Intimacies

A New World of Relational Life

Alan Frank, Patricia Clough, Steven Seidman, Patricia T. Clough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135090388
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In the last decade or so, there has been a shift in the popular and academic discussion of our personal lives. Relationships – and not necessarily marriage – have gravitated to the center of our relational lives. Many of us feel entitled to seek intimacy, an emotionally depthful social bonding, rather than simply security or companionship from our relationships. Unlike in a marriage-centred culture, intimacy is today pursued in varied relationships, from familial to friends and to romances. And intimacies are being forged in multiple venues, from face-to-face to virtual, cyber contexts.

A new scholarship has addressed this changing terrain of personal life – there is today a vast literature on cohabitation, parenthood without marriage, sex and love outside marriage, queer families, cyber intimacies and friendships. However, much theorizing and research has focussed either on the interior, subjective or sociocultural aspects of intimacies, not their interaction.

This volume aims to break new ground: Intimacies explores the psychological terrain of intimacy in depthful ways without abandoning its sociohistorical context and the centrality of power dynamics. Drawing on a rich archive that includes the social sciences, feminism, queer studies, and psychoanalysis, the contributors examine:

• changing cultures of intimacy
• fluid and solid attachments and intimacies from hook ups, to sibling bonds, to erotic love
• a politics of intimacy that may involve state enforced hierarchies, class, misrecognition, social exclusion and violence
• embodied experiences of intimacy and dynamics of endings and loss
• a pluralization of intimacies that challenge established ethical hierarchies

This volume aims to define the cutting edge of this emerging field of scholarship and politics. It challenges existing paradigms that assume rigid hierarchical approaches to relational life. Intimacies will be of interest for psychoanalysts and for students or scholars in sexualities, gender studies, family studies, feminism studies, queer studies, social class, cultural studies, and philosophy.

Part I

Changing cultures of intimacy

1 State and class politics in the making of a culture of intimacy

Steven Seidman

Many Americans navigate an intimate world that is postmarital. It's true that marriage is still privileged as the preferred intimate arrangement by the state, and it's also the case that most Americans still want to marry, will marry, and that gaining the right to marry is at the top of the gay/lesbian agenda. Yet, marriage today is no longer compulsory; it is one relational option. Like other intimate relationships, we freely enter and exit marriage; we negotiate how to balance autonomy and solidarity; and many of us form close, sustaining relationships chiefly in order to realize intimacy. The latter concept, for the purposes of this essay, refers to an historically unique kind of emotional and social closeness featuring the depthful sharing of inner lives, negotiating the conditions and dynamics of the social bond, and aspirations to sustain a sense of personal authenticity in an emotionally thick experience of solidarity.

I will argue that there has been a dramatic expansion of intimate choice in the USA and that the state, especially the federal government, has played a key role by constructing the individual as an “intimate citizen.” The latter concept asserts that every citizen is recognized by the state as having a right to privacy and to bodily, erotic and relational autonomy. At the same time, the government has failed both to recognize fully a reality of intimate diversity (the state “establishment” of marriage), and provide the resources that would make intimate citizenship a reality for many Americans. Despite an emerging field of expanding eroticrelational choice and variation, intimate life in contemporary America remains heteronormative, marriage centered and class inflected. Thus, Americans possessing high levels of economic and cultural capital, especially if they are straight and married, can more fully exercise their intimate autonomy than citizens with fewer material and cultural resources and opportunities, especially if they are not heterosexual and married. These Americans navigate erotic-relational life as a sphere of insecurity, vulnerable to disrespect, marginalization, and at times criminalization.

The heteronormative, marriage-centered organization of American institutional and intimate life has been much commented on (Canaday 2009; Coontz 2005; Ingraham 2008). I add little to this discussion. Instead, I wish to “decenter” a marriage-centered perspective by situating this institution in a context of changing patterns of personal and relational life.

In the first three sections, I sketch broad changes in American intimate life from roughly the early 19th century to the present. In the final section, I address a dimension of personal-relational life that is often obscured by a popular culture featuring personal choice and romantic love, namely the class politics of intimacy. In the course of this historical-critical sketch, I highlight the formative role of the state in shaping a marriage-centered culture and its recent transformation. For the purposes of this essay, my focus will be erotically oriented intimacies. I do not consider a multiplicity of nonsexual, nonromantic intimacies such as friendships, kin relationships, workplace, cyber, and machine-and-object-related intimacies, and so on.

The Victorians: marriage as a status regime

Between 1800 and the 1860s, marriage was the only state-recognized, church-sanctioned sexual arrangement, and it was exclusively for opposite-sexed, same-race couples, and legally free American citizens.

At the heart of Victorian marriage was a specific gender-based status order. Men and women were understood as different but destined by nature and God to form a union. Men were rational, competitive and sexually driven; they were expected to be the protectors of kin and the rulers of public life. By contrast, women were spiritual, moral and maternal; they were supposed to organize lives around domestic and religious matters. Women would provide the right moral-spiritual environment for the making of a respectable family and a virtuous citizenry, while men governed inside and outside of the family. Through marriage, each sex could realize its gendered nature while also creating a moral foundation for the family and society.

