Affective Inequalities in Intimate Relationships

Tuula Juvonen, Marjo Kolehmainen, Tuula Juvonen, Marjo Kolehmainen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367473785
• eBook ISBN: 9781351606691
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Raising to the challenge of how to grasp such forms of inequalities that are mediated affectively, Affective Inequalities in Intimate Relationships focuses on subtle inequalities that are shaped in everyday affective encounters. It also seeks to bridge a gap between affect theory and empirical social research by providing ideas and inspiration of how to work with affect in research practice.

Presenting cutting-edge empirical studies on affect and intimate relationships, the collection

- introduces alternative and novel ways of conceptualizing the workings of affect in intimate relationships

- provides tools for tackling the subtle ways in which affectivity connects with power relations in intimate relations

- develops innovative methodologies that provide better access to affect as an embodied experience

A fascinating contribution to the interdisciplinary field of affect studies, Affective Inequalities in Intimate Relationships will appeal to advanced undergraduates and postgraduates interested in fields such as gender studies, queer studies and cultural studies.

Part I

Affective capacities in embodied encounters

Chapter 1

An affective (re)balancing act?

The liminal possibilities for heterosexual partners on MDMA

Katie Anderson, Paula Reavey and Zoë Boden

Introduction

The fact that MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine or ‘ecstasy’) has been dubbed the ‘love drug’ and is notorious for making people feel ‘loved-up’ invites the question – what is MDMA’s relationship to love? And how might MDMA use influence and intertwine with the experiences of people who love each other? Scholars have considered the way drug use is woven into the social fabric of people’s lives (Farrugia 2015; Foster & Spencer 2013) rather than as an individualized phenomenon determined by pharmacology, which, arguably, has long dominated in the field of drugs research (Foster & Spencer 2013; Moore 2008).

However, explorations of complex social dynamics and drug use have been mainly limited to friendships, neglecting some of the key relationships in our lives – those of a romantic nature. We propose these intimate relationships can be productively understood through the lens of affective capacity (Deleuze 1988). Affect allows us to focus on the less visible ways in which romantic partners relate to each other, and the capacity to affect and be affected enables us to shift away from the binary thought which has been used to define drug experiences as, for example, either harmful or unharmful (Farrugia 2015), towards an experiential concern for how someone can be affected by the world around them.

This chapter will outline how we might consider differences between the expectations of men and women to comprise an affective inequality and how this can be partially rebalanced while together on MDMA. We will then focus on how tracing affect and affective capacity on MDMA can illuminate the relational effects of MDMA use and the extent to which this affective inequality might or might not be viewed as problematic by all couples, not just those who take MDMA together. These arguments owe much to feminist approaches which have prompted curiosity around gender inequality, manifested in women performing more emotional labour (Erickson 1993, 2005; Hochschild 1983) and household work including childcare and domestic chores (Bianchi et al. 2000; Dryden 1999; Kan, Sullivan & Gershuny 2011; Lyonette & Crompton 2015; Mannino & Deutsch 2007; Pinto & Coltrane 2009) than men. These concerns have largely been articulated in relation to heterosexual couples; same-sex couples tend to be more equal (Connolly 2005; Gottman 2011) and more emotionally attuned to one another (Jonathan 2009). Hence, we will draw only on data with heterosexual couples from the UK, EU and USA.

Feeling close on MDMA

MDMA is known for inducing heightened energy levels, euphoric mood, openness and empathy (Ter Bogt et al. 2002). It is most commonly associated with the rave scene (Forsyth 1996; Release 1997) but is taken in a variety of contexts (Olsen 2009).

Within drugs research, an epidemiological understanding is dominant; this model depicts drug use as a separate, individuated phenomenon, the ‘risk’ of which is determined largely by pharmacology (Foster & Spencer 2013). This model casts relationships as: eroded by drug use (Fergusson & Boden 2008; Martino, Collins & Ellickson 2005; Newcomb 1994; Topp et al. 1999); a coercive force, in the linear ‘peer pressure’ model (Farrugia 2015; Foster & Spencer 2013); or simply irrelevant, omitted from even lengthy discussions of long-term repercussions (for example, Parrot 2001). These conceptualizations fail to recognize the role relationships play in the meaning people derive from their drug use, such as an enhanced sense of connection to loved ones or connection to the dance community as a whole (Beck & Rosenbaum 1994).

Indeed, recent qualitative studies have highlighted the complex ways in which friendships and feelings of closeness intertwine with MDMA use. Moments of intimacy and trust, as well as a lack of accessible alternatives, underscored the reason to use drugs for marginalized young people in Foster and Spencer’s (2013) study. Similarly, intimacy and communication emerge from young men’s accounts of taking MDMA (Farrugia 2015), and bonding effects have also been described as permeating beyond the time and place of ecstasy use, leading to changes in well-being and social behaviour (Hunt, Evan & Kares 2007) and a permanent shift to a more positive outlook regarding other people (Anderson & McGrath 2014).

