Intimate Politics Research Articles

Empire, redux: Towards a new political geography of race war

This essay revisits geographical debates on empire to clarify how broader geopolitical economies of power and violence have always been experienced at the scale of the everyday as an intimate politics of relation- and difference-making. It is guided by two questions that promise to stretch geographical writing on empire in new ways. They are: how has empire always been a racial project? And how has imperial race-making historically gone hand-in-hand with imperial place-making? Both questions force us to reckon with empire as a multi-scalar project that entangles the foreign and the domestic, the intimate and the global, and so on.

Women, Hospitality and The Intimate Politics of International Socialism, 1955–1965

Abstract In the 1950s, a commitment to democratic socialism connected networks of intellectuals, activists and political operators in both Europe and Asia. Many of these were women, who built informal and intimate networks of solidarity that underpinned the movement. The rich set of correspondence between European and Asian socialist women speaks to their role as connectors of global and local civil society within international socialist circuits. It also indicates the importance of friendship, mobility and hospitality as a crucial factor in sustaining such networks, as well as building the trust that facilitated the exchange of subversive information. While Asia was seen as the great hope of international socialism in the 1950s, by the middle of the 1960s, many of its socialist parties had imploded, pointing to the limits of international socialism for Asian women amidst global anti-communism and the rise of authoritarian states. Transnational socialist networks nonetheless helped further both European and Asian women’s campaigns for gender equality, development and democratic socialism in decolonizing Asia, adding vital new dimensions to the history of internationalism.

The intimate politics of insurgency

ABSTRACT How is women’s engagement in armed insurgency shaped by intimacy? This article seeks to answer this question by exploring how political struggle for women is caught up in the entanglements of the intimate and the political. Drawing on fieldwork on the Bangsamoro conflict in Mindanao, Philippines, it analyzes four women’s stories about their trajectories as insurgents. Their accounts reveal that relational ties of kin, community, and marriage bound them to the insurgency and preceded ideological commitment; however, these relational ties also ruptured their involvement. Moreover, collective and personal closeness with war made political struggle an inevitable part of growing up and surviving. Contradictory commitments, dilemmas, and disruptions in their relational lives caused by critical events of conflict are read in the women’s political participation. The article’s conceptual answer is an intimate politics of insurgency, which underwrites women’s engagement and, more importantly, their maneuvers to fulfill conflicting political, ideological, relational, and gendered obligations. Intimate politics, I argue, brings attention to women’s work of unsettling and remaking boundaries between the intimate/private and the political/public, which allows them to reconcile continued political action and life as a whole inside conflict.

A Critical Adoption Dialogue about the Race-Family-Nation Nexus

abstract: Adoption & Culture 's series of anniversary articles has affirmed critical adoption studies (CAS) as a growing, diverse, and continually relevant field of inquiry. As part of this endeavor, two adoption scholars created a collaborative dialogue on what it means to "do" CAS from the unique but overlapping perspectives of their two distinct research projects: Dorow's sociological work on late twentieth century China-US adoption and Stevenson's historical work on mid-twentieth century Indigenous adoption in Canada. Reflecting together on their respective approaches and methodologies, they focus on the intimate politics of kinship-nation-race that animate both of these contexts of adoption, while also noting the specific questions and issues that emerge from each distinct context. The conclusion offers three questions for the ongoing work of CAS and asserts the need for more interdisciplinary and pluralistic studies across seemingly disparate cases.

The Intimate Politics of Soul Food: On the Tastes and Distastes of a New Orleans Black Middle-Class Family

Ces dernières années, la cuisine traditionnelle du Sud des États-Unis a été à la fois stigmatisée pour sa contribution à l’épidémie d’obésité et de plus en plus adoptée par la culture populaire américaine. En tant que fusion d’influences africaines, européennes et amérindiennes, la cuisine du Sud est véritablement américaine, mais sa propriété est contestée entre les communautés blanches et noires. À partir d’une ethnographie des pratiques de consommation d’une famille noire de classe moyenne de La Nouvelle-Orléans, cet article vise à dépasser les présupposés culturalistes réduisant la soul food à une tradition du passé et les Africains-Américains à un groupe monolithique. En revisitant la théorie de la « distinction » de Bourdieu pour prendre en compte l’intersection des catégories de race et de classe, nous verrons comment les pratiques de consommation de cette famille permettent à ses membres de revendiquer les valeurs de respectabilité des classes moyennes sans trahir leur identité noire, en se distinguant à la fois des Noirs pauvres et des blancs de classe moyenne qui menacent leur position sociale.

