Intimate Sphere Research Articles

Intimacy and the Transformation of the Public Sphere

Intimacy and the public sphere have typically been conceptualized dichotomously both in scholarly and popular accounts. Problematizing this approach, I argue that considering ‘intimacy’ and ‘public’ solely as dichotomous entities unduly limits the scope of research on intimacy. In making this case, I interpret classic social theory from the works of Simmel and Habermas. Both accounts of transformations in modernity describe the emergence of a sphere of intimacy as a corollary of these transformations, i.e. not as clearly opposed to but intricately related to the emergence of the public sphere. I reflect on the implications of these insights for contemporary studies of intimacy by applying them to the example of wedding ceremonies with the aim to explain a transition from a conspicuously ‘public’ performance to a hybrid public/private event which has now come to include experiences of intimacy supported by mediated publics.

‘Imagine what Gela could be’: Sense of place, ruins of modernity and nostalgias in Sicily

ABSTRACT In the 1960s, Gela, located in southern Sicily, became the home of a petrochemical plant, which created a new sense of modernity, and triggered a process of urbanization. Nevertheless, the resulting pollution and deregulated urban expansion led to the city being stigmatized. The decommissioning of the plant added a condition of economic and identity uncertainty. Drawing from an fieldwork research, this article explores how the process of ruination has affected Gela inhabitants’ sense of place. It points to local sentimental connections with urban ruins – abandoned buildings, incomplete projects and constructions– showing how these become objects of ephemeral micro-practices of concealment while also creating a sphere of intimacy. It analyses the emergence of a new collective imaginary based on archeological and natural heritage, fuelling nostalgia for an imagined pre-industrial past. Although differing from the modernist imaginary associated with oil, this collective rhetoric reproduces the former’s sense of grandeur triggered by the industry.

“Breast-Is-Best” and Care in Fukazawa Ushio’s Chibusa no kuni de

The “breast-is-best” ideology (bonyū shinwa), which is still firmly rooted in Japanese consciousness, can cause women stress and pain, becoming a source of anxiety and even depression. When used in fiction, we can read it as a topos that highlights the great pressure experienced by mothers as primary caregivers in contemporary Japanese society.In this paper, I analyze the representation of breastfeeding in relation to the concept of care in the novel Chibusa no kuni de (In the Country of Breasts, 2020) by Fukazawa Ushio. I argue that Fukazawa’s novel tackles the issue of “breast-is-best” discourse on several levels. On the one hand, this novel describes the discomfort that both the lack and overproduction of breastmilk can cause in women, and also depicts women who lack the so-called “maternal instinct.” On the other hand, the novel also questions the traditional view of care as something that should be performed at the individual level in the intimate sphere. My analysis of Fukazawa’s work will highlight the link between breastfeeding, care, and power, while shedding light on the interdependence between caregivers and care-receivers.

The place of the social in psychiatry: from structural determinants to the ecology of mind.

Social psychiatry considers the ways in which mental disorders are shaped by particular social environments. This paper outlines a cultural-ecosocial approach that emphasizes the ways in which cultural meaning and practices mediate the effects of the social determinants of mental health on the mechanisms of illness, disorder, and disease. Selective review of literature and conceptual synthesis. "The social" in psychiatry stands for the structures and dynamics of groups of people interacting on multiple scales from the intimate sphere of couple and family to neighbourhoods, communities, societies, nations, and transnational or global networks. These interactions create social contexts, niches, forms of belonging, identities, institutions, and larger systems that influence the causes, expression, course, and outcome of mental disorders. Characterizing these systems requires theory that considers the ways in which social systems constitute dynamical systems that configure material, energetic, and informational flows that give rise to human experience. Unpacking the health consequences of these local and extended systems requires an interdisciplinary approach that considers: (1) the social psychological, psychophysiological, and sociophysiological processes that mediate the impact of the environment on body, mind, and person; (2) the interactional dynamics of social systems that give rise to structural adversity and inequity as well as resilience; and (3) the recursive effects of self-understanding, agency and subjectivity. In the cultural-ecosocial view, "the social" is shorthand for interactional processes that constitute material and symbolic structures that provide cultural affordances, constraints, and challenges as well as resources for healing, recovery, and adaptation.

‘A class struggle fought within ourselves’. Party morality and subjectivity in Cold War Italian Communism

ABSTRACT In the harshest phase of the Cold War between the end of the Second World War and the death of Stalin, the Italian Communist Party, in line with the orientation of international communism, stuck to a model of militancy forged in the 1930s and based on the submission of individual choices and behaviour to the rules dictated by the party. This claim was never fully realized: the discipline operated by the party was not a one-way process, and had to deal with the cultural, familial, existential and affective factors that make up each individual’s life. However, the case of the communist leader Emilio Sereni shows how the higher up in the organizational structure one went, the more the identification of the individual with the party intensified, through a logic that affected even the most intimate sphere of feelings and family relationships.

