Introduction In our everyday lives, we deal with, talk about, long for and/or run away from intimacies; however, intimacy is differently understood and embodied in different times, groups of people and circumstances, since intimacies are always entanglements of specific notions, emotions, bodies and environments (Sanger and Taylor, 2013 ). Due to
Introduction: bordering intimacy This book began on an EasyJet flight. Or to be more specific, it began when my partner and I were stopped from getting on an EasyJet flight. In the early hours of the morning we had arrived at the airport to board a flight to Sicily for fieldwork and to attend a conference. As we queued to board the plane with our young son, the airline staff made a further inspection of my partner’s visa documents and her recently acquired family migration visa and marriage certificate. Unsure of the rules that applied to non-EU citizens
’. Immigration, the story goes, does not simply threaten British society but it does so by undermining the normative institutions of marriage and family. So, what is so dangerous about sham marriage? And in turn, what is a ‘sham’? Who is a ‘sham’? And what do ‘shams’ do? In this chapter I trace the way that fears about shams have driven a style of government in contemporary Britain built on demarcations of ‘genuine’ and ‘sham’ Shams 101 intimacies. Starting with immigration rules around family migration, I reveal how this has connected up with broader practices of
regimes and visual registers of normality, emerged as experiments of colonial management. Central to the continuity of colonial borders has been the way that ‘family’ works as a transit point for colonial taxonomies of perversion and the human – that is, in categorising who should be subject to borders, who can move, who can settle, who is dangerous. From sham marriages, to monstrous intimacies, to the ‘good’, domesticated migrant, I have shown the work that the normative power of family does in making certain people appear normal, domesticated, familial – and
practice that can re-entrench, as much as resist, the dynamics of race privilege and oppression. This ambivalent potential, I argue, escapes proper critical attention when the intimacy of empathetic relationships (like intimacy in general) is afforded an unexamined normative positivity (i.e. when both empathy and intimacy are automatically deemed, by default, to be ‘good’). In
encounter in the racialised Making love, making empire 65 and sexualised logics of colonialism. It stands, I argue, as an example of the way that mobility, intimacy and claims to family played a central role in both energising and organising colonial rule. After the opening of the exhibit, newspaper stories circulated regarding the effect of the presence of the ‘savages’ in London. Exoticised and eroticised accounts of ‘savage’ behaviour spread as far as the Los Angelesbased Pall Mall paper. White women, it was said, were seen disappearing into the tribal tents which
battle in God's war.) While Beowulf and Andreas have been spotted together for about a century and a half, they usually only prompt the question: ‘Are they or aren't they?’ Few critics have wondered about the nature of their intimacy. The major exception is Richard North, who, in an essay in his and Michael Bintley's edition of Andreas , has attempted to tease out the nuances of this strange romance. North addresses some of the best-known borrowings from Beowulf : the
material world so that they can live as well as possible? These are the questions addressed in this chapter. My empirical focus is a specific case. I unfold my reflections on ‘caring matter’ and ‘affective intimacies’ in the context of the love story of caring for my partner, who is narcoleptic and a heavy smoker. Against this background, I am committed to a discussion of the
intercourse in the avian voices of Old English literature. 3 In this vein of ecocritical optimism, I too read in the bird language of Beowulf a profound moment of interspecies connection. But I argue that within Beowulf the human is excluded from and indeed denigrated by the intimacy of wild creatures; when birds gossip about human corpses, this intimacy thematises the breakdown of socially embedded human knowledge. Beowulf is an ideal site for those creatures and readers drawn
, irritation and dissatisfaction ( Ehrstein et al ., 2019 ; Mustosmäki and Sihto, 2021 ; Pedersen and Lupton, 2018 ). Intimacy is created by individuals sharing details of their private lives, private experiences and feelings, often with expectations of validation, relief, connection and a sense of belonging (e.g. Kanai, 2017 ). However, these interactions might redirect expressions of cultural and intimate