Search results
Bordering intimacy is a study of how borders and dominant forms of intimacy, such as family, are central to the governance of postcolonial states such as Britain. The book explores the connected history between contemporary border regimes and the policing of family with the role of borders under European and British empires. Building upon postcolonial, decolonial and black feminist theory, the investigation centres on how colonial bordering is remade in contemporary Britain through appeals to protect, sustain and make family life. Not only was family central to the making of colonial racism but claims to family continue to remake, shore up but also hide the organisation of racialised violence in liberal states. Drawing on historical investigations, the book investigates the continuity of colonial rule in numerous areas of contemporary government – family visa regimes, the policing of sham marriages, counterterror strategies, deprivation of citizenship, policing tactics, integration policy. In doing this, the book re-theorises how we think of the connection between liberal government, race, family, borders and empire. In using Britain as a case, this opens up further insights into the international/global circulations of liberal empire and its relationship to violence.
This edited collection, Affective intimacies, provides a novel platform for re-evaluating the notion of open-ended intimacies through the lens of affect theories. Thus, this collection is not about affect and intimacy, but affective intimacies. Instead of foregrounding certain predefined categories of affects or intimacies, the book focuses on processes, entanglements and encounters between humans as well as between human and non-human bodies that provide key signposts for grasping of affective intimacies. Throughout, Affective intimacies addresses the embodied, affective and psychic aspects of intimate entanglements across various timely phenomena. Rather than assuming that we could parse affective intimacies in a pre-defined way, the collection asks how the study of affect enables us to rethink intimacies, what affect theories can do to the prevailing notion of intimacy and how they renew and enrich theories of intimacy. Affective intimacies brings together a selection of original chapters which invite readers to follow and reconsider affective intimacies as they unfold in the happenings of everyday lives and in their mobile, affective and more-than-human intricate predicaments. In this manner, the edited collection makes a valuable contribution to the social sciences and humanities which have yet to recognise and utilise the potential to imagine affective intimacies in alternative ways, without starting from the already familiar terrains, theories and conceptualisations. By so doing, it advances the value of interdisciplinary perspectives and creative methodologies in thinking in terms of affective intimacies.
A reader sits down with a book. The book contains a translation of an old poem, a poem written – or composed, passed down orally, pieced together over time, eventually copied into a manuscript, edited and printed – in a dead language, Old English. The act of reading this poem in translation is a kind of intimacy. But what kind? The reader wishes to come close to, forge a connection with, the original poem in some way. Perhaps they want to hear echoes of the sound of the dead language, its rhythms and patterns; perhaps they want to get a sense
of cultural citizenship, diaspora, revolutionary legacy and globalisation, and they do so through what we call ‘deterritorialised intimacies’. These intimacies are afforded by their documentary practices of decolonised ethnography: a set of aesthetic and ethical documentary strategies that are expressive of historical and emotional geographies of belonging and non-belonging for the filmmaker, subject
3885 Cult British TV Comedy:Layout 1 14/12/12 07:53 Page 128 5 Community and intimacy: from laugh track to commentary track According to Andy Medhurst, ‘Comedy says to us: you’re among friends, relax, join in’ (2007: 19). While proponents of more confrontational or ‘experimental’ forms of comedy might challenge (or at least qualify) this proposition, it seems safe to accept that comedy does require some sense of belonging. The nature of this belonging might vary hugely, along lines determined by nation, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and age. It might
worries. White women should have only the most limited contact with African men’s bodies, lest their reputation as semi-divine be sullied. Many white men, however, believed sex with African women to be something of a perk of empire. Others, particularly white women, argued such intimacy destroyed the boundaries that preserved white prestige. If African men knew that carnality could exist between the races
wishes, the communication is somehow open. (Interview with a bisexual woman, 2014) When women 1 (including cis, trans and genderqueer women) who I have interviewed talk about their past or current relationships with women, there is often closeness and intimacy – a kind of easiness – present
of the women in my street market sites – black women, white Neapolitan women, those working in the market or those passing through – revealed key insights about interconnected patterns of sexual conventions and racialised domination in Napoli. These conventions uncovered a melancholic recollection of colonialism and US military occupation – that continued to demarcate the city in subtle ways – and laid the groundwork for negotiating and managing contemporary fears around racial intimacy. Paranoias about the threat to local ‘sexual preserves’ were articulated
4 Promiscuous intimacies: rethinking the history of American casual sex Casual sex – uncommitted, fleeting, non-romantic sexual encounters, sex for sex’s sake – has become something of a cultural commonplace in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. ‘For me’, observes a female character in a Jennifer Egan novel, ‘the sexual act had nothing to do with love, or rarely. On the contrary, the less I cared for or even knew a man, the more easily I lost myself in his physical company.’1 This is the kind of sex central to the high-rating TV series Sex and
reorienting the presumed subject of analysis and granting that objects can, in certain senses and situations, have agency, ANT breaks down artificial bifurcations between the ‘social’ world and the ‘natural’ world. By deploying ANT analyses, the attentive reader can therefore better understand how non-human agents might have clear effects on the world formerly understood to include only human agents. In the case of the Finnsburg episode, ANT allows us to reconceptualize the types of groups that the poem describes. By paying special attention to the elemental intimacies of