Forms Of Intimacy Research Articles

Tangential Movements: How feminist organizing against gender-based violence offers an alternative avenue for protesting drug violence in Latin America

In the last fifty years, Latin America witnessed both a stark rise in violence between drug trafficking organizations and militarized police forces, as well as a significant expansion of social movements. Few movements, however, have explicitly mobilized against drug violence due to the extreme dangers of speaking out against armed and corrupt actors. In this paper, we extend our understanding of social movements and drug violence by analyzing the relationship between feminist movements against gender-based violence—or feminist anti-violence (FAV)—and drug violence. We conceive FAV as a “tangential movement” to drug-related violence, mobilizing around its root causes and consequences without directly targeting its perpetrators. The paper examines case studies of feminist anti-violence movements in three cities: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Caracas, Venezuela; and Medellín, Colombia. We show that as feminist movements mobilize against gender-based violence, they provide an alternative, and safer, avenue for citizens to mobilize against drug-related violence by working to (a) curb intimate forms of abuse and trauma that create intergenerational cycles of violence; (b) decrease impunity by demanding the state hold perpetrators of violence accountable; (c) strengthen government institutions and their relations with civic organizations, thereby helping enforce democracy and human rights; (d) challenge patriarchal notions of violent masculinity; and (e) organize against structural inequality that bolsters participation in the drug trade. By considering how feminist anti-violence movements help address the underlying causes of drug violence, we can identify new pathways for organizing around human security in contexts where direct channels of confrontation are too risky.

Dancing in your Brain! Interiority + Witnessing + Xenoethics

This text-based essay examines the corporeal interiority and ethical spatiality of Braindancing. Braindancing can be defined as a source of entertainment as well as a form of psychological treatment within Night City, the urban centre of CD Projekt Red’s 2020 video game Cyberpunk 2077. Commonly known as BD, the Braindance manifests as an interactive technological interior, allowing participants to relive the hyper multisensorial and emotional memory of someone else. There exist both legal and illegal markets for BDs, both alluding to its role as a normalised and intimate form of everyday surveillance. Within the context of the year 2077 and the fictionalised game setting, Braindancing operates across the blurred boundary of physical reality and digital fantasy. It offers an escape from the systemic violent and ultra-capitalist conditions that govern the physical urban environment of Night City, while also reinforcing those conditions through the addictive lure of personalised fantasy.By analysing the interior world of the BD, this essay reflects on our current reality.

Embodied Digital Ecologies: A Healing Justice Analysis of How to Survive the End of the World

Embodied Digital Ecologies: A Healing Justice Analysis of <i>How to Survive the End of the World</i>

Chemical species: the art and politics of living with(out) drugs after addiction

We live within and are made up of ever-changing chemical flows. Witnessing a “chemical turn” in the social sciences, this article asks what a chemical reading of drugs and bodies can offer an understanding of drug dependency and recovery. Where chemicals render bodies “molecular” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), they open them up to more intimate forms of connection that extend our understanding of drug–body relationships beyond limiting categories such as addiction. Rather than a chemical drug entering a biological body, there are chemical interactions that expand the boundaries of where one ends and the other begins. While chemicals have long been a preoccupation in neurological models of addiction, they are seldom taken up in sociological studies of these concerns. Drawing on a series of body-mapping workshops with people in drug recovery/treatment in London, UK, to track these chemical bodies, this article explores the art of living a chemically transformed life. This is an art that thinks with Isabelle Stengers’ (in Stengers and Savransky, 2018) notion of the word to include “not paying attention” as a mode of “paying attention to what may lurk” in living with the ongoing effects of drugs in unequally entangled worlds.

Too much too soon?: Perceived appropriateness of sexting across stages of relationship development and attachment tendencies among emerging adults

One communication pattern afforded by smartphones is sexting. When considering sexting as an intimate form of sexual-self disclosure, concepts like perceived appropriateness must be considered. The current project assessed how the frequency and perceived appropriateness of sexting varied across relationship stages and across different attachment tendencies among emerging adults. Results from a cross-sectional survey (N = 133) indicate linear relationships, such that sexting tended to increase in frequency and perceived appropriateness alongside the stages of relationship development. Further, relationship stage did not interact with attachment tendencies, but attachment avoidance demonstrated a negative relationship with sexting frequency. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed further.