Yet this literature lacks a focus on how drug use might interweave with a romantic relationship and shape the continually unfolding process of building, sustaining and recalibrating intimacy in this context. To date, there have been only three quantitative studies exploring this topic (Topp et al. 1999; Vervaeke & Korf 2006). The resulting picture is mixed, including findings that MDMA’s influence is potentially lasting and beneficial (Rodgers et al. 2006), with over a quarter reporting improved relationships; detrimental (Topp et al. 1999), with 40 per cent of 329 ecstasy users describing ecstasy-related relationship problems in a six-month period; and ambiguous (Vervaeke & Korf 2006), depending on whether ecstasy-using partners were still together or not.

We assume that if MDMA enhances the bonds of friendship, it might also figure in romantic intimacy. Certainly, its prosocial effects of greater openness and empathy seem aligned with such an outcome. What is required, then, is a shift in focus away from ‘individual behaviour and individual practices’ (Duff 2008:386) of drug use to the relational behaviour and relational practices of couples who take drugs together.

Intimate relationships: a process ontology perspective

Intimate relationships are understood within a practices framework as what couples do to build intimacy, such as cooking dinner, listening to the grievances of a long work day or sharing jokes (Gabb & Fink 2015; Jamieson 2005). This draws on a rich sociological tradition of focusing on family practices, what families do, as a way to avoid the preconceptions of what ‘the family’ is (Morgan 2002). Relationships are thus viewed as materialized through everyday practices of relating, which are themselves shaped by cultural and material constraints (Gabb & Fink 2015). This conceptualization is argued to align itself with a process ontology where existence is realized through a continual activity of becoming (Brown & Stenner 2009) rather than fundamentally comprising permanent, stable substances. In other words, a relationship is an ongoing process, rather than a unitary object with fixed attributes.

A process ontology also underlies the concept of affect crucial to the framing of this chapter. This focus on affect is seen as helpful in two respects: it enables us to see the less visible ways in which inequalities can structure our intimate relationships, and its experiential undertones allow us to move away from the imposition of top-down (often binary) concepts which have framed drugs research towards an ‘experience-up’ understanding. Affect is defined here in a Deleuzian manner, as an arrangement of the relations between bodies (both human and object) from which a determination to act emerges (Deleuze 1988, 1992). Hence, affect is understood as mediated by our bodies, acknowledging our status as embodied beings compared with the disembodied psyche of Cartesian thought (Cromby 2004).

Emotions and affects seem inextricable from ethics; every major philosophical treatise has wound the two together (Stenner 2013). For example, Aristotle holds that a man of virtue does not just perform ethical actions but takes pleasure in them. Deleuze (1988) maintains that relations cannot a priori be labelled good or bad; rather, it is the affective capacities which emerge from a particular ordering of bodies which is important. A good set of relations between bodies entails a greater affective capacity, and a bad set of relations decreases a body’s ability to be affected. This kind of ethical approach has already been argued to be particularly useful for drugs research, which has been beset by simplistic, pre-fixed binaries such as healthy/unhealthy and harmful/unharmful (Farrugia 2015). Here, we apply the same concept of affective capacity, yet interpret the repercussions of increases in affective capacity within the framework of intimate relating practices (Gabb & Fink 2015).

This understanding of affect is approached here from a re-engagement with thinkers such as Alfred N. Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, from the position of British social psychologists (Brown 2012; Brown & Reavey 2015; Brown & Stenner 2009; Stenner 2008; Stenner & Moreno-Gabriel 2013). From this perspective, the world is not viewed as made up of things, as in a substance ontology, but ‘begins in the middle’ (p. 13): relations and processes are viewed as ontologically fundamental (Brown & Stenner 2009). Experience is viewed as a product of the relationships between different aspects of the world, such as the biological, the social, the psychological and the spatial, which are themselves conceived as processes.

An affective inequality

In order to understand how affective relations can be reformed on MDMA for opposite-sex partners, the ways in which everyday affects tend to be organized and how this intersects with gender must first be considered. We conceptualize affective relations as a helpful orientation to how men and women relate, rather than a deterministic category which ‘fixes’ how men and women behave. Women tend to follow the expectation to be more involved in the ‘emotional dimension’ of life than men (Dryden 1999). This manifests firstly in women taking on more responsibility for maintaining relationships than their male partners (Jonathan & Knudson-Martin 2012). For example, they perform more ‘emotion work’: the practice of being emotionally sensitive and supportive to others (Erickson 1993, 2005). Moreover, the emotion work of a male partner has been linked to relationship satisfaction (Duncombe & Marsden 1993; Erickson 1993), and the lack of emotional intimacy from a male partner is one of the key reasons women give for separation (Jamieson 1998).

Secondly, the reluctance of men to discuss and express their emotions is a well-documented phenomenon (Strazdins & Broom 2004), although it should be noted that this distinction takes place on the expressive rather than experiential level. There is no difference in the frequency of self-reported emotional experiences between men and women (Simon & Nath 2004; cf. Fujita, Diener & Sandvik 1991), but the social sanctions that exist around violating emotion rules are much higher for men (ed. Brooks & Good 2001), such as with the inappropriateness of public displays of sadness.

