The Intimacy of Labor

Abstract

This essay rethinks writing on “intimate labor” to ethnographically explore the intimacy of labor by attending to how Romani women waste workers in Bulgaria assert workplace friendships to lay claim to public space and cultivate life-sustaining solidarities. Under conditions of racialized and degrading labor, they play with their uniformed hypervisibility, catcall white men on city streets, and temporarily unsettle normative expectations of womanhood. With this disruptive power of workplace intimacy, street sweepers use humor and play to create collective pleasure for themselves and one another. As they explain that they “die so that white Bulgarians can live,” they also use their friendships to generate pleasurable forms of living, what they term “anything else.”