Intimate Practices Research Articles

‘I don’t want us to stand out more than we already do’: Lesbian couples negotiating family connections in donor conception

This article adds to debates about intimate life in non-heterosexual relationships and the concept of ‘families of choice’ by exploring lesbian couples’ understandings of becoming and being a family through donor conception. Drawing on a study comprising 25 lesbian couples in England and Wales who pursued parenthood together using donor sperm, it explores the constructions of family connections as they emerge in couples’ accounts about donor selection and ethnicity/‘race’, siblinghood, surnames and civil partnerships. Asking how far the concept of ‘families of choice’ accounts for contemporary same-sex intimate practices, the article highlights the complex interplay between privilege and under-privilege in the couples’ narratives of conception. It argues that traditional intimate values are emerging as significant in shaping how this community of same-sex couples understand, imagine and construct their intimate lives.

Love and Marriage in the Public Sphere

Love and Marriage in the Public Sphere Rochona Majumdar (bio) Shannon McSheffrey . Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 304 p.; ISBN 978-0-8122-3938-6. Christina Simmons . Making Marriage Modern: Women's Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xii + 306 p.; ISBN 978-0-19-506411-7. Ginger S. Frost . Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. 272 p.; ISBN 978-0-7190-7736-4. Maria Raquel Casas . Married to a Daughter of the Land: Spanish-Mexican Women and Interethnic Marriage in California, 1820-1880. Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2007. xiv + 261 p.; ISBN 978-0-87417-697-1. Jennifer Cole and Lynn Thomas, eds. Love in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 280 p.; ISBN 978-0-226-11352-4. Kristin Celello . Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 248 p.; ill.; ISBN 978-0-8078-3252-3. The association of the modern "West" with ideas of romantic love, companionate marriage, and the nuclear family has a long and varied genealogy. Whether we look at the radically different philosophical expositions of John Locke, G.W.F. Hegel, or Friedrich Engels, or to twentieth-century historians like Philippe Ariès, George Duby, and Lawrence Stone, there remains little doubt that the emergence of the modern West has been seen as coterminous with consensual marriage and conjugal equality. In historian Luisa Passerini's eloquent formulation, the "myth" of Europe was associated with the idea of romantic love.1 The books under consideration in this review are all engaged in revealing the gaps between ideals of romance and conjugal equality and the actual lived experiences of men and women. They interrogate received ideas about love and marriage, primarily in the Anglophone west, from the late medieval period to the present. Of [End Page 182] course, romantic love was never the only reason people married. Love and money, familial security, and citizenship concerns were inextricably linked in making western marriages. Taken together, these books remind us of the labors involved in making a marriage work. While the labor of the couple is unquantifiable, the institution of modern marriage has boosted new professions and economic activity that constitute key features of contemporary Anglo-American capitalism. The majority of these works are engaged in the critical labor of historicizing the particular forms of romantic love, conjugal equality, and companionate marriage in England and America, demonstrating that love, marriage, divorce, and romantic partnerships were highly contested phenomena. The books collectively make it clear that any attempt to think of love, marriage, divorce, or companionship as homogenous or uniform is fundamentally flawed. Each study helps the reader navigate a particular archive and its vivid portrayal of how intimacy was lived by men and women, and how intimate practices shaped the public sphere in England and the United States. Love in Africa, the only book that focuses on the "non-West," offers a foil for comparison, giving insight into how these purportedly western ideas of romance and marriage get differently inflected in non-western settings. Since the publication of Georges Duby and Philippe Ariès's multivolume A History of Private Life, the ideology of separate spheres has persistently influenced historical imagination.2 Feminist scholarship has issued numerous challenges to these ideas by showing the porous nature of the public and private spheres, which in turn has bearing on our understanding of marriage. If marriage is not a singularly "private" practice, then under what rubric can we productively think about the place of marriage and sexual relations? Shannon McSheffrey's book, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London, marks an important addition to these debates. By demonstrating how marriage and sexual practices were formative of medieval English civic culture, McSheffrey shows how anachronistic it is to use categories such as private and public, personal and political for the medieval period. As she argues, ". . . some of those arenas of life that seem obviously 'private' to us were not so...

