Boundaries Of Intimacy Research Articles

Tactile technologies of the self: connection, hapticscape and self-development narratives in Cape Town’s Afro-Latin dance scene

Drawing on ethnographic research within the salsa, bachata and kizomba (SBK) scene of Cape Town, this article examines the values and narratives of personal development that Cape Town’s adepts of Afro-Latin dance elaborate around the emic notion of “connection.” I describe how this multisensory experience is informed by an ethic of personal development and self-transformation, which at the same time reflects the influence of global neoliberal entrepreneurial paradigms — together with the hopes, values and hampered dreams of Cape Town’s post-apartheid middle classes. Narratives and descriptions of the hapticscape and multisensory knowledge built through the search for connection highlight how these encounters give shape to intimate spaces where salsa amateurs can imagine, materialise and embody the multiple injunctions they navigate and can reconfigure the boundaries of intimacy, identity and otherness in the post-apartheid city.

Choroba i jej metafory w twórczości współczesnych polskich poetek

The article deals with metaphors of disease in selected contemporary Polish female poets. In focus are the portrayals of disease, its symptoms and consequences for the imperfect human body. The anthropological perspective assumed in this study, which reveals the coding of human experience in a literary work, emphasises the connections between the poetics of the work and the problem of defining individual identity. The analysis leads to the following conclusions: the poets (both in lyrical poetry and other intimist writing) usually relate to conceptual metaphors motivated by the notions of object and containment (e.g. life is a container, body is an object, body is a container); other recognizable metaphors are orientational (wpaść w wilczy dół ‘fall into the pitfall’) or grounded in the notion of fire (czuję się spalona ‘I feel consumed by flames’). By modifying classic metaphors, the poets construct new cognitive perspectives. They express the feeling of isolation from the world of the healthy and the fragility of the human body as a material “prison house”. They also make attempts to regain control over it by extending the boundaries of intimacy. By studying the esthetic and epistemological aspects of metaphors in connection with an understanding of self in a situation of irreversible loss of full physical control, of fear and of bold expansion of one’s corporality, it is possible to identify individual and cultural grounding of corporality.

BRANTWOOD: Canada’s Largest Experiment in Immersive Theatre

Julie Tepperman and Mitchell Cushman, co-creators, playwrights, and directors of Brantwood, write about the process of creating the largest site-specific immersive musical in Canada. Originally commissioned by Associate Dean Michael Rubinoff and Sheridan College’s Musical Theatre Program, Brantwood was designed for and performed in a 90-year-old school in Oakville, Ontario that had been closed down due to low enrolment. The piece consisted of 40 original songs (composed by Anika Johnson, Britta Johnson, and Bram Gielen) imbedded in 11 one-hour scripted storylines, each set during a different decade in the history of this imaginary high school. The 15 hours of total material unfolded simultaneously over the course of each three-hour performance, and the audience had free rein to roam everywhere in the building and to follow whichever character they chose in the 42 person cast. Julie and Mitchell write about the challenges of creating theatre on such a large scale, and immersing the audience in an environment that gives them freedom to roam and explore, and engage with the show in both direct and indirect ways, and to push the boundaries of intimacy between performer and audience.

Surveillant Intimacies

We often think of surveillance as ubiquitous, secretive, top-down, corporate, and governmental—and in many ways, it is. Through three vignettes, this essay prods at the ways in which our everyday tools, technologies, and gestures extend surveillance’s reach into our intimate lives and relationships. Each vignette is a story constructed from facts gleaned in news stories, social media, or personal conversations. As such, these vignettes are neither empirical nor entirely speculative. In an effort to consider surveillance as an ongoing and daily activity, they invite readers into more intimate contexts than those that are usually the object of rigorous scholarly analysis. In their intimacy, these stories serve to remind us of the ways in which communication devices are always, in some capacity, tracking and trailing our desires. Vignette 1 tells the story of the NSA agent who uses the agency’s powerful database to spy on an ex-lover. Vignette 2 explores the kinds of information users can get (about themselves) from Big Tech companies, from social media and dating apps. Vignette 3 looks at Internet cookies and their capacity to make unlikely—and unwanted—introductions. Technology, apps, and our always-on devices complicate the boundaries of intimacy and often work to redefine the trajectories of our desire in the process. The breaches of trust detailed in these stories expose the ways in which Big Tech’s desire to predict and to measure human emotion and behaviour exists in tension with our memories, our secrets, and our wild imaginations.

