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- Convenors:
-
Dumitrita Lunca
(Hamburg University)
Anais Ménard (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel looks at the way mobility and intimacy (shorthand for love, sexuality and everything in-between) shape one another. Global forces, as well as gender, ethnicity, class or age also come into play in this new anthropological approach generating a growing scholarship across and beyond Europe.
Long Abstract:
People on the move do not stop being people who fall in love or feel desire, even in the direst of situations. On the contrary, distance might stimulate or exacerbate these feelings and behaviours, while cultural and social contexts may reconfigure ideas about gender roles and identities, love and sexuality. Intimacy, as shorthand for love, sexuality and everything in-between, is not only an important aspect of migrants' lives, but its very nature is shaped by mobility and other global forces, as well as notions of gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, age or the life course.
And if we consider LGBTQ* people moving out of their home countries in search for more inclusive and safer environments, as well as the ubiquity of transnational and cross-cultural relationships, marriage migration, sex tourism or the mobility of sex workers across borders, just to name a few examples, we see that oftentimes intimacy can also be a catalyst for mobility.
Although the study of migration has a long history in our field, the anthropologies of love and sexuality are comparably much younger areas of inquiry. Following the idea of "New Horizons of Interdisciplinarity," this panel focuses on the intersection of these two anthropological traditions, an articulation which is becoming increasingly recognized in scholarly work across and beyond Europe. Our aim is to underline the tremendous importance of intimacy in the lives of people on the move and to encourage research into the ways in which intimacy and mobility shape one another.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper follows the stories of two Syrian women refugees in Alexandria and their struggles to gain stability through intimate relations and marriage. The paper argues that love and marriage are central to how these women experience their own (im)mobility and imagine their (lack of) futures.
Paper long abstract:
This paper follows the stories of two Syrian women refugees living in Alexandria, and their struggles to gain stability through intimate relations and marriage. The paper argues that intimacy, love, and marriage, far from being peripheral stories to the main trauma of migration, are in fact central aspects of how these women make sense of their own (im)mobility and imagine their (lack of) futures. For each woman, their intimate personal lives represent the potential for stability, but more often than not, result in further precarity and even at times, threats to their lives. This paper, based off of two years of ethnographic fieldwork with Syrian refugees who came to Egypt since 2012, studies the choices, risks, refusals, and affective states of these two women in their intimate lives over seven years of "temporary" displacement, as they await the potential of resettlement or return. This paper argues that a key aspect of this story is aspiration, for love, stability, success, and happiness, in the face of unexpected circumstances. While this is a not a new topic within migration studies, women's aspirations are often not taken seriously, or even studied at all. I argue that these two women's focus on love and/or marriage is a contradictory, complex, and nonlinear attempt to reorient their relationship to the future, and to extract themselves from precarious present that has foreclosed possibilities once thought guaranteed.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the transformation of the perception of love in the life courses of Sierra Leonean women who live in Europe. While love is presented as an individual choice, it remains a 'social possibility' that depends on the importance of collective norms within the migratory context.
Paper long abstract:
Transnational migration often results in the reconfiguration of established gender relations. This paper addresses the way ideas of love and intimacy are reproduced and challenged in the life courses of Sierra Leonean women who live in Europe, in processes that involve the couple, the family, and a 'community' of immigrants. It explores the transformation of women's perception of love over the years, from situations of forced marriage and domestic violence to relationships established later in life and based, to their understanding, on individual autonomy and gender equality. Those narratives, I argue, do not point to ideals of 'romantic love' but reveal the importance of the life trajectory in reframing individual subjectivities with regard to gendered relations in an adverse social context. The context of migration, at first, tended to assign those women to gendered roles that were more rigid than in Sierra Leone, due to their situation of social isolation and economic dependency to immigrant men. In articulating the process by which they 'broke free' and tried to establish new relationships, successfully or not, Sierra Leonean women express individual emancipation from collective norms concerning marriage and present love as an individual choice. Nevertheless, individual choices are 'possible' - or tolerated within the 'community' of co-nationals - because those women are not of reproductive age and have adult children. This reveals the importance of considering 'love' as a 'social possibility' that may be realized depending the weight of collective norms upon individuals at different stages of their lives.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the case of Portuguese migrant workers to Angola, this paper delves into the figure of the Portuguese male engaged in an intimate relationship with an Angolan woman to investigate the entanglements of whiteness(es) and masculinity(ies) as framed by dynamics of North-South mobility
Paper long abstract:
Over the last decade (circa 2008-2015), impelled by the concomitant conjunctures of financial crisis in Europe and booming economy in Angola, a large amount of Portuguese workers migrated to the former African colony (estimations go as high as 150 thousand).
During my ethnographic fieldwork carried out from August 2015 to February 2016 among some of these mobile subjects settled in the Angolan city of Benguela, I realised that while intimate relationships established between migrants and hosts were profuse and diverse, one type among them gathered particular social attention by the community: the one composed by middle-aged Portuguese males and (more often that not) younger Angolan women.
In this paper I explore the ways in which these intimate relations were extracted from the private sphere and were socially inscribed into a local discourse framing the new Portuguese presence in Angola. Furthermore, convoking to this exploration the significant 'absent-presents' of such pairs — i.e. Portuguese women and Angolan men — and building on relevant literature on the topic, I suggest that they constitute a key element to understand the mutual effects of mobility and masculinity(ies).