‘The Church is … My Family’: Exploring the Interrelationship between Familial and Religious Practices and Spaces

This paper considers the interrelationship between family and church, their practices and spaces. Three areas that emerged from qualitative interviews with women who were current and former churchgoers are addressed. First, women described their ‘church as family’ because of personal histories of attending with family and family-like relationships. Second, the resonance between family and church practices and spaces mapped onto other geographies such as gender. Third, experiences of belonging were narrated through the trope ‘church as family’, yet disrupted by racial and classed encounters. The women's experiences demonstrate that intimate practices and spaces of family are permeable and not necessarily bound to conventional formations or sites. They can stretch beyond the household into other spaces, such as church, whereby congregational members are part of kin networks or become ‘chosen families' or a ‘personal community’ that is familial. By looking at this interrelationship, the ways in which people ‘do family’ may offer insights into how and why people may ‘do church’.

Intimacy as a Concept: Explaining Social Change in the Context of Globalisation or Another Form of Ethnocentricism?

This article focuses on intimacy in terms of its analytical potential for understanding social change without the one-nation blinkers sometimes referred to as ‘methodological nationalism’ and without Euro-North-American ethnocentrism. Extending from the concept of family practices, practices of intimacy are sketched and examples considered across cultures. The cultural celebration and use of the term ‘intimacy' is not universal, but practices of intimacy are present in all cultures. The relationship of intimacy to its conceptual relatives is clarified. A brief discussion of subjectivity and social integration restates the relevance of intimate relationships and practices of intimacy to understanding social change in an era of globalisation, despite the theoretical turn away from embodied face to face relationships. Illustrations concerning intimacy and social change in two areas of personal life, parental authority and gender relations, indicate that practices of intimacy can re-inscribe inequalities such as those of age, class and gender as well as subvert them and that attention to practices of intimacy can assist the need to explain continuity as well as change.

Family Lives and Relational Living: Taking Account of Otherness

Contemporary research has shown that families are constituted through everyday practices of intimacy with affinities being fashioned around the structuring principles of openness and reciprocity alongside or superseding traditional ties of obligation and responsibility. Paradoxically in many instances powerful differences and inequalities among intimates remain intransigent, undermining claims on the democratisation of intimacy. In this article I want to examine how people make sense of difference and significant otherness in family lives, focusing attention on embedded practices that span across interpersonal, human-object, natural-cultural boundaries. I focus on three examples; these are relations between humans and animals, parents and children, people and objects. These relations are structured through species, gendered, generational and subject-object differences, but these categorical distinctions do not set apart the self and other. Instead they demonstrate how otherness is part of everyday relational living. Thus, to put personal relationships and families in context, I contend that we need to reframe the analytical lens around an ethics of otherness.

Impacting on Intimacy: Negotiating the Marriage Equality Debate

Impacting on Intimacy: Negotiating the Marriage Equality Debate

Intimate circuits: modernity, migration and marriage among post‐Soviet women in Turkey

AbstractThe study of migration too often ignores the ways that labour migrants' emotional entanglements and complicated personal relationships factor into their experiences of being people on the move. In examining post‐Soviet migrant women's relationships with Turkish men and the ways these are regulated in Turkey, in this article I consider how intimate practices of marriage and performances of ‘love’ have emerged as key aspects of transnational mobility. These intimate practices both enable long‐term transnational circuits between post‐Soviet homelands and Turkey, and attest to the way global capitalism is redefining personal lives.

