Intimate Domain Research Articles

Do ongoing lifestyle disruptions differ across cancer types after the conclusion of cancer treatment?

Cancer interferes with participation in valued lifestyle activities (illness intrusiveness) throughout post-treatment survivorship. We investigated whether illness intrusiveness differs across life domains among survivors with diverse cancers. Intrusiveness should be highest in activities requiring physical/cognitive functioning (instrumental domain). Intrusiveness into relationship/sexual functioning (intimacy domain) should be higher in prostate, breast, and gastrointestinal cancers than in others. Cancer outpatients (N = 656; 51% men) completed the Illness Intrusiveness Ratings Scale (IIRS) during follow-up. We compared IIRS Instrumental, Intimacy, and Relationships and Personal Development [RPD] subscale and total scores across gastrointestinal, lung, lymphoma, head and neck, prostate (men), and breast cancers (women), comparing men and women separately. Instrumental subscale scores (M(men) = 3.05-3.80, M(women) = 3.02-3.63) were highest for all groups, except prostate cancer. Men with prostate cancer scored higher on Intimacy (M = 3.40) than Instrumental (M = 2.48) or RPD (M = 1.59), p's < .05; their Intimacy scores did not differ from men with gastrointestinal or lung cancer. Women collectively showed higher Instrumental (M = 3.39) than Intimacy (M = 2.49) or RPD scores (M = 2.27), p's < .001, but not the hypothesized group difference in Intimacy. Post-treatment survivors continue to experience some long-term interference with activities requiring physical and cognitive functioning. Sexual adjustment may be of special concern to men when treatments involve genitourinary functioning. Ongoing monitoring with the IIRS to detect lifestyle interference throughout survivorship may enhance quality of life. Screening and intervention should target particular life domains rather than global interference.

Domestic belongings: Intimate security and the racial politics of scale

This article aims to explore the phenomenon of White ressentiment in recent Australian politics by tracing the affective mobilization of ‘home’ in the political backlash against multiculturalism through government and media discourse. Beginning with the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation, the first section draws on Lauren Berlant’s work in order to recast Hansonism as an intimate public that utilized ‘home’ as a means of fostering affective identification with White belonging in a multicultural context. The following section explores how Hansonism centred the national imaginary upon a White domesticity, which functioned to create a correspondence between the White family home and the Australian nation. In doing so, Hansonism refashioned migrant (particularly Asian) homes as being unheimlich to the nation. The third section traces how this ‘homely nation’ continued to affect race politics under John Howard’s national security agenda. The conclusion reflects on two arguments that emerge through the article, which give the article its subtitle. The first concerns what I term ‘intimate security’ by which I signal the ways in which domains of security and intimacy converge. I argue that the stability, comfort and intimacy associated with the family home and family values become emblematic of the secure nation such that public insecurity is often felt as a nostalgia for a lost home. However, this intimate security is founded upon a White domesticity, such that non-White migrants are rendered unheimlich to the nation. The term ‘racial politics of scale’ is used to render the ways in which scalar imaginaries are used to secure particular configurations of race.

Intimate Discrimination: The State's Role in the Accidents of Sex and Love

This is a challenging moment for the law of discrimination. The state’s role in discrimination has largely shifted from requiring discrimination - through official policies such as segregation - to prohibiting discrimination - through federal laws covering areas such as employment, housing, education, and public accommodations. Yet the problem of discrimination persists, often in forms that are hard to regulate or even to recognize. At this challenging moment, the intimate domain presents a vital terrain for study in two main ways. First, conceptually, studying the intimate domain permits new insights into discrimination and the law’s identity categories, because people are more willing to be explicit about identity-based preferences in this domain than in others (such as employment). Second, practically, examining the intimate domain reveals the ways that relationships in this sphere affect hierarchies and opportunities in more public domains, and the role the state plays in those relationships. This Article therefore examines intimate discrimination, focusing on race, sex, and disability, and identifies key norms for each category. For race, the norm is homogamy, or pairing with one’s own type; for sex, by contrast, the norm is heterogamy, pairing outside one’s type; and for disability, the norm is desexualization, rather than pairing with one group or another. The Article does not assume that intimate discrimination is necessarily bad. On the contrary, examining the nuanced landscape of discrimination in this realm is one of the Article’s main purposes. Ultimately, the Article concludes that, at the level of individual interaction, intimate differentiation based on these identity traits can be good, bad, or neutral, depending on context. For this and other reasons, legal regulation targeting individual differentiation on these bases would be woefully misguided. Nonetheless, the state plays important roles in intimate discrimination at a structural level. By creating the infrastructure of society, the state shapes the accidents of who meets whom and how. In addition, the state plays a role in the hierarchy of intimate opportunities by shaping social capital and relative advantages. The state therefore should reform its laws and policies to attend to its structural role in intimate discrimination. For sex, the most obvious next step is to cease to restrict marriage according to sex. For disability, the state should help to encourage opportunities for intimate affiliation by, among other things, attending to the architecture of intimacy, by which I mean the ways that structures of accommodation operate to help or hinder not only access, but also closeness. For race, the state’s goal should not be to encourage race mixing, but rather to lift burdens on existing relationships, such as residential segregation. Recognizing how intimate affiliations affect opportunities and status hierarchies, both in the intimate sphere and beyond, points us toward new ways to intervene in the persistent problem of discrimination.

