Thinking with the Intimacy Contract: Social Contract Critique and the Privatization of US Empire
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591720901556 |
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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Political Theory
2020, Vol. 48(6) 692 –722
Thinking with the
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Social Contract
Critique and the
Privatization of
US Empire
Rachel H. Brown1
Abstract
This essay considers how an “intimacy contract,” as a conceptual tool
and a political reality, extends existing critiques of the social contract
tradition by accounting for the privatized nature of the post-9/11 US
empire. Examining critiques by Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, I
argue that an intimacy contract uncovers the coercive power relations
underlying neoliberal discourses of entrepreneurial freedom. Focusing on
migrant labor on US military bases, I provide an overview of the racial,
sexual, and settler contracts and the need to extend Mills’s and Pateman’s
critiques of embodiment and spatiality. Next, I suggest how the intimacy
contract generates a transnational, embodied account of the labors
upholding US empire; a lens into the shifting significance of these labors
under neoliberal imperialism; and a chronicling of desire and workers’
interests. In conclusion, I suggest how the intimacy contract exposes
multiple resistances to US empire and neoliberal capitalism.
1Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO,
USA
Corresponding Author:
Rachel H. Brown, Assistant Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Washington
University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1078, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899,
USA.
Email: brown.rachel@wustl.edu
Brown
693
Keywords
social contract, racial contract, sexual contract, intimacy, empire
. . . the body vanishes, becomes theoretically unimportant, just as the physical
space inhabited by that body is ostensibly theoretically unimportant.1
. . . (there are) many different versions or local instantiations of the racial
contract, and they evolve over time, so that the effective force of the social
contract itself changes, and the kind of cognitive dissonance between the
two alters.2
. . . the sexual contract is made only once, but it is replicated every day . . .3
Introduction
In 2005, several hundred Filipino, Nepalese, and Indian contract workers
organized a labor strike at US military base Camp Cooke outside Taji, Iraq.
Protesting poor working conditions, they insisted that employers Prime
Projects International (PPI) and Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) honor the
terms of their contract.4 Like tens of thousands of other migrants on US mili-
tary bases—dubbed “third-country nationals” (TNCs)—they were hired by
subcontractors of the US Department of Defense (DoD) to do cooking, clean-
ing, laundry, and logistics. Detailing his experience with recruiters, Nepalese
worker Krishna Bahadur Khadka notes, “I was not happy at first as my con-
tractors did not provide me a job as heavy vehicle driver as pledged. But they
had offered Rs 175,000 [$2,450], and one would not be able earn half that
amount in Kuwait. So I signed the papers.” In response to these allegations,
Khadka’s boss stated that “Khadka is a troublemaker who was trying to orga-
nize the workers.”5
Three years later in December 2008, a thousand migrants from
Bangladesh, Nepal, India, and Sri Lanka staged another protest, demanding
release from the Baghdad airport warehouses where they were stranded,
return of their passports, and fairer working conditions. Despite paying
upwards of US$3,000 in middlemen agency fees to migrate, they were met
with gunshots from privately hired Iraqi security guards and the assurance
from a US military spokesman that the military “[takes] every allegation of
human rights violation seriously.”6 Coming from Pakistan, India, Nepal,
the Philippines, South Korea, Uganda, Sierra Leone, and other countries,
migrants comprise the majority of workers on US sites in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and they are also disproportionately employed in Guantanamo,
694
Political Theory 48(6)
South Korea, and the Gulf countries.7 Tellingly, in 2016 every fourth US
personnel in Iraq was a contractor, and the current ratio globally is roughly
one-to-one, while migrants constituted the largest number of DOD contrac-
tors in Iraq from 2009–2013.8
In a third protest in South Korea, where US soldiers have a lengthy his-
tory of employing local and migrant sex workers, a thousand sex workers
and brothel employees organized a rally in Seoul to fight the criminalization
of sex work.9 Chanting “Repeal the anti-prostitution law!” and “We are
