Consuming Intimacies: Bodies, Labour, Care, and Social Justice - Guest Editors' Introduction

The lines between care, paid work, and consumption are increasingly blurring, both conceptually and in everyday practices.More and more people are paying others -often less advantaged persons -to perform personal, often deeply intimate labours that include caring for children, the elderly, and disabled persons; cleaning houses; acting as surrogates; and providing eggs, sperm, and breast milk to create and sustain families.In addition to the growing repertoire of intimate labours, the intimate exchange of body parts is also on the rise as bodily fluids, tissues, and organs are being transformed into consumer products through "body shopping" (Dickenson, 2008).These processes are simultaneously global and local, public and intimate, economic and affective, oppressive and empowering; they create new forms of intimacies but they also offer a great potential for exploitation and social injustice.The title of this special issue, Consuming Intimacies, has a double meaning.Intimacies are "consuming" in that many people care deeply about connecting with and caring for others, yet, increasingly, intimate labours and exchanges are commodified and treated as consumer products.Moreover, there are wide disparities between the geographical location, gender, race, and class of those who provide and those who receive intimate labours, as well as between those whose bodies are commodified and those who can afford to purchase organs, Consuming Intimacies: Bodies, Labour, Care & Social Justice Studies in Social Justice, Volume 10, Issue 2, 194-198, 2016 195 tissues, and fluids.This special issue is produced from a symposium of the same title that was held at Brock University in October 2015, which brought together 47 leading and emerging Canadian and international scholars and artists to present, debate, and explore a wide spectrum of 21 st century intimate labours and their associated economies.The symposium was supported by and connected to the social justice objectives of the Social Justice Research Institute at Brock University.The symposium and outreach activities explored a broad range of critical questions and social justice issues that have arisen from interconnected concepts and practices of intimate labours and exchanges, care, social reproduction, bodies, consumption, and commodification.Symposium participants examined correspondences and divergences between movements and transactions of care work and reproductive labour, on the one hand, and the exchange and sale of body tissues, fluids, and organs, on the other.They explored ways to protect vulnerable individuals and populations from exploitation by asking, for example, when, where, and why forms of intimate labours and exchanges are contentious (Hoeyer, 2013), exploitative (Dickenson, 2013), or "bioviolent" (Moniruzzaman, 2012), who they affect, and in what ways.The symposium featured three internationally renowned keynote speakers:

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