UK street art and the meaning of masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020-21

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to social and cultural geographies of the COVID-19 pandemic through an exploration of the role of UK street art in documenting the remarkable shifts in the practice of wearing facemasks, the tensions and emotions involved, and the transformations in the meaning of facemasks during the pandemic. Street art has become an important outlet for political critique and social engagement, capturing the public mood in response to policies and recommendations attempting to stem viral transmission, including the requirement to wear facemasks in some public places. Drawing primarily on image analysis of street artworks produced during 2020 and sourced using online search tools, and qualitative interviews with UK street artists in 2020 and 2021, the paper first explores the changing geographies and politics of street art during the pandemic. It then examines the ways in which street art portrays mask-wearing simultaneously as reassuring, protective and fear-inducing, and reflects the meaning of masks in relation to protecting public health, managing anxieties concerning health risks, boosting morale, and symbolising solidarity and public spiritedness. The paper argues that pandemic street art contributes to public dialogue by articulating emotion and deeply held concerns, and communicating the intimate politics, semiotic meanings and social properties of objects associated with disease.

Norms and Illegality: Intimate Ethnographies and Politics. CristianaPanella and Walter E.Little, eds. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. 228 pp.

Norms and Illegality: Intimate Ethnographies and Politics. CristianaPanella and Walter E.Little, eds. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. 228 pp.

Singing Across Divides: Music and Intimate Politics in Nepal

Singing Across Divides: Music and Intimate Politics in Nepal

Artificial Emotional Intelligence and the Intimate Politics of Robotic Sociality

ABSTRACT This article examines Artificial Emotion Intelligence (AEI) and its application in social robots. It argues that AEI and social robotics intensify practices of data-capture and algorithmic governance by extending the spatial reach of digital surveillance deeper into intimate spaces and individual psyches, with the goal of manipulating human emotional and behavioural responses. The analysis demonstrates the need to more thoroughly engage the multiplicity of theoretical and applied approaches to building artificial intelligence, to question assumptions as to the kinds of intelligence being created, and to consider how a diversity of AI systems infiltrate and reshape the spaces of everyday life.

Engendering Political Labour: Findings from a Kerala Village

Literature on Indian politics has largely under-examined the role of the family in shaping party politics with the exception of the studies on dynasticism. There is a paucity of research that looks at the complex ways in which intimate lives and party politics are intertwined. This article contributes to the existing feminist analyses of Indian party politics by conceptualizing politics and political labour in a way that does not exclude the role of the family. It presents the case study of a village in northern Kerala, which has been witnessing heightened political conflicts to show how personal experiences and family disputes get politicized. As domestic and political spheres bleed into each other, political parties become hugely dependent on feminine ideals and women’s everyday labour, affects and sociality to survive electoral competitions. Yet, the patriarchal family and masculinized local party leadership use gender ideologies to celebrate hypermasculine political participation, undervalue women’s labour and limit their political aspirations.

The end of intimate politics in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster

ABSTRACT This article examines Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2015 film The Lobster in relation to debates about intimate politics in contemporary queer scholarship and queer cinema studies. Rather than reading the film as a satire on compulsory coupling, this article teases out the film’s depiction of both normative and antinormative practices as parallel forms of sexual citizenship. Examining the relationship between normative enactments of gender and sexuality and the regulation of the species boundary, we argue that The Lobster reveals three dichotomies at the core of heteronormative cultural mythologies: male and female, coupled and uncoupled, human and nonhuman. In examining the complex interplay between these categories throughout The Lobster, this article foregrounds the important intersections between critical approaches to normativity established within feminist and queer film studies, and emergent approaches to nonhuman and more-than-human ethics in the environmental humanities.

“Wait for a permanent contract”: The temporal politics of (in)fertility as an early career researcher

The impetus for this intervention comes from my own experiences of advice to ‘wait for a permanent contract’ before trying to conceive a child. I contend that this considerate guidance, frequently given to Early Career Researchers, nonetheless re-inscribes a linear capitalist temporality, and that there is a need to resist this binding of the temporalities of (in)fertility to the metrics of the neoliberal academy. I suggest that to promote ‘waiting’ negates the nonlinear, everyday and intimate politics of our varied, embodied experiences of (in)fertility. It is also grounded within problematic assumptions: first, that waiting is linear; that we will arrive at a permanent job in the future, if we persist with the present; and second, that our (in)fertility is known to us, that we are able to, and will, make a rational decision to conceive a child. These are pervasive assumptions with deeply personal implications. Moreover, they are compounded by the short-term contracts, and expectations of institutional mobility that characterise many experiences of UK academia. My hope for this piece is that it invites geographers to further explore embodied politics of (in)fertility.