Intimate harms and menstrual cycle tracking apps

Menstrual cycle tracking applications (‘apps’) are smartphone or tablet apps that allow users to log data pertaining to their period. Using a lens of privacy focussed on intimacy, it will be argued that the control-based harms and intimate harms emerging from these apps require moving from an information privacy law model based on control to one that acknowledges the deeper connection between intimacy and privacy. We examine the privacy policies of 20 menstrual cycle tracking apps to investigate how the control-based protections of the Privacy Act apply. Our findings demonstrate that there are many deficiencies in app privacy policies which give rise to critical questioning about the application of the Australian Privacy Act’s control approach. We argue that the current gender-agnostic approach of information privacy law's control approach does not adequately protect app users and their intimate information. Intimate harms rethink the application of information privacy law by extending its reach beyond the traditional control harms contemplated by the Act and examine how menstrual cycle tracking apps disrupt users’ intimate spheres and relationships. To adequately protect app users from these deeper intimate harms, we contend that information privacy law moves beyond the procedural-based control approach to an information privacy model that is relational, context-dependant and acknowledges the connection between intimacy and privacy.

A secret life of Queen Eleanor of Austria: correspondence, courtiers and covert agents

Abstract This article seeks to reassess the influence of Eleanor of Austria as queen of France. Her dual role as a foreign queen consort not only encompassed her persona as a queen of peace, emphasized at public appearances, but also involved an intimate sphere of back-channel diplomacy where she maintained close connections with her siblings, Emperor Charles V and Queen Mary of Hungary. First, Eleanor’s peace-making identity in public diplomacy will be discussed. Then, by examining dispatches from imperial ambassadors, this article demonstrates how Eleanor stimulated the Habsburg information-gathering process. Furthermore, an analysis of her unedited correspondence provides insight into the political and cultural context in which she operated as a letter writer at the court of François Ier. This article then illuminates the prominent roles played by her courtiers, and most notably Beatriz Pacheco, as informants of the imperial ambassadors and her support for covert agents such as Domingo Leyton, thus offering a more political and personal portrayal of the queen’s entourage. In this way, the article aims to present novel perspectives on secrecy and espionage at the French and Habsburg Renaissance courts.

A Lonely Position. Misrecognition and Belonging Among International Adoptees in Norway

In this article, we use the concepts of recognition and misrecognition to shed light on the subtle manifestation of othering and racism experienced by international adoptees in Norway. Our aim is to deepen understanding of identity formation and belonging among adoptees by examining recognition and misrecognition within two key contexts: encounters with strangers and interactions within the adoptive family. Strangers often perceive adoptees as immigrants or foreigners, failing to recognize their middle-class identity and their belonging to Norway. This misrecognition underscores the intertwined nature of physical appearance, class, and national belonging. Moreover, misrecognition of Norwegian identity not only symbolically separates adoptees from the nation, but also from their adoptive families, compounding the effects of misrecognition. Paradoxically, while family members unequivocally view adoptees as Norwegians, this recognition sometimes entails misrecognition of adoptees’ experiences with othering and racism in the external world, which can lead to a sense of alienation within the family. The dynamics of recognition and misrecognition, both externally and within the intimate sphere, can converge to isolate adoptees, placing them in a lonely position.

Translating Violence

This paper examines the relationship between regional concepts of manhood and the experience of wartime sexual violence for the sub-group that is highly at risk of its victimization and its perpetration, the combatant-male. The violence witnessed by sub-Saharan Africa in the wake of its independence movements and the instability caused by rival factions not only displayed incidents of sexual violence but also highlighted the social value tied to “manhood” by these regions and their populations such that the concept of masculinity was weaponized at that time. Additionally, this paper explores the more intimate sphere of the combatant’s unit and group dynamics to discuss the formation of “hyper-masculinities” that drive its members to increased aggression and the employment of harmful actions, such as sexual crimes, as a mark of manliness. As such, this paper argues that the idea of the “hegemonic male” and the social value tied to such men present a twin-edge opportunity where committing sexual crimes serves to increase the prestige of the perpetrator, while at the same time, inflicting harm upon its victim with consequences beyond the initial incident of violence. Insights and data were drawn from existing literature on masculinities and the experience of militarized persons, with the intent of adding to existing knowledge on masculinity.

