Paper short abstract:

Anthropologists are increasingly using 'intimacy' as a frame of reference in our work. But what do we mean by it and, as a conceptual lens, does it capture something that other more traditional frames of reference miss?

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the extent to which a conceptual focus on intimacy is useful in anthropology. As global mass media, capitalism and consumerism are reshaping ideals of how we should relate to one another, anthropologists are increasingly concerned with intimacy. In this paper, I probe the concept, asking such questions as: How might we define 'intimacy' for the purposes of anthropological study? Is the concept discrete enough to be conceptually useful (or is it perhaps its broadness that makes it useful in examining varied cultural contexts?) How does intimacy articulate with more established anthropological rubrics for exploring similar issues - such as gender, kinship, reciprocity and affect - and as an alternate or complementary frame of reference, is it able to add something to our data collection and analysis that these other frames may overlook? Can a focus on intimacy be particularly revealing for enduring anthropological concerns with relationality, personhood and agency - particularly, as we seek to make sense of intimacy's paradoxes, such as domestic violence?

Paper short abstract:

Romantic love in Singapore unfolds through film, television and in everyday relations. Tensions exist between the (neo)liberal, orderly aesthetics of living and transgressive aspects of passionate love. I describe the public scenes and political impasses engendered by these affective configurations.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary Singaporean living takes place at the intersection of multiple forces, namely, political transitions from the developmental state to neoliberal governance, the rapid rise of an urban landscape pervaded by market capitalism and widespread consumerism, together with the ruling elite's sustained emphasis on developing a unique yet hybrid postcolonial identity for its citizenry, drawing on their multicultural and multireligious "Asian" modernity and traditions. While there has been much academic interest concerning these state-sanctioned modernising trajectories, little has been written about the intimate spaces and affective tenor of everyday relationships. From portrayals of love, desire and sexuality in recent Singapore cinema and television soap operas, to observations from my initial fieldwork of six months, I focus on the lived experience of romantic relationships as a site of intergenerational reproduction, socialised habit, cultural innovation, as well as intensified attachments to material objects and fantasies. I argue that these relationships are marked by tensions between the (neo)liberal and orderly social aesthetics of "balanced" lifestyles, self-moderation and self-regulation, on the one hand, and structures of feeling involving the transgressive or sacrificial extremities of romantic (or other forms of) desire, on the other. These aporias have also blurred the boundaries between private, everyday struggles of individuals and couples, and intimate publics (Berlant, 2008) that offer recognition, validation, and ultimately, reassurance for Singaporeans experiencing these contradictory pressures. Finally, I trace the political implications of these intimately lived tensions, palpable in the state's present difficulty in securing affective loyalties from its citizen-subjects.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ways men create affective relationships with other men through participating in illicit romantic or sexual encounters with women. Focusing on the experience of men in Pakistan, the paper will examine how these interactions reinforce masculine ideals and intimacy between men.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the ways in which elite men seek to forge intimate relationships of trust and friendship with other men through engaging in and recounting experiences of illicit romantic or sexual encounters with women. The paper will explore how a façade of the illicit is used to designate gender-segregated spaces and facilitate widely held conceptions of ideal manhood involving pride, rivalry and virility, traits long associated with ideal masculinity in Pakistan (Barth, 1959).

The paper will explore how, in social contexts that retain a significant degree of social segregation between husbands and wives, elite men bond with one another through the sharing of 'illicit' interactions with women. These illicit interactions range from the ubiquitous, and largely socially acceptable, shared viewing of erotic dance performances; to more circumscribed experiences with sex workers; to romantic relationships outside of marriage with girlfriends and mistresses. By creating a designated and semi-public environment for illicit enjoyment, men both legitimise their extramarital relations with women, and create an environment of shared enjoyment and trust, without violating the private sanctity of the home. Though some of the illicit relationships elite men have with women are intensely affective involving love, desire and jealousy, I argue that for most Pakistani men, their most intimate relationships are those they share with an inner circle of men.

