The culture of servitude in the elite space of the late-19th century Qajar harem meant that various classes of servants and members of the royal family shared what Ann Stoler and Karen Strassler have termed “the emotional economy of the everyday”—the various spaces, times, and people within daily life with whom sentiment is displayed, shared, withheld, and demanded. They argued that the everyday domestic life affected sensibilities and sentiments between and amongst various classes of people who shared relations of proximity. Looking at various gendered and racialized classes of servants in the Gulistan harem during Nasir al-Din Shah’s reign, from wet nurses and nannies, to concubines and eunuchs, this paper examines the ways in which laboring bodies leverage differing relations of proximity to gain intimate knowledge of the private affairs of their masters and mistresses, build interdependent bonds, and use them to further their status and place within the harem hierarchy. While such relationships were defined by deeply uneven structures of social status, race, entitlement, and obligation, this paper argues that servants used affective labor to gain various forms of access to wealth and privilege, though this access was negotiated through and limited by the materiality of their class, gender and racial identity.