Women tend to be more emotionally expressive and place greater emphasis on emotional support and intimacy than their male partners. This leaves a seeming mismatch between how men and women deal with their own emotions and the emotions of others, which, moreover, seems to impinge upon their experience of romantic fulfilment in a heterosexual relationship. Same-sex couples were not interviewed as part of this research, but do seem to experience less of an affective mismatch in that they are more intentional about creating emotional attunement and are more likely to be attuned to one another (Jonathan 2009).

This mismatch between men and women when it comes to emotion collides with research on the personal benefits of being emotionally open and expressive (Pennebaker 1995), including the ability to more fully connect with others (Baumeister & Leary 1995; Brown 2012; Laurenceau & Kleinman 2006), which has its own positive repercussions on well-being (Siedlecki et al. 2014) and health (Umberson & Karas Montez 2010). We want to tentatively frame the different degrees to which men and women are licensed and expected to participate in emotional aspects of life as affective inequality in order to understand how communication can be (re)made on MDMA.

Reassembling affective relations on MDMA

‘Liminality’ has been used to encompass a broad array of meanings, but it is used here to denote a situation where the everyday structures and systems which govern human life are suspended or altered (Stenner & Moreno-Gabriel 2013; Turner 1987).

Being on MDMA has been described as a liminal space (Ashenhurst 1996; St John 2015), a rupture holding new possibilities for the reconfiguration of social codes and conventions, often taking the form of a sense of ‘communitas’ where people experience a sense of oneness with humanity as a whole (Stenner & Moreno-Gabriel 2013:21); here, however, it was the reassembling of gendered affective relations on MDMA which came through in the data.

The first author conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with ten couples who had taken MDMA together five times or more. Visual methods were incorporated within the interviews: couples were asked to bring five objects or photos as talking prompts (Del Busso 2009; Majumdar 2011), each item representing a time they had taken MDMA together, as well as to draw a timeline of their relationship (cf. Iantaffi 2011). The decision to use visual methods reflected a concern with the materiality and multimodal nature of existence (ed. Reavey 2011), a crucial constituent of the process perspective taken in this work since we exist within interconnected social and material webs (Stenner 2008).

Using visual prompts, such as objects and the timeline, can also provide a safer method of communication – acting as an intermediary between researcher and researched, something for participants to speak through and to (Boden & Eatough 2014). In addition, such physical prompts might further help participants ground their accounts in ‘concrete experiences’ (Silver & Reavey 2010:1643), lending specificity and detail to the discussion while avoiding generalized talk about their experiences (ed. Reavey 2011).

All interview transcripts were analysed thematically according to Braun and Clarke’s (2006) guidelines. The data was coded with a specific focus in mind, namely how couples experienced (or did not experience) closeness, and then organized into themes, contextualized by insights from the literature. Braun and Clarke (2006) describe two ‘camps’ of thematic analysis: ‘theoretical’ and ‘latent’ versus ‘inductive’ and ‘semantic’. This analysis falls more into the former, meaning it sought to code for how comments revealed underlying assumptions and ideas participants held, rather than being coded semantically for the surface meaning of comments. Two theoretical concerns in particular guided the coding of the data: (1) how our experience is grounded in the material settings and objects of the world (Brown & Reavey 2015; Latour 1996, 2005); (2) the vital role of feeling in human life (Cromby 2007, 2015; Wetherell 2013).

Mark: becoming more affected

Mark and Jenny, a cohabiting couple in their thirties who have been together eight years, will be used as a case study to explore gendered affective differences in greater depth. Mark describes his affective experience on MDMA:

I don’t have much empathy in normal daily life […] and so I think, erm, that switches me to actually feel empathy for another person, so I think that I am a much better listener, erm, for Jenny. I understand what she’s saying on a level that I can’t when I’m not on the drug. It feels like I get what she’s saying as opposed to just thinking about it.

Mark’s lack of empathy in ‘normal daily life’ is congruent with, though perhaps a more extreme example of, a wide selection of research findings that show men display a lessened degree of emotional sensitivity than women (Montagne et al. 2005) and perform less emotion work in their relationships (Erickson 1993, 2005). However, communicating with Jenny on MDMA ‘switches’ him into a different, more empathetic state where he can be a ‘much better listener’ and really ‘get what she’s saying’. The use of ‘switch’ imitates a transition from one state to another, suggested here as representing movement to a liminal realm, away from the everyday affective order – where women are expected to be more emotionally communicative and supportive than men. And, indeed, this liminal switch reconstitutes the relations between bodies, from which a new affective capacit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: thinking with and through affective inequalities
• Part I Affective capacities in embodied encounters
• Part II Affective transitions throughout intimate lives
• Part III Affective negotiations between partners
• Part IV Affective intimacies beyond couples
• Index