Paper short abstract:

The rejection-adverse approach taken to offering a hand to a fellow member within a Port Melbourne activity-based group, as with flirting, provided an experience of social order that suggested the potential for politics to be staged.

Paper long abstract:

Across the Port Melbourne activity-based groups in which I participated, much conversation was directed at providing offers of assistance to fellow members. As opportunities for the direct rejection of the offer were foreclosed, it paralleled what may be familiar to Australians as flirting — performing a noncommittal interest in a fun manner that guards against a socially recognised refusal. Such situations demonstrated both the functioning of social order and the imposed, hence contestable, nature of that social order.

Starting with the example of offering to help an older person move some furniture in her house, I contribute to the catalogue of examples of how people make and perceive ethical decisions in a world where order is only ever imposed. My attention to the details of a specific instance offers methodological and conceptual insight into the imposed nature of social identifications as order (whether imposed by us within the situation or to describe it afterwards). Finally, I argue that the seemingly non-confrontational nature and recreational value of these conversations about help, as with flirting, does not render them politically impotent.

I take a distinctive conceptual path by working with Jacques Rancière's presupposition that people have the capacity to be equal, and his definition of politics as being when this equality disrupts and forces a redistribution of the always unequal social order. Yet I speak more broadly to the project of the anthropology of the good (Robbins 2013) and how particular social interactions may reflect, impose and interrupt broader social order.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the concept of 'intimate borders' as an approach to Australia's policing of intimacy and its effect on intimate relations. It focuses on the experiences of African-Australian couples with political, moral and social borders they meet during their journeys of marriage migration.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I explore the concept of 'intimate borders' as an approach to Australia's policing of intimacy and its effect on intimate relations. I focus on the experiences of African-Australian couples with the political, moral and social borders of Australia. As migration policies become increasingly restrictive, for unskilled migrants from the Global South, marriage migration seems to be the only option left. However, in order to prevent 'sham' marriages, this category is subject to increasing control to make sure marriages are genuine. Couples have to prove their love for each other is real. While in Australia marriage is encouraged and seen as a private matter between two partners, marriage between a non-citizen and an Australian is a public affair. I argue that such policies and the related stereotypes about Africans who would 'only do it for the visa' and 'desperate Australian women' significantly affect the quality of life for those involved. The visa application process is a lengthy, expensive and emotional burden for couples, and, moreover, stereotypes and racism encountered in everyday life in Australia makes African-Australian relationships vulnerable and prone to breaking down. Unequal power relations and dependency on a partner as a result of policies and attitudes triggers emotional instability, frustrations and domestic violence. As such, a policy 'to protect our citizens' has become a risk for Australian citizens' wellbeing. The arguments I use are based on ongoing fieldwork among African-Australian couples in Adelaide since October 2014 for my PhD research on 'intimate borders'.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the contrast between women’s stories of wartime and domestic conflict in Sierra Leone. I argue that both the ‘private’ realm of intimate relations and the ‘public’ realm of political violence are equally governed by a regional aesthetics of concealment and secrecy.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I reflect on 3 months of fieldwork in Sierra Leone to explore the contrast between women's stories of wartime conflict and domestic conflict. I show how women's stories of wartime violence were subject to a gendered aesthetics of concealment and secrecy that has developed in response to a regional history of political violence, including slave trading, raiding, warfare, colonial rule and electoral politics. In contrast to their highly contained and scripted "war narratives", women recounted their stories of domestic conflict with husbands, lovers and boyfriends relatively more openly. Nonetheless, the fragility of intimate relationships between women and men in Sierra Leone reflects broader societal, ritual and ideological attempts to sexually and verbally contain women's power. Drawing on the insightful work of anthropologists such as Mariane Ferme and Rosalind Shaw, I argue that political relationships in the so-called 'public' domain - and political violence in particular - structure gendered relationships and women's social and domestic roles at the most intimate, 'private' levels of the family and the body; and vice versa as my case studies of women's stories of wartime violence will show. In Sierra Leone, the personal is indeed deeply political. By examining the relationships and disjunctures between stories of gendered violence, abuse and neglect in marital relationships on the one hand, and stories of political violence on the other, I argue that in West Africa the categories of gender and secrecy are key to understanding the structural continuity of violence between the political ('public') and domestic ('private') domains.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I reflect on aspiring academics' intimate lives in relation to their often uncertain careers, unstable jobs, insecure finances, and unsettled locations. Drawing on my study of aspiring academics in Australia, I ask how intimacy and career insecurity inform and shape one another.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, the difficulties faced by aspiring academics have received a great deal of attention, in Australia and worldwide. While this has led to a growing academic interest in the lived realities of this group, the majority of research to date has been quantitative. In this paper, I offer qualitative insights into aspiring academics' intimate lives in relation to their often uncertain careers, unstable jobs, insecure finances, and unsettled locations. I draw on interviews carried out across three universities in Australia among those that aspire to academic careers or have done so in the past.