Intimate Justice: A Critical Analysis of Sexual Satisfaction

This article elaborates an intimate justice framework to help guide research on sexual satisfaction. Using a critical historiography approach, I examine the etiology and development of the psychological construct of “satisfaction” over the last century and argue that social and political antecedents to satisfaction ratings are an essential and under-theorized aspect of research in this field. By examining what are considered to be the most influential definitions in life satisfaction research, I identify conceptual gaps, oversights, and disagreements that characterize this body of work, and specifically its theoretical treatment of inequity. Moving to the intimate domain, I argue that the field of sexual satisfaction must include theories and methods that systematically consider the role of social and sexual stigmas as antecedents to sexual satisfaction ratings. In the conclusion, building from existing social justice theories, I propose an intimate justice framework as a means to guide research that can highlight issues of entitlement and deservingness in sexual satisfaction research. This is particularly important as sexual satisfaction is increasingly used as an indicator of individual and relational well-being; however, this construct is presently limited and inadequately measured for women and men who experience limited sexual rights in the socio-political domain because of their gender and/or sexual minority status.

Looking beyond the importance of life goals. The personal goal model of subjective well-being in neuropsychological rehabilitation

Objective: To identify subjective importance, attainability and success of life goals and their predictive value for subjective well-being in patients with acquired brain injury. Design: Cross-sectional, descriptive. Setting: Two inpatient neurological rehabilitation centres. Participants: Patients with non-progressive neurological disorders. Interventions: Survey using questionnaires. Measures: Life goal characteristics were assessed using a life goal questionnaire (GOALS). Subjective well-being (composite score) was measured using the Center of the Epidemic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) and the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS). Results: Fifty-nine patients participated in the study. The most important life goals are intimacy (4.59/5), achievement (3.96/5) and altruism (3.89/5). The intimacy goals are considered most attainable (4.19/5) and patients feel most successful in this domain (3.98/5). Two important predictions of the personal goal model of subjective well-being could be confirmed. First, goal attainability moderates the relation between goal importance and goal success. Second, the influence of goal importance on subjective well-being is mediated by experienced success. The most powerful predictors for subjective well-being are success in the achievement domain (β = 0.404) and discrepancy between importance and success in the intimacy domain (β = —0.276). Conclusions: The subjective well-being of neurological patients depends not only on the appraised importance of life goals but also on their attainability and success.

The politics of love

Contemporary queer interrogations of heteronormativity are fraught with the traces of feminist contestations of the intimate domains of women's `ordinary' lives during the era of the women's liberation movement. These traces remain enigmatic within contemporary theories of public affect and emotion rather than incorporated into their critiques of the present political moment. This essay argues that the work of the early women's liberationists — their attempts to bring the personal into view as the dense, affect laden, site of social reproduction — can offer us a countermemory to the enduring and alluring force of the `private' domains of love and ordinary feeling in the contemporary US national public sphere. In order to hear the echoes of that moment — the time of women's liberation — in this one, the essay stages a comparative reading between two novels, Doris Lessing's A Ripple from the Storm (1958) and June Arnold's The Cook and the Carpenter: A Novel by the Carpenter (1973). Although the two novels were written over a decade apart, both have as their subject the dense and complex relations between political action, personal relationships and feelings within a (broadly conceived) feminist paradigm. By taking the risk of an odd conjunction, and reading the two novels side-by-side, the essay aims to open up the messiness and contingencies of an era in which both `the political' and `the personal' were contested terms, their meanings challenged, their domains struggled over, their practices altered and, in some cases, transformed.

