and sexual partners. Based on qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with 37 women who self-identify as lacking sexual desire (or who have experienced low desire at some point during the course of their lives), I emphasize how these low-desiring women’s stories about their early and current relationships with men are often fraught, and characterized by their engagement in feminized sexual carework and caretaking of men. I argue that women learn their roles within this framework of sexualized social reproduction from a very young age, and that this type of labor falls neither clearly within the realm of gendered housework (or other forms of intimate carework that take place in the household), but nor does it fit clearly within the category of affective labor. Rather, women who perform sexual carework labor physically with their bodies, while also simultaneously enacting affective performances of pleasure—creating an atmosphere or ambiance of harmony in the home (and in the bedroom). This research suggests that the terrain surrounding desire, work, and pleasure is complicated, as some low-desiring women describe enjoying the sexual labor they perform and desiring to fulfill their partner’s desires—while simultaneously highlighting that their own desires to this end may not be characterized as “sexual” in accordance with traditional psychoanalytic or biological conventions.

Author

• Alyson K. Spurgas, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville