The Production of Intimacy: How Hollywood’s Intimacy Coordinators Manage Intimate Labor in a Creative Industry

• In Event: Production of Culture Perspectives

Abstract

In 2017, Hollywood’s relaunched #MeToo movement revealed extensive sexual assault in the screen industries. In the aftermath of widespread allegations of sexual assault against powerful men, Hollywood leaders scrambled to demonstrate support for social change through their labor practices. While industry leaders welcomed some labor changes, other changes were met with more skepticism, especially the implementation of intimacy coordinators. This ongoing ethnographic research study explores Hollywood’s growing incorporation of intimacy coordinators and other intimate labor practices into film and television production. Given the industry’s ambivalent responses to intimacy coordinators, I ask: what does the implementation of intimate labor practices into a creative industry transform or reveal about creative labor? I draw on nearly three years of participant observations in intimacy coordinator classes, workshops, and hard-to-access settings like SAG-AFTRA union meetings, film sets, and invite-only community events. Additionally, I’ve conducted in-depth interviews with 15 U.S.-based intimacy coordinators and conducted dozens of ethnographic interviews with intimacy coordinators and their key collaborators. I find that intimacy coordinators transform the relations of power on film productions by performing forms of intimate labor: they provide care for vulnerable workers, question the necessity of filming sexually intimate acts, and uphold the legal rights and dignity of the performers in intimate scenes. But since their work challenges longheld norms of creative labor production in the screen industries, some industry leaders – including those who publicly advocate for gender equity and sexual harassment prevention – treat intimacy coordinators’ (care) work as a threat to artists’ creative expression. By framing intimate labor practices as incompatible with the creative process, industry leaders perpetuate inequitable relations in creative labor. Ultimately, this work contributes to research on cultural production, creative industries, and intimate labor.

Author

• Jennifer David, University of California-Santa Barbara