Although Victorians didn't necessarily marry for love, it was expected to grow during marriage. However, this was less a romantic and passionate love than a sympathetic bond based on shared religious and family values. Sex was expected but chiefly for family making; sex oriented to carnal pleasure was condemned by the guardians of Victorian America as corrupting the moral-spiritual sanctuary of marriage and the family (Seidman 1991; D'Emilio and Freedman 1998).

No doubt, a certain intimacy accompanied a life shared over decades. However, intimacy, in the sense of a process of ongoing self-revelation and the forging of a depthful, enveloping companionship was not expected and did not serve as a yardstick of a good marriage. To the extent that intimacy was expected, it was during the courting process and as a strategy to determine the moral character and suitability of a potential spouse (Rothman 1987; Lystra 1992). Once betrothed, a good marriage was less about intimacy than fulfilling gender and kinship obligations, family making, maintaining civic respectability, and securing domestic and social order.

Intimacy seems to have flourished chiefly outside of marriage, especially among friends of the same sex. As we've noted, women and men occupied separate spheres and social roles, which no doubt shaped different psyches and sensibilities. Victorians often found a deep moral and psychological affinity with persons of the same sex.

Consider that men's lives were centered in an exclusively male public world; men worked and socialized together, and often shared sleeping quarters when they traveled. Men's friendships were supported by exclusively male associations and clubs (Rotundo 1994). Similarly, women shared lives organized around domestic tasks and moral and religious instruction. Women also enjoyed exclusively female associations. At times, friendships among women were emotionally thick, even romantic, and paralleled marriage as long-term, committed relationships (Smith-Rosenberg 1986; Faderman 1992). Same-sex intimacies, especially among women, were tolerated because they didn't threaten heterosexual marriage. Not only were women said to lack sexual passion, but also marriage was their taken-for-granted destiny.

The intimate culture of Victorians has often been maligned as rigid and intolerant. However, looked at from the vantage point of governmental policy and law, the truth is considerably more complicated.

Across the nation, governments enforced the principle of “coverture.” Instead of stipulating marriage as an association of two separate and equal persons, this principle held that, despite its contractual origin, marriage transformed the status of two separate individuals into a publicly recognized legal and social unit. Married persons assumed new identities: husband and wife (Hartog 1991: 2, 13).

Marriage was understood as a public status regime. The laws of nature and God dictated the respective roles, rights and duties of husband and wife (Hartog 1991: 13; Regan 1993: 11; Singer 1992: 1456–63). Because men were viewed as naturally superior in reason and rulership, they were the sole legal representatives of the family. They were also responsible for financially supporting their wife and children. Coverture was embedded in a patriarchal culture that gave to men the exclusive right to vote, hold office and possess family property. Wives were obligated to obey and serve their husbands through their domestic labor and sexual accommodation. They could not enter into contracts, own assets, execute legal documents, or enter the labor market without their husband's consent (somewhat relaxed after mid-century). In short, a wife's legal personality was absorbed or “covered” by her husband (Cott 2000: 11–12, 54).

Despite approaching marriage as a permanent arrangement, Victorians did separate and sometimes divorce. Contrary to contemporary American conventions, separation was not necessarily a step towards divorce but often an occasion to modify the marital arrangement. Without a separation agreement, a wife could not live alone, negotiate a property settlement, use her own funds and earnings, or claim custody of her children (Hartog 1991: 7); also, even after establishing a separate household, she remained married.

States varied as to the conditions of divorce and its consequences, for example, whether the “guilty party” could remarry. Generally, to the extent that marriage was a status regime, divorce was not approached as a private, individual decision; rather, the state alone could grant divorce and only if a spouse failed to fulfill gender-based marital duties. Unfit or unsuitable husbands or wives were viewed as threats to the institution of marriage (Regan 1993: 12). “If a spouse was divorceable, it was because he or she had committed a public wrong against the marriage as much as a private one against the partner; the public wrong justified the state's interposing its authority” (Cott 2000: 49). Divorce, then, was not about reclaiming a right of intimate choice, but about punishing individuals incapable of participating in the institution of marriage (Hartog 1991: 11). Finally, because states made divorce difficult, many Americans simply abandoned their marriage and some remarried. Despite the Morrill Bill of 1862, which made bigamy a federal crime, “bigamy was rife in early America” (Hartog 1991: 11).

Although the government sought to protect marriage by claiming the exclusive right to dictate its form and its dissolution, by enforcing a rigid gender-based institution, and by prohibiting and often criminalizing nonmarital sexualities, its success was decidedly mixed. The combination of a weak federal government, the lack of uniform state laws, and the power of local nonstate authorities meant that customary law often trumped formal law. The former was local, often contested and at times disregarded.

