Intimacy and industry: the multiple heterosexual intimacies shaping cycle rickshaw men’s labor and migration in India

Abstract

ABSTRACT Indian men who migrated circularly from their village homes to Delhi to pedal cycle rickshaws for work practiced intimate relationships with their wives, sex workers, and middle-class female customers. While the intimacy practiced by South Asian men who migrate is, in popular discourse, often framed as deviancy or assumed to be only about physical gratification, this article’s ethnography demonstrates that rickshaw men’s heterosexual/erotic intimacies took multiple forms which were variously characterized by sexual exchange, physical closeness, emotional connections, and/or the denial of gender and sexuality. The intimate practices were informed by intersecting identities and systems of social hierarchy, and it is argued that they had considerable bearing on the men’s migration decisions and labor performance. Although neither intimacy studies nor South Asian labor migration studies are in the habit of analyzing industries like the cycle rickshaw industry through the same lens as, for example, sex work or surrogacy and fertility work, a case is made that such industries that rely on South Asian male migrants’ manual labor and migration may, too, be profitably understood as intimate industries.