Affective Displacements

Determining what counts as sexuality and persecution within the terms of international refugee law is fraught with challenges. Many decisions that seek to discern if a refugee was or was not homosexual, rely on discourses of sexuality that privilege the authentic from the inauthentic (ie the 'confused' or 'experimental' sexual experience from the 'genuine' sexual identity). What these analytic and moralising terms gesture to is that some sexual orientations are more valid than others. Using international jurisprudence commenting on the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 1951 (UN) ('Refugee Convention 1951') and subsequent interpretations of this Convention in administrative law in Australia, it is clear that the policy and legal structure seeks to codify the 'refugee' in the terms of a discrete persecuted characteristic. Authenticating refugees on the basis of sexuality relies on a causal narrative - suturing stereotypes of 'functioning' sexuality to incidents of persecution. Emotion, desire and feeling are obscured by a largely ethnocentric administrative method of verification, a narrative process which produces a caricatured, stereotyped and overdetermined legal trope of the gay or lesbian asylum seeker. Refugee voices become mute within the colonising space in which they seek asylum. Such an approach raises broader questions as to why the law continues to construe identity and experience within objectifying representations of legitimate sexual practices or violent experiences. While the 'queer refugee' has no currency in international law, I use it as an analytic term to encompass individuals who experience persecution framed in terms of their (perceived) 'queerness'. Queerness as it relates to refugees is not confined to a particular sexual identity or identification, but rather articulates sexual and cultural difference(s). It is a discursive and affective subject position which emerges through how a refugee experiences and negotiates their sexual attachments, persecution, displacement and intimate practices. Focusing on spatial and embodied difference(s), rather than a quest for universal (fixed) identity, this article considers legal representations in a relational context, alongside experiences of emotion, to frame sexuality and persecution in heterogeneous ways.

Intersections, Immigration, and Partner Violence: A View From a New Gateway—Baltimore, Maryland

This article reports on the results of exploratory surveys with immigrant women regarding their observations of intimate partner violence and criminal justice practices in their communities in the emerging immigrant gateway of Baltimore, Maryland. Using an intersectional/interlocking theoretical framework, it asks how nativity interacts with other social locations in the experiences of partner violence through surveys of women representing 5 language groups. The study found high levels of awareness of the problem of partner violence in immigrant communities and strong awareness of many U.S. criminal justice approaches to the problem. Although the women preferred informal sources of support in a situation of abuse, they strongly supported government intervention. We found low levels of awareness of the Violence Against Women Act as well as little support for the higher levels of prosecution for batterers, even though arrest was sometimes approved. The article calls for sensitive policies and practices that take into account the particular vulnerabilities of the foreign-born, especially in localities where national diversity is relatively novel.

Body image perceptions in women with pelvic organ prolapse: a qualitative study

To describe perceptions of prolapse-specific body image in women with symptomatic prolapse. Women with symptomatic pelvic organ prolapse quantification stage ≥ II prolapse participated in semistructured focus groups or self-report questionnaire. Transcripts were independently reviewed and body image themes were identified and confirmed by consensus. Twenty-five women participated in focus groups and 27 in online questionnaires. Transcript analysis revealed 3 central themes and 25 body-image related subthemes. Women living with prolapse were more likely to feel self-conscious, isolated, "different," less feminine, and less attractive. Women often changed sexual intimacy practices because of embarrassment or discomfort, and many avoided intimacy all together. Prolapse greatly affected women's personal and professional activities causing some women to adjust routines or stop activities. Women reported loss of interest in activities, distraction while performing daily/work-related tasks, and embarrassment when asking for help with activities. Themes identified in this qualitative study demonstrate the profound effect of prolapse on a woman's body image.

Narrating Gender and Sex in and through Apartheid Divides

In this article I reflect on the way in which racist practices intersect with gender as this emerges in narratives on living through apartheid, from a group of academics in contemporary South Africa. A wide range of literature has explored the complex intersections of ‘race’, gender, class and other forms of difference and power inequality through the history of South Africa before, during and after apartheid. The continued intersection of gender with racist practices and other forms of inequality is more than evident in post-apartheid South Africa and reflected in multiple contexts. While a number of stories of women and their experiences of the violent forms of the intersection of gendered apartheid through rape and abuse have been documented by the TRC and other forms of interrogation, the more ‘normal’ stories of how racist and gendered practices played themselves out in patriarchal apartheid South Africa are arguably not widely documented other than in theoretical terms. A narrative analysis located within a broad discourse analytic framework is utilised here, which foregrounds experiences in the narratives that reflect broader ideologies on ‘race’, class, culture, gender and sexuality and their enmeshment with each other that were salient in apartheid South Africa and arguably are still of relevance today. I explore some of the multiple and complex ways, many of them not new to us, in which normative gender roles and gender power relations, and sexual and intimate practices intersect with racialised discourse and racist practices in home, work and public spaces through the stories that participants tell.

