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.
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
This edited collection, Affective intimacies , provides a novel terrain for rethinking intimacies through the lens of affect theories. It departs from the assumptions that, on one hand, there are a priori affective domains, such as care relationships or sexuality, that form a primary locus for intimacy, and on the other hand, that intimacy is about what is private and special
affective effects of austerity; it expresses a sense of embodied austerity, how it is felt as a blow to the body. This singular feeling – expressed, shared and articulated through a plural subject – marks relational milieus that correspond to forms of collective intimacy in living with the disastrous effects of austerity. But what is the qualitative order of this collective intimacy
-defining teletherapies as similar or different to traditional therapies, as a point of departure, I suggest that technological infrastructures condition and shape the affective processes of support-seeking and support-giving in diverse areas from long-term psychotherapies to anonymous one-off advice. In particular, I tap into the question of how intimacy comes to matter in teletherapy practices. As the quote
Introduction In this chapter, I analyse the experiences of gender non-binary individuals using the web of affects and obligations experienced within the family. I seek to show how the ordinariness of family intimacy is transformed when it encounters transgender non-binary lives. Building on research on the everyday lives of gender and/or sexual
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