Being Like Your Girlfriend: Authenticity and the Shifting Borders of Intimacy in Sex Work

In the last decades a series of sexual services that offer company, talk, and more generally, what is understood as a ‘girlfriend experience’, are increasingly offered to a middle and upper-middle class clientele. These services involve a change in the boundaries of intimacy. We argue that they can be interpreted as part of the general process by which late capitalism has subsumed the 1968 critique that demanded liberation and authenticity. Based on an analysis of in-depth interviews with escorts and street walkers, we explore the discourse of authenticity in escort work in Spain and how the line is drawn between an ‘authentic intimacy’ that is sold, and a ‘private intimacy’, which involves the non-commodified affective life of the sex worker. We argue that escorts and street walkers draw these borders differently, the former emphasising authenticity in their service. Both, however, deploy a form of emotional labour.

Negotiating the Boundaries of Intimacy: The Personal Lives of Asexual People

This paper uses findings from research diaries to explore the use of practices of intimacy among asexual people. While much of the literature to date has focused on the supposedly transformative and political nature of uniquely asexual practices of intimacy, our findings suggest something different. Rather than seeking to transform the nature of intimate relationships, asexual people make pragmatic adjustments and engage in negotiations to achieve the forms of physical and emotional intimacy they seek. We discuss this in relation to three areas: friendships, sex as a practice of intimacy, and exclusion from intimacy. Our findings suggest the importance of not only considering the social context in which asexual people practise intimacy, but also how the practices in which they engage may be shared with non-asexual people.

Okiem podglądacza, czyli zjawisko wojeryzmu w polskich mediach i polityce

Nowadays, when the media are omnipresent and the globalization is constantly progressing, there is no place for privacy. It can be seen on the example of tabloids, which describe famous people’s life in detail, and on the small screen, where reality shows and quasi-documentary programmes dominate. Above all, it may be seen on the web – by means of social networks such as Facebook or Twitter. People like “peeking” others – our nature has an inborn tendency to be curious. This phenomenon is called voyeurism and it is a novelty on a Polish media market. It also refers to a political sphere. Consequently, we deal with a new kind of political communication. We more and more treat ourselves as products, by sharing our photos on the web and creating a certain image which often oversteps the boundaries of intimacy. The image culture has entirely dominated the mass media. Do any boundaries of privacy still exist, on account of that? If yes, how to preserve them?

Eating together: food, friendship, and inequality

An insightful map of the landscape of social meals, Eating Together: Food, Friendship, and Inequality argues that the ways in which Americans eat together play a central role in social life in the United States. Delving into a wide range of research, Alice P. Julier analyzes etiquette and entertaining books from the past century and conducts interviews and observations of dozens of hosts and guests at dinner parties, potlucks, and buffets. She finds that when people invite friends, neighbors, or family members to share meals within their households, social inequalities involving race, economics, and gender reveal themselves in interesting ways: relationships are defined, boundaries of intimacy or distance are set, and people find themselves either excluded or included.

Framing Sensibility: The Female Couple in Art and Narrative

This essay will examine how portraits of sisters and other female pairings have been culturally coded to produce certain types of readings; through a comparative analysis of a variety of sisters portraits from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century, as well as the work of Denis Diderot, we will show how the construction of female intimacy shifted between presenting a safe form of domestication on the one hand, and a questioning and subverting of familial and heterosexual relations on the other. We will argue that it is perhaps because feminine bonding was perceived to require less surveillance and to be inherently safe that the boundaries of intimacy in paintings and narratives were allowed more varied permutations.

