Intimacies at Work

This chapter considers the mutual imbrication of capitalism and intimacy among BPO agents and their customers and coworkers. BPOs foster intimacy at a distance between agents and their customers to secure profits for the company. Intimacy in agent-customer interactions encompasses both empathy and “ugly sentiments” that reflect and perpetuate geopolitical and racial inequalities. The organizational structure of BPOs generates intimate relations among coworkers while disrupting familial and communal relationships. These intimacies underscore how regimes of affective labor create potentialities that offer agents opportunities for friendship, solidarity, compassion, dignity, and lines of flight when faced with exploitation, racist abuse, and sexual harassment. BPO agents’ desires gesture toward hopeful, fragile futures that are always in the process of becoming. In bringing to the foreground relationalities as sites of connection and oppression, desire and coercion, and solidarity and estrangement, this chapter envisions forms of futurity that are sustainable—that is, futurities that have a future.