Aspiring academics' work and lives were understood and enacted as 'uncertain' and 'insecure', and concerns regarding the impact of academic work on domestic life were commonplace. Issues raised related to an inability to 'settle down', including problems of relocating with a partner or child, troubles maintaining 'work-life balance', and financial difficulties, which were experienced as a barrier to parenthood and home ownership. Moreover, women in particular raised concerns over how their families and relationships impacted their academic career prospects. Yet it was apparent that people's intimate relations not only restricted but supported their pursuit of an academic career, and that their academic ambitions both limited and produced intimate relations. As such, in this paper I explore how intimacy and career insecurity mutually inform and shape one another.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how upland ethnic minority people’s imaginings of the state in Vietnam are mediated through the politics of intimacy in their dealings with local state officials, and each other. Affect, cynicism and desire are the prevalent registers in which this intimate politics takes place.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws upon ethnographic fieldwork from an ethnic minority commune in northern Vietnam to explore how the state is imagined by local people. Ethnic minorities in Vietnam have long been the targets of state governmental schemes to mould them into modern and productive Vietnamese citizens and overarching national narratives, symbols and bureaucratic practices are deployed to inculcate a particular state imaginary in the borderlands of northern Vietnam. Local state officials are the interlocutors in this process: they are all ethnic minority people who have grown up in the commune and who share intimate connections of kinship, friendship and reciprocity with commune residents. It is through the routine and everyday interactions of local people with these local officials, and with each other, that the idea of the state and the operation of political power is truly made manifest. These local encounters spawn a politics of intimacy which is powerfully constitutive of state ideas quite different to those imagined by central state planners and bureaucrats. These state imaginaries take shape in the three intimate registers of affect, cynicism, and desire and the paper provides ethnographic episodes to illustrate how the idea of the state is constantly constructed, de-constructed and re-imagined by local people themselves in these intimate domains. Critically though, the exercise of power and the imagining of the state takes place within the bounded territory of already existing social hierarchies and relations of power in the commune, and the politics of intimacy also ultimately serves to reinforce these structured relations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the politics of intimacy through an analysis of the representation of gendered selves, potential partners, and romantic relationships by PNG women using online dating sites, arguing that these suggest increasing expectations of intimacy in relationships.

Paper long abstract:

The politics of intimacy in online dating rely partly at least on the understanding that images and presentations of self during online communication is more malleable than that of face-to-face communication, given that personal characteristics listed online are not always obvious or verifiable. At the same time, however, online daters seek to maintain a level of authenticity and consistency between online and offline 'selves' in order to be able to form intimate relationships offline. This paper explores the politics of the presentation of gendered selves by Papua New Guinea women using a variety of online dating sites, including global sites utilised by daters from many different countries as well as small, localised sites within PNG. But it seeks to focus also on the ways in which potential partners and romantic relationships are also key elements in this process of self-presentation. It examines the ways in which these women represent not only themselves as certain kinds of gendered persons and potential partners, but also the types or characteristics of the male partners they are seeking in order to bring about a certain kind of relationship. I argue that these PNG women present themselves, their desired partners, and the relationships they seek online in ways that indicate transformations of not just experiences but also expectations of intimacy in personal relationships in PNG.