Rethinking the Boundaries of Intimacy at the End of the Century: The Role of Victim-Defendant Relationship in Criminal Justice Decisionmaking Over Time

I investigate whether the degree of intimacy between victims and defendants affects legal responses to violence and how this association has changed over time. Using data on homicides between 1974 and 1996, I examine court outcomes in more than 1,000 cases. I demonstrate that intimacy matters at three criminal justice stages: charging, mode of conviction, and sentencing. However, moving beyond the traditional conceptualization of intimacy, I show that defendants who kill intimates do not always receive the same treatment, nor are all defendants who kill nonintimates treated similarly. Finally, I show that criminal justice leniency toward intimate violence is less evident in recent years.

Conceptualizing the Divorce Process: Renegotiating Boundaries of Intimacy and Power in the Divorced Family System

The topic of divorce has attracted a great deal of attention from social scientists over the last two decades. Both clinicians and researchers have written much about the experience of divorced families. These accounts agree that, socially and psychologically, divorce is not a single event but a process of change that can extend over long periods of time (e.g., Cherlin, 1992; Emery, 1988; Hetherington, 1989; Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980). Despite widespread agreement on this point, few integrative conceptualizations have been offered about the process of divorce. In this article, we outline our conceptualization of divorce as the renegotiation of boundaries of intimacy and power in the relationships between members of the divorced family system. The first author has discussed this conceptualization elsewhere in relation to marriage and parenting (Emery & Tuer, 1993), family conflict (Emery, 1992), and the mediation of child custody disputes (Emery, 1994). In this article, we briefly outline the conceptual model as applied to dyadic and triadic relationships between divorced parents and their children, as well as between the former partners themselves. We also speculate about how family members experience these relationship changes as individuals. Throughout the article, we focus on concepts and clinical experience rather than research findings, although we note that the model is broadly consistent with research evidence that we have reviewed in detail elsewhere (Emery, 1982, 1988; Emery & Forehand, in press; Emery & Kitzmann, in press). BASIC CONCEPTS: INTIMACY AND POWER BOUNDARIES Family relationships do not end with a divorce. Parent-child relationships obviously continue after a separation, but ironically, even former partners must maintain some form of a relationship if they also are parents. Thus, the divorced family is defined by shared relationships and not by a shared residence. Relationships transcend households, and the functioning of individual family members, particularly children, cannot be understood apart from these interdependencies. This family systems view of divorce is particularly apt in the first few years following a marital separation, when many children have fairly frequent contact with both of their parents (Seltzer, 1991). The model still may apply many years later, even among children who rarely see their nonresidential parents. Many children in this circumstance still list both of their parents as members of their family (Peterson & Zill, 1986), for example, and the influence of the physically absent parent is indexed in various other ways, such as by the avoidance of certain topics of conversation. It is obvious, of course, that family relationships do change dramatically when a marriage ends. What is not obvious is what the changes will (or should) be The uncertain boundaries of altered family relationships create problems for mental health professionals, the legal system, and family members themselves. Relationship Boundaries We need to define the concept of boundaries clearly. Boundaries are the explicit or implicit rules that define the structure of family relationships (P. Minuchin, 1985; S. Minuchin, 1974). Family boundaries can be seen as analogous to international boundaries. Instead of defining physical territory, family boundaries define the psychological territory of an individual or of a relationship. For example, parents draw a boundary around their intimate relationship to exclude other family members. Various rules mark this boundary, such as the avoidance of discussions of sexuality in the presence of the children. Boundaries are negotiated over time in a marriage based on preexisting expectations, direct discussions about rules and roles, and particularly the actions of family members (Emery Tuer, 1993). In divorce, a major goal is to redefine these boundaries. Boundaries are difficult to renegotiate following a marital separation, however, because of uncertain normative expectations, intense and painful emotions, incompatible desires, limited contact and communication, and loyalty dilemmas. …