Intimacy, Alienation, and Affective Automation

Chapter 2 examines how the state and employers treat migrant caregivers as intimate members of the family and “foreign” interlopers excluded from a Zionist future. While their treatment as national helpers reinvigorating the nation and workers performing exceptionally intimate labors enables task expansion, their constitution as non-Jewish demographic threats justifies surveillance. This unsettled positioning disrupts the home and nation as an exclusionary Jewish space, even as, paradoxically, live-in eldercare is central to its reproduction. Treating the household and nation as contiguous topographies of risk, I contend that the dual demands of their positioning as intimate and alien require that they engage in “affective automation,” or the repetitive execution of physical and emotional tasks despite their own limits. This continual demand for labor impacts their exposure to injury within a broader reproductive regime predicated on the disavowal of indigeneity.