Brothers, friends, and enemies: averting intimacy on Facebook in western India

Brothers, friends, and enemies: averting intimacy on Facebook in western India

Beyond dystopia: Regenerative cultures and ethics among European climate activists

AbstractIn this article, I analyze practices of self‐formation among European climate activists. I develop the concept of regenerative cultures as a lens to capture nonspectacular practices that embody intimate forms of activism. Drawing on ethnographic research among climate activists, I show that regenerative cultures employs recursive circuits of practicing, retrospective visions, and subjunctive ecologies in order to enable ethical self‐formations geared toward personal or planetary regeneration. I identify two implications of such practices. First, I argue that intimate forms of activism reshuffle the sphere of politics in rendering the intimate a locus of concerted action that is deemed to radiate out. Second, I argue that such ethical labor is situated between what in the anthropology of ethics figures as virtue ethics and endurance. What I identify as utopian becomings instantiated by climate activists’ ethical labor embodies attempts to open spaces for caring differently. Moving beyond an understanding of the utopian as prefigurative move, I argue that utopian becomings operate by enabling to become otherwise in affectively loaded encounters.

Joy or Vexation: Respectable Motherhood and the Trope of Childhood in Nella Larsen's Passing

Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) illustrates that Irene's experience and perception of joy and pleasure are intertwined with her understanding of Black motherhood and childhood. During the early twentieth century, racial uplift leaders urged Black girls and women to embody the ideals of respectable motherhood as a means of both combating the infantilization of Black people and reclaiming the motherhood that slaveholders had denied to Black women. However, racial uplift leaders' insistence on the sacrificial and moral responsibilities of Black motherhood was often co-opted by a middle-class ideology, limiting Black women's ability to envision Black joy through their various forms of intimacy with Black children as well as their own childhoods. This essay contends such conservative aspects of respectable motherhood are exemplified by Irene, whose desire to maintain her family's middle-class status leads her to avoid complex questions about Black happiness. In addition to critiquing Irene's limitations, Larsen further explores Black women's erotic power by describing Irene's conflicted feelings about her childhood friend Clare's willful pursuit of pleasure. Informed by Audre Lorde's attentiveness to the Black inner girl child as a source of erotic power and Saidiya Hartman's Black feminist reading of love of pleasure, this essay argues that the manner in which Irene constructs her memory of Clare's girlhood and the ways the trope of childhood is deployed in the novel reveal Irene's fascination with Clare's yearning for a freer life and her willful refusal of self-abnegation.

“I Have Never Felt More Utterly Yours”: Presence, Intimacy, and Long-Distance Marriages in the First World War

AbstractThe unique anxieties experienced by married couples remain under-examined aspects of both the First World War and the early twentieth century. Drawing on the writings of four upper-middle-class couples, this article reveals the complex ways in which couples sought to maintain intimacy across transnational time and space during the war. The author argues that, elements of modern marriage were clearly present in these relationships. Wartime separation gave couples space to develop new forms of intimacy and affection. Through creative, often abstract, alternatives developed to affect a sense of presence, spouses were able to know, embody, and imagine one another. While separated couples frequently desired and imagined physical reunion, its fleeting nature was emotionally wearing and often undermined intimacy and togetherness in immediate and long-lasting ways. Exploring the subjective experiences of these couples challenges the tendency to periodize marriage in distinct categories such as patriarchal or companionate, and also invites us to reframe our understanding of the spatial dimensions of separation and intimacy.

Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma

Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma

A Lady’s Guide to Spectral Etiquette: Domestic Science in Georgiana Houghton’s Séance Diaries

ABSTRACT Despite its dubious subject matter, the spiritualist movement of the nineteenth Century developed new languages of materiality and methods of scientific inquiry in order to prove the material existence of spirits. This article compares the methods employed by male spiritualists in tackling new questions of spectral materiality, which took the form of “objective” reports and research papers, with those of female medium Georgiana Houghton, who utilizes the more intimate form of the séance diary to mask her scientific interests in domestic imagery, intriguingly blending both life writing and scientific inquiry in a careful negotiation of “gender-appropriate” genre.

African American Gay Men

African American Gay Men

Race, Sex, and God

Race, Sex, and God

Friendscope: Exploring In-the-Moment Experience Sharing on Camera Glasses via a Shared Camera

We introduce Friendscope, an instant, in-the-moment experience sharing system for lightweight commercial camera glasses. Friendscope explores a new concept called a shared camera. This concept allows a wearer to share control of their camera with a remote friend, making it possible for both people to capture photos/videos from the camera in the moment. Through a user study with 48 participants, we found that users felt connected to each other, describing the shared camera as a more intimate form of livestreaming. Moreover, even privacy-sensitive users were able to retain their sense of privacy and control with the shared camera. Friendscope's different shared camera configurations give wearers ultimate control over who they share the camera with and what photos/videos they share. We conclude with design implications for future experience sharing systems.

Cyber Criminal Policy In The Perspective Of Decency

Cyber crime is one of the forms or a new dimension of evil today gets wide attention in the international world. One of the problems that is very unsettling and got the attention of various circles is the issue of cyber crime in the field decency which later became known by the term cyber adultery. That cyber adultery in essentially no different with crime/violation of decency in general, such as adultery. Cyber adultery/cyber sex can be viewed as satisfaction/excitement maya (virtual gratification) that is associated with sexual expression, and a new form of intimacy (a new type of intimacy). An intimate relationship or intimacy (intimacy) it can also contains the meaning of sexual intercourse or adultery. This means that cyber sex is a form of new from adultery. To overcome this problem, it takes its criminal policies in an effort crime prevention, which in essence is an integral part of the effort the protection of society (social defence) and the efforts of the social welfare (social welfare).