"Contagious Love": A Qualitative Study of the Couple Relationships of Ten AIDS Carriers

The qualitative study in this article portrays the couple relationship among AIDS carriers, based on Sternberg's triangular love theory (involving domains of intimacy, passion and commitment). The central study hypothesis is that certain components of the Sternberg model will be more significant than others among the AIDS carrier population. The study was conducted on ten AIDS carriers aged 21-37 who had experienced a couple relationship. Six men and four women participated; most of them were in a romantic couple relationship of homosexual orientation.The interviewees answered a questionnaire that included the three domains-- intimacy, passion and commitment--in the personal interview technique. The interview focused on interviewee's attitude towards his/her relationship with a partner, as he/she understood it. The findings of the study focus on relevant content that was gathered from the interviews and these portray a limited view of couple patterns in the world of AIDS carriers. The study reveals two major findings regarding the carrier's desires: On the one hand, the carrier describes a powerful need for a stable, permanent relationship--from the diagnosis of AIDS and throughout the subsequent years. On the other hand, the carrier also expresses powerful sexual desires that are not necessarily limited to a permanent partner. Thus passion is the dominant among the three domains.The intimacy domain is mainly affected by disclosure of the disease and the joint coping that follows.The findings are discussed in the context of the romantic internalized model theory and Sternberg's triangular love theory.

Truncated Multilingualism or Language Shift? An Examination of Language Use in Intimate Domains in a New Non-racial Working Class Township in South Africa

The dominance of English in particular domains of language use in South Africa, such as higher education and the economy, has led to the fear that other languages may be threatened by an increasing shift to English in all domains, especially among the young. However, this paper reveals the strong vitality of the mother tongues in the intimate domains and increasing multilingualism becoming the norm in new shared spaces.

Matrilineal Spirits, Descent and Territorial Power in Northern Thailand

This paper examines matrilineal spirits (phii puu nyaa) in northern Thailand based on field research recently undertaken in a village in Chiang Mai province. The paper suggests that the puu nyaa spirits remain locally significant—despite previous statements about their demise—and that matrilineal linkages are ideologically and practically important in the constitution of the groups. Nevertheless, there are alternative points of reference—to fathers, spouses and localities—that can attenuate attachments to matrilineal kin and introduce alternative sources of spiritual power. It becomes clear that phii puu nyaa spirit beliefs and practices are malleable and provide a basis for various orientations to spiritual power. The intermingling of different types of spiritual power is well illustrated by the presence of protective spirits locally referred to as aahak. In local perception, there is a very close relationship between phii puu nyaa and aahak, but the two entities appear to reflect quite different orientations: in simple terms the aahak represent a masculine, territorial and outward looking form of power which is contrasted with the female‐focused and lineage‐derived potency of the puu nyaa spirits. The paper argues that the outward orientation of the aahak provides some valuable insights into local perceptions of power, demonstrating how the supposedly peripheral and parochial draws regional power into more intimate domains.

Split Ends

Examining the narratives of eighteen heterosexual drug-injecting men living with HIV, this study seeks to understand how HIV-positive men negotiate issues of masculinity, sexuality, and emotional intimacy. It focuses specifically on strategies HIV-positive men use to manage emotional vulnerability in sexual encounters. We identify a core theme of “splitting,” in which men compartmentalize the domains of sexuality and emotional intimacy. We examine how this aspect of masculinity is at times exacerbated as a strategy to minimize emotional investment in sexual partners. By splitting the emotional and sexual domains, the men are able to perform sexually with casual sex partners while minimizing both the risk of infecting intimate partners and a fear of rejection from those they care about or desire most. However, the tensions created by splitting the emotional and sexual domains may disintegrate intimate interpersonal relationships that serve as a base of much-needed emotional support.

Couple, sexualité et santé sexuelle

Sexuality remained for a long time in the intimacy domain, judged worthy of a consultation reason only and yet as an illness cause or a male failure. Besides, dyspareunia and various women's illnesses took more time to be worthy of interest and care. And now it seems almost as if a turnaround were taking place. This mutation will probably induce some cultural changes. This paper focuses on the fifty-year-old man, in a world in which sexuality, from a universal right, becomes an obligation with the need for means and results, a requirement for performance. In order to discover how to approach these old problems with nowadays tools, we carried out a Medline review on sexuality and impotence, or erectile dysfunction (ED), which is a real problem in public health policy concerning more than 150 million men all over the world and more than 2 million in France. The analysis of the main papers associated with our own experience, allows us to better understand the changes in men/women relationship and the disclosure of male fragility, visible in the management of their well-being, their state of anxiety fowards this new women's control which probably influences their attitude in front of ageing and its consequences.