Singing across Divides: Music and Intimate Politics in Nepal by Anna Marie Stirr

Singing across Divides: Music and Intimate Politics in Nepal by Anna Marie Stirr

Embodied Exhibits: Toward a Feminist Geographic Courtroom Ethnography

Courtroom ethnographies are very rare in English-, German-, and Spanish-language legal geography. Yet courtrooms are dense spaces through which legal subjects, spaces, and instruments are performed, created, disciplined, and managed. In this article, we develop a feminist geographic ethnography of the court. This approach attends to the affective, intimate, and bodily politics of courtroom subjects, spaces, and moments, connecting these with wider structural processes of legal, sociocultural, political, and economic life. To develop this approach, we draw collaboratively on our work on immigrant detention hearings, corporate fraud, antiterrorist trials, and our conversations and reflections together as feminist geographers. We use four embodied exhibits—the file cabinet, the legal pad, the cloakroom ticket, and the cell phone—to make manifest four elements of our feminist methodology. These integrate grounded data sets, embodied transcriptions, global intimate analyses of legal power, and antithetical-activist scholarship. We assert that feminist courtroom ethnographies offer vital and deeply geographical insights into the spatial work of power in and through the legal system, connecting everyday legal goings-on and the transscalar structural machinations of state violence. Key Words: courtroom ethnography, feminist geography, feminist methodology, legal geography, political geography.

Refugee resettlement, place, and the politics of Islamophobia

ABSTRACT Contested meanings of place have emerged in the wake of refugee resettlement in Missoula, Montana. Drawing on qualitative research, this paper explores the ways the intimate and local politics of refugee resettlement in Montana is intertwined with broader geopolitical discourses that conflate refugees, national security, and Islam. As Missoula became a new resettlement destination in August 2016, some residents responded with protest that framed refugees as a grave threat to the community, while others actively participated in welcoming refugees from Congo, Eritrea, Iraq, and Syria. Interviews with residents suggest that settler colonial narratives constructing Montana as a frontier space shape how locals respond to the idea and embodied experience of refugee resettlement. Meanings and histories of place are key to better understanding of Islamophobia, the politics of refugee resettlement, and the intimate connections between place, identity, and racialization in the contemporary U.S.

Caring for solidarity? The intimate politics of grandmother childcare and neoliberal conservatism in urban Turkey

AbstractThe number of grandmothers who provide regular care for their grandchildren and do housework for their daughters or daughters-in-law is increasing in Turkey. While perpetuating traditional gender roles for themselves as a surrogate daughter, wife, or daughter-in-law, these women nonetheless enable younger women to distance themselves from obligatory care work at home. The sociocultural concepts of kinship ties, economic need, or love for grandchildren do not fully explain why grandmothers assume the role of caregiver for their grandchildren. Drawing on interviews with 25 grandmothers from middle-class families in urban Turkey, this article shows, first, that these women’s gendered subjectivity is formed by both habitual and intentional actions that defying the oppression and resistance duality within patriarchal Turkish society. Second, in dialogue with the scholarship on the “classic patriarchal bargain”1and feminist analyses of neoliberal social policy, the article suggests that these grandmothers’ inarticulate desire to live in solidarity with the younger generation of women may be turned into a government instrument in the context of Turkey’s increasingly family-centered neoliberal social policy environment.

Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World

<i>Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World</i>

New Forms of Revolt: Essays on Kristeva's Intimate Politics. Edited by Sarah K. Hansen and Rebecca Tuvel. New York: SUNY Press, 2017. 230 pp. $85.00 (hardcover), $22.95 (paperback).

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New Forms of Revolt: Essays on Kristeva's Intimate Politics ed. by Sarah K. Hansen and Rebecca Tuvel

New Forms of Revolt: Essays on Kristeva's Intimate Politics ed. by Sarah K. Hansen and Rebecca Tuvel

New Forms of Revolt: Essays on Kristeva’s Intimate Politics. Edited by Sarah K. Hansen and Rebecca Tuvel.

New Forms of Revolt: Essays on Kristeva’s Intimate Politics. Edited by Sarah K. Hansen and Rebecca Tuvel.