book project

Intimate data: latina workers and the data-driven politics of care

Intimate Data: Latina Workers and the Data-Driven Politics of Care offers a theoretically robust and empirically grounded intervention at the intersection of Chicanx/Latinx Studies, Gender Studies, and Media Studies, revealing how contemporary regimes of documentation and datafication penetrate spaces long considered private: homes, bodies, and the relational domains of care. This book develops the concept of intimate data to examine how caring relationships are transformed into objects of knowledge and administrative power, increasingly through data-driven technologies of care that purport to disrupt and smooth intimate labors through mechanisms like data collection and surveillance. Situating these contemporary, data-driven technologies of care within a longer historical arc of state and corporate governance, this book traces continuities with earlier regimes of racialized and gendered documentation and datafication like biometric tracking and border-control databases. Examining how administrative regimes have long shaped normative understandings of care, family, kinship, labor, and belonging, this book argues that seemingly new data-driven technologies of care are often undergirded by the same logics that render care workers as legible, commodifiable, and – at times – disposable. 

Grounded in four years of collaborative ethnographic research with Latina domestic workers and critical media analysis, Intimate Data does not simply portray Latina care workers as passive subjects of data-driven control. Rather, by framing the politics of care as a site of struggle, Intimate Data elevates worker‑centered practices of counter‑data production and counter-documentation as foundational to an emancipatory politics of care. Intimate Data highlights how immigrant Latina care workers navigate and contest documentation and data regimes through strategies of refusal, subversion, and collective invention. In doing so, the book offers a critical vocabulary not only for analyzing how datafication shapes care, but also for imagining how marginalized communities reclaim epistemic, political, and economic authority over their intimate lives. Ultimately, Intimate Data is a call to dismantle the exploitative economies that render care (in-)visible and disposable – and to uplift the emancipatory practices of those whose intimate labor “makes all other work possible.”