Chinese intimacies & consumer–culture–brand relations

ABSTRACT Two Western culture-inflected paradigms of intimacy dominate scholarship in the marketing and consumer behaviour disciplines: intimacy as interior-secrets-revealed and intimacy as knowledge-which-accumulates. This article decentres these concepts by exploring how intimacies in China emerge in complex co-created ways, from contextual settings, from the local construction of space and place, through kinship and its extensions, through ritual and embodied everyday practices, and through the situational instantiation of symbolic boundaries which separate the sphere of intimacy from the public and private spheres. The article shows how competing paradigms for intimacy, including the Western culture inflected paradigms, interact across diverse social domains in China, and further, how Chinese persons’ dispositions regards intimacy are shaped by broader processes of globalization. The article draws on autoethnography in China, as well as popular culture, social media, and brand communications analysis. It offers conclusions about how to theorize consumer-culture-brand relationships considering the analyses of intimacy explored throughout.

Seguros para os pobres: ironias da financeirização da pobreza na África do Sul

This text makes a Bibliographical Critique of the book "Ironies of Solidarity: Insurance and Financialization of Kinship in South Africa", written by the Dutch anthropologist Erik Bähre and published in 2020. The book brings an original reflection on the processes of financialisation of everyday life and poverty in the so-called Global South. The sensitive ethnography, conducted in Cape Town, shifts assumptions and brings a relevant contribution to social studies of the economy and the relations between moralities and markets. More than that, it brings relevant insights and methodological propositions for an approach to global financial capitalism based on the contradictions and ironies produced in people's daily lives. The book draws attention to how insurance, especially in its form marketed by large financial institutions, is a type of solidarity distinct from the forms usually studied by anthropologists. Anthropological theory has devoted itself more thoroughly to the study of community forms of solidarity and usually apprehends "the market" or "neoliberalism" as a force that corrupts the spheres of intimacy and personal ties. The book allows us to develop more sophisticated strategies for understanding such social processes from an anthropological approach.

The Muslim Friend: Cross-Confessional Male Intimacy in Eighteenth-Century Italy

Abstract In early modern Italy, stereotypes about Muslim men’s supposed inclination towards the vice of ‘sodomy’ gave rise to fears that Christian masculinity was being tainted. Eighteenth-century court records from the Republic of Genoa and the Papal States contain numerous instances of cross-confessional male relations that faced persecution by state authorities. In each of these cases, Christian men were prosecuted for taking a sexually ‘passive’ role in relation to sexually ‘active’ Muslims, while the reverse scenario was never pursued. This article argues that the sexual focus of judicial authorities obscured the enduring bonds of affection and mutual obligation that developed between men across religious lines. The existence of these relationships unveils an intimate sphere of connections across faith in the early modern Mediterranean while highlighting an intersectional site of Christian social anxiety, where fears of religious contamination overlapped with concerns about same-sex intimacy.

Young families’ space adaptation in subsidized housing case study: Mataram city, West Nusa Tenggara Indonesia

ABSTRACT Indonesia’s 2020 census shows that 25.87% of the population comprises productive working-age millennials in the family-forming phase and demand affordable housing. To aid the low-income class in accessing the housing market, the government provides the Rumah Inti Tumbuh (RIT) or “growing core house” programme. This study examines the young families’ adaptation to utilize the available rooms, using mixed methods of observations, interviews, and architectural records. Study analyses employ the six layers’ theory of [Brand, Stewart. 1994. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They are Built. New York, NY: Viking] to trace back the incremental process from the early home-making, motivation development, and adaptation strategy of the spatial usages in the post-reconstruction. The study concludes that young families needed to incrementally outmode the forms of provision even in the early occupation. The adaptive solutions gradually blurred the initial design idea provided by the developer. The home-making practices also accommodate daily activities connected with Islamic cultural, social, and intimate spheres.

Mehir (Dower), Gifts of Gold, and Intimate Economies of Marriage in Istanbul

Abstract Islamic mehir practices (dower) and other financial arrangements during a marriage reveal how marriage, gender and religion are understood and reconfigured in Istanbul today. Drawing on religious women's narratives of mehir and gifts of gold, this article examines the complex interplay between economic transactions and intimate marital relationships in Istanbul, as well as the relation between my interlocutors’ practices of mehir and wedding gifts and their sense of propriety. It suggests that women's ways of understanding and practising economic marriage transactions are ambivalently shaped by intimate entanglements of religion, nuclear family, conjugal love, secular civil law, and reputation and honour. Women uneasily navigate the ambivalences of the intimate sphere as they make decisions and engage in practices related to economic marriage transactions.

