Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (University of California Press, 2023)

Offshore Attachments explores how the oil industry wrought transformative change in the Dutch Caribbean (Curaçao and Aruba), by managing sex, race, and intimacy to serve the energy economy from the 1930s to the 1980s. The book argues that intimacy, including sex work and family structures, were crucial to the oil industry's infrastructure and productivity. It includes in its analysis not only how these dynamics affected male oil workers, but also how they exploited women's domestic, economic, and reproductive labor, which in turn helped make oil into such a wealth-producing commodity.

Speaker: Chelsea Schields
Associate Professor, History School of Humanities
UC Irvine