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The Work We Do But Won’t Name

Scholars who study labor have a term for work that involves “particularized knowledge and sustained personal attention.” They call it intimate labor. According to scholar Viviana Zelizer’s framework, this work includes things like shared secrets, bodily information, awareness of personal vulnerability, interpersonal rituals, and private languages.

Read that list again. Now think about what happens in a massage therapy session.

We know our clients’ bodies in ways that even their partners may not. We hold their secrets about pain, about stress, about the divorce they haven’t told anyone about yet. We know things about our clients we don’t even realize we know, the way a janitor knows what a household discards, learning private details from what people throw away.

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