Working intimacies: Migrant beer sellers, surveillance, and intimate labor in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand

Thousands of rural-to-urban migrant women find employment in urban areas of mainland Southeast Asia as beer sellers, beer promoters, and karaoke girls whose duties include selling alcoholic drinks, often on commission, and entertaining clients. Using the label of beer sellers to refer to all of these workers, this paper draws from a sequential mixed-methods participatory study conducted with migrant beer sellers in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand to examine beer selling as intimate labor. Deploying emotional, affective, and embodied labor as interactive components of intimate labor, migrant beer sellers as members of the urban precariat are subject to myriad forms of surveillance that operate in concert to inform the parameters of beer selling as an intimate industry, the somato-social presentation of workers' bodies, and their intercorporeal interactions with clients. Together, they work to reinforce gendered and racialized social hierarchies and the normative social order.