The gender of PrEP: Transgender men negotiating legitimacy in France

Transmasculine people (TM) constitute an invisibilized group within the transgender population. Little is known about their relationship to sexuality in transgender medicine. Their presence and needs are still unacknowledged within HIV prevention research and services. Pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP) is an oral medication that prevents HIV in HIV-negative individuals at risk of infection with the virus. This paper proposes to bring TM back into the focus of PrEP research by questioning how they navigate and situate themselves in relation to existing PrEP categorization and services, and how they think about and (re)shape the meanings of PrEP. It is based on the “interpretative descriptive” method and a transfeminist theoretical framework applied to the analysis of ten semi-structured interviews with TM conducted in France between 2019 and 2023. Findings show that PrEP is gendered. We identify specific barriers to getting PrEP as well as to access healthcare and we show that a cisnormative and homonormative approach to prevention generates them. PrEP use and PrEP disclosure are embedded in structural and symbolic power relations between cisgender and transgender MSM that are reflected in the intimate sphere. TM use PrEP to prevent sexual assault and to alleviate the difficulty of condom negotiation. PrEP comes into play following major changes in TM's sexualities and is integrated post-exposure.

Schizophrenic Identity and Other Gender Issues in Finnish Folklore Studies

This article gives an overview of two early female folklorists and one folklore collector from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. The aim is to reveal the symbolic violence and rejection the three female scholars underwent through the use of the term trivialization. I have chosen Charlotta Europaeus, Helmi Helminen and Elsa Enäjärvi as examples because of their early appearance in the field. These cases illustrate to what extent gender, together with presumptions of the gender roles and scientific norms of the era, affected their scholarly work. Charlotta Europaeus, Helmi Helminen and Elsa Enäjärvi were fascinated by women’s life, female genres and intimate spheres of culture, but in order to succeed they needed male supporters and adaptation of male-dominated methods. Above all, the collecting and scientific work of the early female scholars concretely elucidates the female as dismissed and further, how the suppression of female gender and folklore is embedded in documentation and textualization practices.

There as a discourse-pragmatic marker in Irish English

The upper ranks of corpus word frequency lists are primarily populated by functional items, as well as by other small words characterised by their polysemy that reward focussed attention and research. Exploring these items has resulted in rich and fruitful insights from a corpus pragmatic perspective. This paper focuses on the nature and value of there as a discourse-pragmatic marker in Irish English (IrE). We focus on intimate discourse (i.e., the language used between family and friends), and use corpora of IrE to trace and investigate the varietal nuances of there in this context. Our analysis acknowledges the expected existential and locative functions and illustrates that there has specific discourse–pragmatic properties in the intimate sphere in IrE. We argue that there has acquired additional pragmatic dimensions and is used in the language of family and friends as, for example, an involvement marker or mitigator. In the discussion of the development of there as a discourse-pragmatic marker, we consult historical data that matches our focal context, and discuss the processes by which there has come to fulfil a range of discourse-pragmatic functions in IrE.

The Making of “Passengers”: The Pre-Departure Subjectivation of Sri Lanka’s Aspiring Migrant Domestic Workers Heading to the Arabian Gulf

ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine the process of migrant subject-making prior to departure based on the experiences of Sri Lankan women aspiring to become migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in the Arabian Gulf. Within a context of commodified, privatized and foreignized care migration regimes, women from developing countries have become “ideal” maids: cheap, docile and hardworking, they satisfy the growing social reproductive needs of more affluent countries. This image of the “ideal” MDW is re/produced, maintained and challenged through technologies of subject-making across the circuits of migration. In a combined public–private, local–transnational, and formal–informal thrust towards subject-making, different actors—including MDWs themselves—use different pre-departure technologies in a sociology of markets. Thus, passengers are carved out even before potential MDWs leave their home country; these passengers reflect different constructions, embodiments and connotations of “ideal” migrant subjects, where labour power is re/produced and exploited in the most intimate sphere.

At home in the ‘home’? Narratives of home in repertoires of institutional dining

Home is not only a concrete place and a complex system of relations, but also an end-in-view that connects perceived shortcomings in the current versions of home with the desired goals and the means to achieve them. Our case study centres on a dining improvement project which strives to create home in residential institutions for people identified as disabled by serving a ‘home-like meal’. We describe three versions of home that are enacted in residential institutions – home as a commune, home as a private space and home as an intimate sphere – and document how they influence the serving of meals. We combine pragmatic theory of valuation with ethnographic research of home-making practices to assess the feasibility of these ends-in-view in relation to the housing options available to the disabled-identified. We show that when the realization of the chosen goals proves unfeasible under present circumstances, the discrepancies between the desired and actual versions of home can be effaced through various re-contextualization strategies. Of the three versions of home encountered during our intervention/research, the home enacted as an intimate sphere is the one most firmly grounded in clients’ real wishes and needs, and therefore the one most favourable to positive change.

Ecuadorian Women Architects: A Gender Turn in the Collective Memory

A review of: Pioneras de la Arquitectura Ecuatoriana, virtual exhibition at https://www. pionerasarquitecturaec.com/exposición-virtual, launched 20 November, 2020, curated by María José Freire and Verónica Rosero. The review examines the Ecuadorian exhibition, which recovers memories that have long remained in the personal and intimate sphere and exposes them to the social sphere, a fundamentally political act.