Sex differences in predictors of illness intrusiveness 1 year after a cardiac event

Objective This prospective study examined sex differences in illness intrusiveness and in baseline predictors of illness intrusiveness in cardiac patients' 1-year postcardiac event. Methods Patients diagnosed with a myocardial infarction (MI) or unstable angina (UA) completed a baseline questionnaire during their hospitalization (139 men and 104 women). Eighty-one men and 67 women completed the follow-up questionnaire 1-year postcardiac event. The questionnaire included measures of illness intrusiveness in three life domains, depressive symptomatology, social support, medical information, risk factors for heart disease, and sociodemographic information. Results A MANCOVA with the three Illness Intrusiveness subscales as dependent variables, sex as the between-group factor, and partnership status as a covariate found a sex effect for the Intimacy subscale, but not for the Instrumental and the Relationships/Personal Development subscales. Men reported more intrusiveness in the Intimacy domain of their life as compared to women. After controlling for sociodemographic factors and risk factors for heart disease, hierarchical regressions indicated sex differences in baseline predictors of 1-year follow-up illness intrusiveness in the three life domains. For men, being satisfied with support from partner at baseline was associated with less intrusiveness in the Instrumental Life domain 1 year after the cardiac event. For women, surprisingly, more satisfaction with support from their partner at baseline was associated with more intrusiveness in their intimate lives 1 year after their cardiac event. In addition, emotional symptoms of depression at baseline were predictive of increased illness intrusiveness in Relationship/Personal Development and Intimacy domains for men and in Instrumental and Intimacy domains for women. Conclusion Support from partner may have a differential impact for men and women after a cardiac event. Depressive symptomatology during initial hospitalization, particularly emotional symptoms, is a prominent indicator of illness intrusiveness for both sexes 1 year after the cardiac event.

Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in (Post) Colonial Studies

This essay takes as its subject how intimate domains - sex, sentiment, domestic arrangement and child rearing - figure in the making of racial categories and in the management of imperial rule. For some two decades my work on Indonesia's Dutch colonial history has addressed patterns of governance that were particular to that time and place but resonant with practices in a wider global field. My perspective thus is that of an outsider to, but an acquisitive consumer of comparative historical studies, one long struck with the disparate and congruent imperial projects in Asia, Africa and the Americas. This essay invites reflection on those domains of overlap and difference. My interest is more specifically in what Albert Hurtado refers to as ‘the intimate frontiers’ of empire, a social and cultural space where racial classifications were defined and defied, where relations between coloniser and colonised could powerfully confound or confirm the strictures of governance and the categories of rule. Some two decades ago, Sylvia van Kirk urged a focus on such ‘tender ties’ as a way to explore the ‘human dimension’ of the colonial encounter.’ As she showed so well, what Michel Foucault has called these ‘dense transfer point[s]’ of power that generate such ties were sites of production of colonial inequities and, therefore, of tense ties as well. Among students of colonialisms in the last decade, the intimacies of empire have been a rich and well-articulated research domain. A more sustained focus on the relationship between what Foucault refers to as ‘the regimes of truth’ of imperial systems (the ways of knowing and establishing truth claims about race and difference on which macro polities rely) and those micro sites of governance may reveal how these colonial empires compare and converge.

Unravelling Subjective Quality of Life: An Investigation of Individual and Community Determinants

Subjective quality of life is a popular measureof outcomes across fields as disparate asmedical research, community and healthpsychology and sociology. Its widespread usehas led to recent calls for a betterunderstanding of the psychological determinantsof the construct, emphasising the need to builda substantial body of knowledge around whatdetermines and impacts on perceptions of lifequality if it is to live up to currentexpectations as an outcome variable. This studyused two likely determinants of quality oflife, an individual level variable, loneliness,and a community level variable, aspects ofsense of community, and investigated theirassociation with subjective quality of life.Confidence in the results of the study wasstrengthened by repeating it in two separatetowns, matched on fundamental demographicvariables. The results revealed that subjectivequality of life was consistently associatedwith the individual level variable, loneliness,in both towns. Lonely people consistentlyreported significantly lower quality of life,particularly in the domains of intimacy,community involvement and emotional well-being.Once loneliness had been accounted for, thecommunity level variables showed much weaker,and generally no association with reportedquality of life. The importance of continuingto empirically identify variables that impactupon subjective quality of life is discussed.