A strong tradition of individual rights, state rights and religious freedom, along with a national preference for the regulatory authority of the market, yielded a weak federal government. For example, despite a moral panic whipped up by politicians and Christian leaders, which associated polygamy with barbarism and moral chaos, this practice, linked especially to Mormonism, was largely unregulated until the end of the 19th century. At this time, the US Congress (Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887) and the Supreme Court, indicative of the beginning federalization of family law, threatened to deny statehood to Utah and dissolve the Mormon Church (Cott 2000: 119–21; Grossberg 1985: 123).

As the federal government ceded authority to states, the power of which was curtailed by church, local notables and tradition, the state had little power to enforce uniform norms of personal-relational life. For example, while restrictive antiabortion statutes passed in many states in the antebellum period, abortion remained a widely practiced birth control method. One historian estimates “that in midcentury there was one abortion for every five or six births” (cited in Grossberg 1985: 170). “Neither statutory revisions nor judiciary concessions stemmed the tide of women seeking abortions” (Grossberg 1985: 167). Grossberg concludes that “in many ways abortion was like prostitution which neither should nor could be admitted, legalized or eliminated” (Grossberg 1985: 168).

Often, laws pertaining to personal and family life varied widely between states and were unevenly enforced. A telling illustration is the somewhat unsettled and contested meaning of marriage in antebellum America, as manifest in the ambiguous status of common law or informal marriage (“marriages” lacking a state license). Despite the fact that such marriages occurred outside the law, and despite the wide range of relationships that might count as a common law marriage, they flourished well into the postbellum period (Dubler 1998: 1889). Indeed, the division over the legitimacy of informal marriage exposed a basic division: was marriage a private contract based on individual consent and personal well-being or a public status-based institution (Dubler 1998: 1894–95)? Given this cultural divide, it was hardly surprising that the enforcement of state-based marriage varied considerably across states and regions. “New England … enacted the earliest and most comprehensive regulations [prohibiting informal marriage]; parts of the south and southwest had the least stringent … [but] everywhere the law remained dependent on the initiative and competency of local officials and the willingness of couples to adhere to legal forms. To the dismay of reformers … common law marriage continued [throughout the century] …” (Grossberg 1985: 101).

Further limiting government control over intimate matters was the ambiguity of Victorian categories stipulating erotic and intimate illegalities. For example, sodomy statutes were often crafted to address specific “unnatural” acts, especially anal sex and bestiality. However, such statutes were also used in sweeping, inclusive ways to refer to all nonprocreative sex. However, the courts often found that enforcing this broad view of sodomy proved impossible. Thus, fellatio, [regardless of the gender of the participants] was in principle enforceable under the broad definition of sodomy, yet because it was not typically specified in sodomy laws, it was almost never enforced (Painter 1991–2005). Making matters even more confusing, sodomy statutes rarely specified “sexual orientation.” Although such laws mostly targeted sex between two men, state statutes typically did not specify same-sex sexual behavior. Setting aside its statutory indeterminacy, the reality was that prior to 1900 sodomy laws were hardly ever enforced.

Victorians then relied less on the formal statutory power of the state than on informal and often local authorities to regulate intimate life. Referring to the laws and social policies governing personal and familial life in early 19th-century America, Grossberg underscores “the antiregulatory bias of marriage law's formative era … In many intimate areas—abortion, prostitution, age of consent, informal marriage—behavior was regulated less by the state than by customary law, family, and community …” (Grossberg 1985: 107–8).

While state laws constructed marriage as a public institution and framed its ideal gender, sexual and racial makeup, this institution gained its coherence and authority by its embeddedness in everyday life. Yet, a weak state, one that relied on local customs and authorities, meant that this institution coexisted with a diverse world of marital and nonmarital intimacies. There was a fluidity and plasticity in Victorian intimate matters that belies modern stereotypes. Informal marriages, polygamy, bigamy, slave marriages, even interracial marriages, cohabitation and same-sex intimacies flourished alongside the rigid scripts of public Victorian culture.

Modernizing marriage: the making of an “inclusive institution”

Between the 1880s and 1950s, America underwent dramatic changes. A world of nonurban towns and villages governed by kinship, local customs and small state governments gave way to an industrial, urban, bureaucratic welfare state. The USA also became a world power.

Many Americans were unsettled by these transformations. In the pre-World War I years, there was a pervasive sense of social crisis, and many Americans believed that at its root was the instability of the institution of marriage.

Critics were alarmed that Americans were choosing to remain single well into adulthood, divorcing with apparent ease, and tolerating the public proliferation of pornography, prostitution and abortion. The surfacing of same-sex cultures in major cities unsettled them. At the heart of a perceived crisis of marriage was a deep anxiety about gender. Women were enrolling in colleges at unprecedented rates, participating in the wage labor market, mobilizing for the right to vote and participating in what was an exclusively male public nightlife. At the same time, more and more men were employed in bureaucratic organizations and their work lacked the essential features of Victorian masculinit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Changing cultures of intimacy
• Part II Between fluid and solid intimacies: Hook-ups, sex, love
• Part III Lateral intimacies: Siblings, surrogates, families
• Part IV Unsettling intimacies: Anxieties, violence, misrecognition
• Part V Phenomenology of intimacy
• Index