Politics Of Intimacy Research Articles

The State of Our Unions

Book Review| October 01 2006 The State of Our Unions Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity Edited by Elizabeth Bernstein and Laurie Schaffner New York: Routledge, 2005. xxv + 313 pp. Patrick Mullen Patrick Mullen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2006) 12 (4): 644–646. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2006-007 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Patrick Mullen; The State of Our Unions. GLQ 1 October 2006; 12 (4): 644–646. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2006-007 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review: Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity

Book Review: Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity

The Autocracy of Love and the Legitimacy of Empire: Intimacy, Power and Scandal in Nineteenth‐Century Metlakahtlah

This paper examines the politics of intimacy, power, and scandal at Metlakahtlah, a Church of England mission village in northern British Columbia, Canada, from 1862 to 1885, in order to cast light on settler colonialism and its aftermath. It particularly examines Metlakahtlah's main missionary, William Duncan, his relationships with young female converts and missionary women, and, perhaps more importantly, the stories that were told about them. Stories of Duncan's relationships with young Tsimshian women that circulated throughout settler society reveal the central place of sexuality to both critiques and defences of imperialism, and cast new light on contemporary politics around the historical experience of Indigenous children in settler colonies like Australia and Canada.

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.

Political scopophilia, presidential campaigning, and the intimacy of American politics

This essay explores the shift of political campaigning in the United States toward a more intimate, self‐disclosive style and maintains that the psychoanalytic concept of scopophilia offers an explanation for this progression. Seen as an impulse encouraged by television, scopophilia allows for a greater understanding of political strategies designed to exhibit candidates to voters with increasing intimacy. The essay offers an analysis of three presidential campaign films from the 1984, 1988, and 1992 campaigns, and concludes with the implications of heightened levels of intimacy for the American political community. First, a politics of intimacy results in a shift away from policy concerns toward more candidate‐centered campaigns. Second, such a shift may reorder existing, masculinized conceptions of presidential leadership. Such reordering may create political and cultural disruption in a society that fears the feminization of politics. Finally, increased intimacy may foster a “scopophiliac shame” respon...

(Re)Constituting community through narrative argument:ErosandPhiliainthe big chill

This essay analyzes the way a specific narrative text—Lawrence Kasdan's 1983 feature film The Big Chill—confronts the relationship between communal norms and political possibilities. By inviting the audience to engage in a constant process of character and community identification and contrast, the film enacts a complex disjunctive narrative argument endorsing a specific form of communal affiliation (what Hannah Arendt refers to as philia) and rejecting its opposite (Arendt's sense of eros). In rejecting communities grounded in eros, the film also critiques what can be called “the politics of intimacy” and adumbrates an alternative “politics of friendship.” Additionally, the reading of the film illustrates the importance of narrative to communal constitution and political friendship.

The Politics of Intimacy: Costs and Benefits Determining Disclosure Intimacy in Male-Female Dyads

A review of previous research suggested a three-way interaction effect between gender of discloser, locus of evaluation of discloser and partner in influencing disclosure intimacy. A social exchange model predicted the specific structure of the interaction. Application of the model yielded four distinct theoretical intimacy investment levels. Fifty five males and fifty-five females responded to the locus of evaluation questionnaire and completed the Davis (1976) acquaintance exercise in male-female dyads. Using a median-split method, participants were labelled as internal or external evaluators. Results provided support for the predicted interaction effect and for the social exchange model. Results are discussed in terms of social exchange theory and the costs and benefits of intimacy, power and their intersection in the development of close relationships between women and men.