What's Love Got to Do with It?

To the popular singer Tina Turner's bittersweet song that repeatedly asks, “What's love got to do with it?,” Ann Laura Stoler would surely reply, “Everything, girl.” No secondhand emotions here. For in the workings of the intimate domain, through sentimental education, through child rearing, and through sex, Stoler sees the making of race, the management of empire, and the congruence of imperial projects about the globe. Stoler's stunning essay forces our gaze to the politics of intimacy, to those spaces and places in Asia, Africa, and the Americas where “colonial regimes of truth were imposed, worked around, and worked out.”1 Her provocations to comparative historical work, to frames of analysis that move beyond nation-states, to circuits of knowledge production and circulation that tie core and periphery, metropole and colony as one, are of great import. Stoler and her interlocutors ask us to see as commensurate colonial projects that might otherwise escape notice as exceptional and unique.

The Family FIRO Model: Exploring Relationship Needs of “At-Risk” Families

This research investigates the conceptualization and application of the family fundamental interpersonal relations orientation(FIRO) model to an at-risk family population. The relationships between the family FIRO domains of inclusion, control, and intimacy and family functioning indices, as measured by the Family Assessment Device (FAD) subscales, were explored. An at-risk family population ( N = 43 primary caretakers) was assessed at four time intervals, using an ex post facto design with multiple linear regression model testing. The results indicated significant relationships between FIRO model domains and FAD subscales. A case example further explored the application of the family FIRO model with at-risk families.

Personal Autonomy and the Law: Sexual Harassment and the Dilemma of Regulating “Intimacy”

There have been remarkable changes in the “domain of intimacy” over the last four decades.

Stigmatization of social and intimacy loneliness.

82 female and 62 male college students judged the psychosocial functioning and acceptability of hypothetical peers that depicted 2 Levels of Loneliness (Lonely versus Nonlonely) x 2 Domains of Loneliness (Social versus Intimacy). Analysis indicated the students stigmatized both social and intimacy loneliness; they ascribed lower psychosocial functioning to and were less accepting of the lonely than nonlonely peer for both the social and intimacy domains of loneliness. The students, however, displayed greater differentiation in the ascription of psychosocial functioning between the lonely and nonlonely peers for the intimacy than the social domain of loneliness.

The gold standard for life satisfaction: Confirmation and elaboration using an imaginary scale and qualitative interview

It has now been established that normative samples drawn from Western populations report mean levels of life satisfaction that lie within 70-80 percent of the scale maximum. This study tests whether such consistency is an artifact of Likert scales, and also examines the cognitive processes people employ in making such judgements. Forty-two undergraduate psychology students were asked to describe an imagined worst and best life for themselves. They then rated their current life on a 100 point imaginary scale connecting their worst and best life, and completed a standard life satisfaction scale. The values obtained from the imaginary scale yielded a mean of 76.1 percent and correlated 0.79 with the standard scale. It was concluded that the normative standard for life satisfaction was not an artifact of scale construction. Life satisfaction judgement was found to be dominated by the life domain of intimacy and to confirm the types of comparisons predicted by multiple discrepancies theory.

Factors affecting birth rates among white women 20-24 years of age : A trend analysis (January 1972-March 1992)

This research provides a multivariate explanation of monthly (N = 243) birth rate variation for African-American women 20--24 years of age using time series analysis. The research explains both seasonal and intermediate variation in these birth rates. The independent variables were selected for their relationship to: economic understandings of fertility; developing understandings of the relationship of photoperiod to reproductive functioning; routine activity theory; and the relationship of birth rates to quality of life perspectives. The findings of this research are interpreted with respect to important developments and understandings in the quality of life literature. Concepts of ''compensatory validation'' and ''contextual compatibility'' are derived from quality of life understandings and Rainwater's (1974) concept of ''validating activities''. The previously identified importance of domains of intimacy, sexual activity and family life (Cummins, 1996; Alfonso et al., 1996) are related to empirical findings concerning the conception of children and incorporated into these theoretical concepts. Nine explanatory variables were selected. Theoretical, research and policy implications are summarized.