workers!” they demanded that sex work be treated as work, contra anti-
trafficking and punitive approaches. As one former sex worker on a US mili-
tary base noted, “this is a system that (the Korean government) created” as a
way of facilitating positive relations with US soldiers on bases.10 The pro-
motion of sex work by the South Korean government in US military base
camp towns, or gijichon, is now largely done by Filipina migrants, as South
Korean women have gained access to other economic opportunities.11,12
Though rarely reported, migrant workers regularly engage in protests,
strikes, sit-ins, and legislative action. The capitalist exploitation they contest is
part of the broader privatizing and outsourcing of military labor that allows the
United States to declare artificially low troop numbers, rely less heavily upon
costly “mercenary” companies, avoid hiring local workers whom they fear
could betray their mission, and cut the labor costs required to maintain its
“neoliberal empire of military bases.”13 As Isabelle V. Barker argues, this out-
sourcing enables the US military to “disavow” the role these feminized and
racialized labors play in upholding US empire while allowing citizen-soldiers
to avoid the stigma of these reproductive labors.14 As I detail below, this dis-
avowal is not only a denial of the racialized and gendered particularities of
migrant workers whose labors are mystified by discourses of the abstract, uni-
versal entrepreneurial subject, but equally a denial of the “white, corporeal
particularity” of the ideal citizen-soldier.15 Through a related logic, migrant
sex workers in South Korea doing the labor that for decades was done by
South Koreans helps sustain and contest the imperial status of US soldiers on
the peninsula, and that of South Koreans as citizens of a “subempire.”16
As feminist, antiracist, and anticolonial critics of the liberal political
philosophical tradition have detailed, the disavowal of the racialized and
gendered labors that are the conditions of possibility for liberal principles
of freedom, equality, and autonomy are neither new to the workings of US
empire nor to contractarian accounts of political legitimacy. Scholars have
highlighted how the liberal humanist tradition has been leveraged to justify
land expropriation, resource extraction, slavery, and the expansion of
empire.17 Yet under neoliberal free market enterprise, privatization, and
state retrenchment from welfare provision, the language of freely
Brown
695
consenting individuals entering voluntarily into contracts has become
embedded in distinctively new discourses. In what Wendy Brown terms an
“inversion” of the liberal social contract, the neoliberal state transforms
into a firm wherein the citizen is no longer “homo politicus” but rather
“homo economicus,” a personally responsible, replaceable, and “instru-
mentalizable” element of the state.18 In this moment of “neoliberal imperi-
alism”—the post-9/11 period marking a joining of neoliberal governance
and the use of market-based approaches in the so-called “war on terror”—
migrant workers become the “instrumentalizable” entrepreneurial “transna-
tional development agents” sustaining a US military presence around the
world.19 Marking a merging of “political-military and economic unilateral-
ism,” neoliberal imperialism denotes greater use of the private security
industry (PSI) and private military contracts (PMC), whose market worth
approximates $100 billion, and expanding defense contracts outsourced to
layers of for-profit contractors.20 Accompanying this flexibilization of army
labor has been the erosion of the public sector in matters pertaining to war
and the rule of law.21 Revealingly, the 2002 National Security Strategy
states that the country’s role is to “actively work to bring the hope of
democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the
world.”22
How, then, can we understand the migrant labors enabling the reproduc-
tion of US military bases and the shifting meanings they take on under neo-
liberal imperialism? How do the racialized, gendered, and sexualized
hierarchies that workers occupy constitute and transform the spaces where
they labor? What new languages of freedom, equality, and autonomy so cen-
tral to the social contract tradition mystify the violence migrant workers face
under global restructuring and the flexibilization of labor? And why is social
contract critique a crucial lens into the intimate labors unfolding under neo-
liberal imperialism?
As the “lingua franca” of political philosophical debates about the proper
role of government, the legitimacy of sovereignty, and the rights and protec-
tions owed to a polity, social contract critique provides a conceptual frame-
work for understanding how...
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