Finally, interrogating what 'race', nationality, economic class and age do to the social (re)construction of what it means "to be a man" in this particular setting, the paper advances the hypothesis of reading the migration to Angola as sort of rescue for fragile white/Portuguese masculinities.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the connections between intimacy, identity and belonging among young Romanians in Rome, Italy, focusing on how coming of age transnationally influences their self-perceptions, future aspirations and intimate choices and desires, whether they migrated as children or young adults.
Paper long abstract:
There are over one million Romanians currently living in Italy, a large portion of which are under 35 years old. Some of them have migrated as children or young adults in order to join their parents, while others migrated on their own as young workers or students after Romania's entry in the EU. What sets the members of this generation apart from their older counterparts is the fact that transnationalism and globalization have become a part of their identity in a way that was inconceivable for those growing up during state-socialism.
On the one hand, coming of age in the late 1990s and 2000s in an increasingly globalized world, where material goods, cultural products and people were constantly crossing frontiers, they have internalized transnational information and mobility as a part of their identity. They were also exposed to "modern" and "Western" ideals regarding intimate relationships to which previous generations did not have access. On the other hand, the identities of mobile youth, which include their cultural belonging to either Romania, Italy or both countries, are oftentimes reflected back onto their intimate pursuits. Young migrants may either become attached to a shared cultural background or they may actively reject their fellow Romanians as possible partners, a choice which mirrors their transnational experience, future aspirations and ultimately their personal ideals regarding love and sexuality.
This paper explores the connections between intimacy, identity, belonging and growing up in an increasingly hyperconnected and hypermobile world among young Romanian transnational migrants in Rome, Italy
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the experiences of Brazilian women living in Germany and in relationships with/ married to German men in parallel to the way prospective brides were depicted in marriage agencies websites which specialized in uniting German men to Brazilian women.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I present some of the results from my dissertation in which I aimed to scrutinize the values attributed to affective-sexual relationships that are established through the mediation of dating websites and introduction agencies between German men and Brazilian women. Taking in consideration the historical and social dynamics that make such relationships not only possible, but also desirable, I tried to shed light into how such dynamics are implicated in the production and reproduction of desire and of intimate interactions, as well as how such dynamics mobilize notions of race and sexuality. The presentation will draw a parallel between the representations of Brazilian women in the websites of four marriage agencies specialized in uniting Brazilian women to German men and the experiences of a group of young Brazilian women living in Berlin who were in relationships with / married to German men. Throughout the paper I will propose the argument that, in spite the processes of racialization and sexualization which these women were under once they moved to the country of origin of their partners, they were in parts able to manipulate such stigma and forge, collectively and individually, new national-racial identities.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the intricate relationship between mobility, place, love and (hetero)sexuality for Canadian women who fall in love and have sex with a man from the Global South. Intimacy redefines women's sense of belonging and emplacement; and intensifies their transnational mobility.
Paper long abstract:
In his novel Comment faire l'amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, Laferrière suggests that white women who sleep with an African man might "wake up the next morning under a baobab tree discussing tribal affairs with village women". Drawing on narratives of Canadian women in a relationship with a man from the Global South, this paper explores the intricate relationship between mobility, place, love and sexuality. More specifically, I examine how heterosexual intimacy with men from the Global South contributes to the women's sense of belonging and emplacement in the place of origin of their partner, whether they have met their partner though travels or online. Following Morrison's argument that (hetero)sexuality is central to everyday practices of homemaking (2012), I suggest that romantic love and sex with a non-Canadian man become key to understanding 1) how a place of transit becomes a home for Canadian women travelling abroad; and 2) how a faraway country becomes a pole of attraction, and the intense focus of transnational mobility for Canadian women, some of whom had never travelled before falling in love with a non-Canadian man. Thus, contrarily to Paula Ebron's (1997) understanding of tourist women in relationships with local men as "women out-of-place", the Canadian women in my study become more firmly grounded in place in the Global Souths through their intimate relationship. I argue that love for a man and love for a place become intertwined, and that love-related mobility should be understood in relation to emplacement and belonging.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I discuss how constructions of "otherness" and intimacy work in Fortaleza, a city in the Northeast of Brazil that since the 1990's has been considered a centre of heterosexual, mainly European, sex tourism, but received in 2018 thousands of extremely well paid Korean male workers.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I discuss how diverse constructions of "otherness" and intimacy work in Fortaleza, a coastal city in the Northeast of Brazil that since the 1990's has been considered a centre of heterosexual international sex tourism. Men from diverse European countries flooded the international tourist circuits and were disputed by local women engaged in the city's sexscapes. During the end of the decade of 2000, however, European tourists ceased visiting the city. Concurrently, the construction of a port attracted thousands of Korean male workers who gave new life to Fortaleza's sexual economies. Brazilian women who used to hang out with foreign visitors felt ambiguous regarding these workers. In spite of the high prices Korean clients paid for tricks, sex workers expressed their nostalgia for the European clients. And so did women who engaged in transactional sex, since foreigners from Europe were connected to a possibility of intimacy and migration they felt impossible to associate with the newly arrived Koreans. Considering the outcomes of a long-term ethnography carried in Fortaleza since 2000 I analyze how sexuality, love, mobilities, styles of masculinity, social and economic position, race and aesthetics take part in these perceptions.