Intimate practices, conjugal ideals: Affective ties and relationship strategies among Lala (Lesbian) women in contemporary Beijing

This article explores a range of marital ideologies and relationship strategies in the lives of lala (lesbian) women in contemporary Beijing. Although new discourses on same-sex marriage rights and sexual equality are becoming popular in parts of Chinese lala communities, the traditional marriage ideal continues to appear desirable, and it structures same-sex life aspirations as well as social, romantic, and family relationships. The author offers ethnographic data to demonstrate why seemingly oppressive structures retain such significance and overall positive association in lala everyday life and ideology. Narratives of 3 complex relationship strategies demonstrate that marriage is at the core of negotiations that reconcile personal same-sex desires with normative social pressures. Compliant-like conjugal strategies enable subversive possibilities that subtly challenge the status quo while appearing normal. This observation requires a rethinking of notions and meanings of agency, power, and the approach to studying the current global diversity of nonnormative sexualities.

MOSCOW'S ECHO: Technologies of the Self, Publics, and Politics on the Russian Talk Show

This essay examines the practices and politics of self-help in Russia. It interrogates the status of “neoliberalism” in Russia as it relates to the remaking of subjectivity 17 years after the collapse of communism by analyzing a radio talk show called For Adults about Adults hosted by a psychotherapist. An analysis of host–caller exchanges reveals a deployment of robust neoliberal technologies. The talk show not only incites autonomous, responsible, self-esteeming subjects but it also advocates alternative social relations, practices of intimacy and visions of “civil” society. Yet at least two factors indicate a more complex discursive field: The host's technologies of self aimed not as much at a rational-choice actor as a liberal-democratic citizen. And caller responses posed competing visions of selfhood, social life, emotions, and politics. These point to the multiple pulls on subjectivity in post-Soviet Russia. Projects that appear to be “neoliberalizing” also articulate with other political rationalities to form particular assemblages. Nonetheless, at the intersection of national politics under the Putin-Medvedev tandem, where political liberalism remains a dirty word, the effects of this particular assemblage appear depoliticizing: The host's pedagogy of self-cultivation dovetails with a federal interest in making Russians into entrepreneurial subjects, although his “autonomized” politics—referring to the forms of community-based politics neoliberal governmentality is supposed to engender—are blunted. A psychotherapeutically inspired, liberal-progressive vision of a future Russia appears to serve the call to sacrifice all for the economy. This anti-political effect attests to the promiscuous and dynamically assembled nature of neoliberalism—an effect that is seen here to take shape inside the subject.

