Reconfiguring Intimacy In Asia: Mobility, Care, and Emerging Subjectivities

Intimacy has long been a central lens in international migration studies, particularly through analyses of women’s labor mobility and the transnational organization of care. Earlier scholarship highlighted how intimate labor—once carried out by women within national boundaries—became increasingly globalized as women from the Global South migrated to perform care work in wealthier countries. Asia has been a key site in this transformation: it is both a major sending region of women who engage in care labor and a major receiving region where reliance on familial forms of social reproduction remains high. As a result, the globalization of the intimate sphere has unfolded in especially dynamic and uneven ways across the region.

Recent social transformations, however, have rendered the relationship between intimacy and mobility more complex. The aging of migrants and ethnic minorities has meant that those who once provided intimate labor increasingly require such support themselves. Neoliberal reforms have reshaped family structures and expectations of care across Asia, while advances in information and communication technologies have expanded forms of “cross-border” care that do not require physical movement. These shifts call for renewed attention to how intimacy is reorganized, redistributed, and reimagined in contemporary contexts of mobility and immobility.

This session will examine these emerging configurations of intimacy in Asia. Through diverse empirical cases, how social change reshapes intimate relations and how these reconfigurations, in turn, shape new forms of subjectivity among those who move and those who remain would be explored. 4-5 paper presentations will be accommodated in this session.