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe about Gender and Global Politics

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Cynthia Enloe about Gender and Global Politics

Where is my home? Sense of home among rural migrant women in contemporary China

In the context of changing patterns in migration and migrant population, the concept of ‘home’ for migrants has broadened, extending to multiple dimensions and scales. While working and living in Chinese cities, rural migrant women face both institutional and individual gender discrimination under Confucian ideology and patriarchal culture. Meanwhile, in contemporary China, a series of changes in context, including education massification, cultural modernisation and the improvement in women’s socioeconomic status, have transformed the thoughts and behaviours of rural migrant women, leading to their diversified construction of a home. Based on in-depth face-to-face interviews and employing ‘critical geographies of home’, this study explores rural migrant women’s sense of home in contemporary China at multiple scales and in urban destinations and rural origins. The study reveals that rural migrant women in China create various forms of intimacies in their daily lives and negotiate the power relations embedded in Confucian ideology to build their lived and desired ‘home’ at multiple scales. The ‘soft’ environment and material objects contribute to their sense of home across the boundaries of urban and rural areas. Overall, the study underscores that rural migrant women’s unstable and fragile ‘home’ reflects their plight in contemporary urban China. Nevertheless, cities provide an important platform for some migrant women to escape from persistent gender discrimination in rural areas and develop a sense of home based on independence, equal gender norms, respect from locals, and engagement in urban life.

Maternities: Dorothea Tanning's Aesthetics of Touch

This essay explores the concern in Dorothea Tanning's work of the late 1960s and early 1970s with touch, contiguity, and the concept of maternity. In addition to a series of paintings and drawings that connote intimacy and whose titles allude to maternity, during this period Tanning also gave form to a group of soft sculptures, which similarly evince a preoccupation with closeness and touch, and indicate a form of intimacy that challenges the limits of the individual subject. Tanning's engagement with these themes, the essay argues, resonates closely with the feminist poetics developed around the same time by poststructuralist theorists such as Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray. I propose that Irigaray's theories of maternity, subjectivity, and non‐phallocentric language offer a particularly rich set of analytical tools with which to understand Tanning's work. Through establishing the affinities between Tanning and Irigaray, I suggest, we can better understand the intellectual currents that flowed between poststructuralist feminism and surrealist women's work of this period.

Keeping Time

My first inclination to this prompt, what of Black temporalities in crisis, was to ask a small group of Black familiars (friends and colleagues) to talk with me about their current experience of time in quarantine, and under the present articulations of racial injustice and economic crisis. Many remarked on awaiting moments of dance and embodiment, or the body after surgery during COVID, to the forms of mutual aid arriving, just on time. Others expressed holding patterns of rage, when being called forth in work environments to engage in conversations about race, others of the crushing aftermath of an intimate partnership in quarantine that went awry, only to arrive at new forms of intimacy in self-reflection and community co-counseling, or deep expressions of freedom, when invited to social distance with a family member, and doing so outside clothing. Still others reflected on mourning a relative, loved one, distant friend, and the uncertainty of the living body, through measures that are within and outside of human control. As the call for this special issue of SAQ noted, “Black temporalities of crisis might consist of subtle, collective and individual experiences of anticipation, drawn-out boredom, acceleration, or the feeling that something has ended before something else begins, among other possibilities.” In this instance, I focus on how the stretchy drawn-out and quickening qualities of time in crisis persist. By drawing on the anonymous experiences of loved ones and moments of rebellion toward fugitivity (e.g., the maroon communities of the Great Dismal Swamp and Harriet Jacobs’s neo–slave narrative), I ruminate on the in-between moments of Black life that show up in and around ongoing crisis.

Preventing COVID-19 pandemic outbreak: physical distancing and the socio-economic wisdom of local community in Aceh, Indonesia

Human as a social being have an instinct to live together and interact with one another. Nevertheless, COVID-19 has significantly limited face to face interaction. In a local community such as Aceh, Indonesia, such situation makes the community somewhat indifferent as their traditions carried out so far are actually interacting closely with each other as a form of intimacy. This research aims to explore the problem of physical distancing based on local wisdom in Acehnese society. Qualitative approach was utilized with data from field study and library research. This study found that there still exist various local wisdoms in Aceh community which are parallel in the current recommended mechanism in avoiding the spread of COVID-19. The socio-economic ties are also still strong among the local population who believe in tradition which prevent the COVID-19 outbreak. This study implies that local wisdom which have been applied by Acehnese for years could be one of solutions to mitigate the COVID-19 outbreak.