The History of x in Early America

The History of x in Early America Bruce Burgett (bio) Rape and Sexual Power in Early America. Sharon Block. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. 276 pp. Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830. Clare A. Lyons. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. 420 pp. In 2001, I served on the steering committee for the conference Sexuality in Early America, 1500–1820. Co-sponsored by two major institutional forces in the study of early American history and culture, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, this conference was designed to address the general neglect of the history of sexuality in the field of early American studies. Here is how the original call for papers set the stage: In the last two decades, the history of sexuality has emerged as an important and dynamic field of inquiry. By historicizing matters once understood as universal and eternal, scholars have connected sexual behaviors and desires to specific political, social, and economic contexts. Many have discovered links between this seemingly private realm of human experience and broader structures of power. Still others have questioned the coherence of the category of sexuality itself. With few exceptions, early American scholars have remained on the margins of this new field. Mindful of this omission, the . . . conference aims to examine the relationship between sexuality (defined broadly to include [End Page 215] desire, behavior, and attitudes) and the conditions and institutions of early American society (also defined broadly to include New France, the Caribbean, and the Spanish borderlands). Notable here are several now familiar overarching motifs: the naming of the history of sexuality as a new and important academic field; the insistence on a historical approach to the study of matters once considered universal and private; the gesture toward linkages between those intimate matters and macro-level analyses of power; the positioning of the research to be presented at the conference as a corrective to previous omissions; the somewhat uneasy assertion of a temporal range contained by the years 1500–1820 and informed by present-day concerns, as well as a geographical scope that is American in both the national and the transnational senses of the term. These stage directions also reflect some interesting negotiations that had taken place behind the scenes. When the original call for papers was circulated among the members of the conference steering committee, I had responded by suggesting that we might want to include a solicitation for research that called into question the utility of the categories of “sex” and “sexuality” for research conducted on historical materials that did not deploy those terms as we do today. This suggestion struck me as uncontroversial at the time, as I was drawing not only on the insights of Michel Foucault and his many commentators but also on research clustered around the rubric of queer theory which had suggested, throughout the 1990s, that we need to think carefully and politically about the instability of those categories as we investigate bodily and intimate practices that travel across geographic regions and historical periods. Yet my suggestion created a flurry of email. Some steering committee members worried that the inclusion of this emphasis in the call for papers would move the conference in a less historical direction; others were concerned that questioning the heuristic value of the concepts organizing the conference would undercut its coherence and focus, and could even return the emergent field of the history of sexuality to the margins of academic study. The result was an inclusion in the call for papers of the short sentence, “Still others have questioned the coherence of the category of sexuality itself.” At the conference, the tension between these two different, though not necessarily opposed, approaches to the history of sex and sexuality created [End Page 216] some interesting effects. The conference papers ranged over a wide array of topics that could be generally categorized as sexual, while the responses to those papers consistently raised the question of what was gained and lost by the deployment of sexuality as an organizing category. In part, I...

Domestic Temporalities: Sensual Patterning in Persian Migratory Landscapes

When dealing with the moving worlds of migration among the Persian diaspora in Australia, memories cannot simply be removed to dusty attic boxes to be stored as an archive. Rather, this analysis takes the body and its sensory engagement with the world as a central focus, arguing that memories are crafted, tasted, smelt and touched in everyday temporalities. In the kitchens and lounges of Persian migrant women the lived past refuses to become undone from the countless revolutions of food, talk and domestic activity that are central to the patterning of memory. In this paper, we argue that these intimate practices have references beyond their domestic dimensions, for they point to a worldly movement of life writ domestically small. It is via a sensory network that the spatially and temporally disparate worlds of homeland and new homes are remembered and forgotten, and where miniature worlds call out to the movement of migration.

Intimate Partner Violence Screening Practices of Certified Nurse-Midwives

Intimate Partner Violence Screening Practices of Certified Nurse-Midwives

Making Places of Intimacy—Ethnicity, Friendship, and Masculinities in Oslo

Through transnational migration, practices of gender, intimacy, and sexuality “travel” with people, get incorporated into new social and cultural contexts, and are negotiated and transformed in the encounter with other such practices. The discussion here will focus on the fluid boundaries between male–male emotional and physical intimacy, male–male sexual practice, and homosexual imagery, as they are culturally understood in Pakistan and incorporated into a minority context in Norway by migrants from Pakistan. While homosexuality in Norway is gradually gaining public and political support, it is regarded as unacceptable by Muslim authorities in the country, thus making the issue of homosexuality a vital marker separating the majority population from the Muslim minority. Against this scenario, which is much debated among politicians, activists and various spokespersons from the ethnic and religious communities, practices of friendship and intimacy among Pakistani men in Norway take place. The significance given to the heterosexual–homosexual divide, however, creates a more vulnerable situation for practices of intimacy among men that are not necessarily judged against the homosexual imagery in Pakistan. By using the concept of unmanliness, it is shown how the boundaries of manliness are differently positioned within dominant Norwegian and Pakistani masculinities respectively. This can cause tension on an individual level, as well as on a group level. Therefore, Pakistani men in Norway must create particular places of intimacy, within which culturally specific practices of gender, sexuality, and intimacy are maintained and transformed.

