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.

Plain language summary

India’s women frontline health workers are a large and important workforce that promotes much-needed maternal and child healthcare. But these marginalized women workers are caught in what I call an intimacy double bind: they are compelled to invest time, money, and care into their relationships with their supervisors. In this article I describe the nature, dynamics, and consequences of this exploitative supervisory relationship.