Young Women, Routes through Education and Employment and Discursive Constructions of Love and Intimacy

The current diversity within the sphere of intimacy has been explained in terms of `individualization', whereby individuals exercise choice in this area of their lives. This is argued to have resulted from changes affecting young women's lives — specifically, increased educational and occupational opportunities and subsequent reduced domestication. This article thus explores the interplay between young women's educational and subsequent occupational experiences and their intimate relationships with men, drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with young women. It argues that their different routes through education and employment position them in different settings, which facilitate or encourage opposing discourses of love and intimacy — romance and contingency — and subsequent intimate practices. This dynamic is shown to have some flexibility.

A survey of the value of routine intimate examination and related practices in subfertile couples

SummaryThe practice of undertaking routine intimate examinations in the management of subfertile couples varies among clinicians. An anonymous self-administered mailed questionnaire survey was carried out to determine the current practices followed by clinicians and the rationale supporting their practice. In the absence of large comparative studies, this survey provides expert opinion regarding this practice. The questionnaire was mailed to the Fellows and members of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in the Northern, Yorkshire, West Midlands and Wales regions in the UK. A total of 802 questionnaires were posted, of which 516 were returned, giving an overall response rate of 64%. The responses and comments varied. Some 62% of respondents would routinely perform a pelvic examination on all women presenting with subfertility; 23% would do so only in selected cases and 63% of the clinicians would perform a routine transvaginal ultrasound. The male partners are examined by only 19% of the clinicians. A total of 83% of the respondents were of the opinion that the survey made them think about the role and justification of intimate examinations in greater detail. The practice of intimate examination of subfertile couples varies among clinicians in the survey group. There is a need for large prospective comparative studies to study the value of this examination and related practices in the management of subfertile couples. In the absence of comparative trials, this survey provides expert opinion. It may be suggested that an intimate examination should not be carried out routinely in all subfertile couples. It could be done when it has potential to add value to the management of the patient. A pragmatic approach should be adopted in every clinical situation.

Engaged spirituality: social change and American religion

In recent years, the United States has been characterized not only as a highly religious nation, but as one undergoing a resurgence of spirituality. There is much discussion in both the media and academe about what this means. Religion is usually understood to be social, collective, and institutionally-based. on the other hand, is considered as an emotional and individual practice that borrows from a variety of religious traditions to create a unique devotional system. While scholars have long recognized the importance that and religious organizations have played in social activism, they have typically seen as a private matter with few practical implications. In Engaged Spirituality, Gregory C. Stanczak challenges this assumption, arguing that plays an important role in the making of activists and has the potential for changing the social order. As an integral aspect of everyday life, is a feeling, an experience, a relationship, and a connection of intimate practices that, much like other feelings or relationships in our lives, takes on the texture and color of what is going on around us. While some are more familiar with the concept of as an alternative means of self-discovery, there are just as many individuals for whom it serves as a driving force to address the injustices they find in their communities and beyond. Based on over one hundred interviews with individuals of diverse faith traditions, the book shows how prayer, meditation, and ritual provide foundations for activism. Among the stories, a Buddhist monk in Los Angeles intimately describes the physical sensations of strength and compassion that sweep her body when she recites the Buddha's name in times of selfless service, and a Protestant reverend explains how the calm serenity that she feels during retreats allows her to direct her multiservice agency in San Francisco to creative successes that were previously unimaginable. In an age when Madonna studies Kabbalah, Methodists create home altars with Kwan Yin statues, and the internet is bringing Buddhism to the white middle-class, it is clear that formal religious belonging is no longer enough. Stanczak's critical examination of provides us with a way of discussing the factors that impel individuals into social activism and forces us to rethink the question of how religion and spirituality might be defined.