Mapping Intimacies

Relations, Exchanges, Affects

T. Sanger, Y. Taylor, T. Sanger, Y. Taylor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230356023
• eBook ISBN: 9781137313423
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection explores sexualities, families, caring practices, and the ways in which people practice intimacy in an ever-changing social and political landscape. Authors map desires, struggles and reconfigurations, thereby broadening current understandings of what contemporary intimate life looks like.

Part I

Embodied Exchanges: Choice, Risk, Value

1

The Ties That Bind: Intimacy, Class, Sexuality

Yvette Taylor

You talk to mainstream women [about] class you end up talking about ‘Well, it’s who you marry.’ I think that’s the thing with lesbians, that’s what’s different, a woman can change her class by marrying the right fella, that he can kinda drag her up into whatever class ’cause she then belongs to the husband and joins his family or whatever. For lesbians, that’s different, you don’t have that even if you end up dating a middle-class girl.

(Cathy, 37, Manchester)

Introduction

This chapter explores the difference that class makes in same-sex relationships where there has been a tendency to suggest that lesbians ‘do things differently’, freed from normative relational ties (or ‘belonging to’) and living out unconstrained choices and creative intimate biographies (Weeks et al., 2001; Ryan-Flood, 2005; Weeks, 2007; Taylor, 2009). Cathy comments that things are ‘different’ for lesbians and this variance has been widely commented upon, celebrated and contested (Giddens, 1992; Jamieson, 1998; Taylor, 2009; Hines and Taylor, 2012), but often not in the ways that Cathy’s ‘difference’ is complexly articulated. Instead, lesbian relationships are often depicted as examples of ‘pure relationships’, shaped by equality and sameness (Dunne, 1997). Such qualities are seen to transform patterns of intimacy, shaped through a ‘family of friends’ rather than through couple relationships alone (Weston, 1997; Weeks et al., 2001).

Yet this unhinging from heterosexual family formations and traditional obligations frequently fails to consider class as an important component in generating resources and opportunities to live ‘differently’, in well-protected and resourced communities (Skeggs, 1997; Gillies, 2006; Taylor, 2009; McDermott, 2010). In privileging accounts of reciprocity and accountability in lesbian relationships (and indeed in creative or ‘chosen’ communities more generally) inequalities within relationships, intimacies and communities are sidelined (see Todd, this volume; Taylor, 2009). ‘Sameness’ is often highlighted with reference to shared gender, but there is little attention paid to the ‘differences’ of class within this, both in terms of institutionalised contexts and in everyday intimacies, evaluations and expectations (Taylor, 2007, 2012a, 2012b).

The dominant academic position tends to emphasise individual agency, creativity, autonomy and choice as re-shaping intimate biographies (Giddens, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995, 2002). However, other factors such as poverty, unemployment, not having enough and just ‘getting by’ all have an impact on ‘picking and choosing’ (Armstrong, 2010). Moreover, relational ‘choices’ are shaped by changing legislative contexts, which celebrate the choice-to-choose (correctly), to be included and recognised (as a citizen) and to approximate intimacy as accumulative, proprietal and often orientated towards a specific (for example, child-rearing) family-as-future (Parker, 2010; Taylor, 2012c). Working-class lesbians engage and dis-engage with these frames, invoking and avoiding classed ideas of worth, pretention, value and excess as attached to proximate intimates and distant others (Tyler, 2008; Allen and Taylor, 2013).

Ties of class, intimacy and inequality are threaded through recent and continued international demands for ‘sexual citizenship’ as manifest in the Civil Partnership Act (UK) and anticipated legislation on same-sex marriage (Taylor, 2011a, 2011b; Hines and Taylor, 2012; Santos, 2012 and this volume). With same-sex marriage debates has come the proliferation of new sexual stories, taking up much page space in both the lesbian and gay press and international media.¹ As Cathy perhaps signals in her use of ‘dating’, a possibly more casual, less visible or recognisably named status now has the potential to be announced and owned by ‘mainstreamed (lesbian) women’. Legislation variously promises inclusion into the mainstream state – and the mainstream family – as sexual citizens come forward as middle-class entrants now able to ‘appear’ and to relate with recognition (Binnie, 2004, 2011; McRobbie, 2009; Seidman, 2011).

These mainstream manifestations promise both an arrival and a future for the queer citizen. But new presences are based around profoundly classed notions of exchange, transference and inheritance (Skeggs, 2004): on setting up intimacy as attractiveness and loyalty to certain relations, feelings and futures (Ahmed, 2010). This is as a classed constancy which pulls value into presences (symbolic, material and embodied) while pulling away from others who are viewed as lacking, failing and falling behind.

This chapter draws upon Economic and Social Research Council funded research Working-class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders (Taylor, 2007), which examines the significance of class and sexuality in the lives of women who self-identify themselves as working-class and lesbian. The project is based upon interviews with 53 women living in a range of localities in the UK: the Highlands, Glasgow, and Edinburgh in Scotland, and Yorkshire and Manchester in England. Through analysis of in-depth interviews covering the life course, the broader research project explores the way class affects childhood memories of not having and wanting, the meaning of family, educational experiences, work experiences, dating, desire, sex, ethical values and friendships. Participants speak in detail about the suffering associated with working-class life, including leaving home at a young age, pain and silence around sexuality, single parenthood, low-paid and difficult jobs, and unemployment. Interviewees also touch on the playful competition between working-class people over who has it worse and the meaning of working-class authenticity. Being working-class reflects a sense of culture, values, history – as well as finances – including a sense of working-class communities as more friendly, politicised, decent and real (Taylor, 2005) than middle-class communities, which are, in contrast, positioned as embarrassingly normative and pretentious.

My purpose in this chapter is to explore the material and subjective ways that class manifests in relationships, forcing an awareness of intimate inequalities continued in a context of new ‘equal rights’ (Peel and Harding 2008; Taylor, 2011b; Taylor and Addison, 2013). ‘Family’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘class’ are all contested terms, changed, re-circulated and heightened in legislative contexts of Equalities legislation and welfare cut-backs (Hines and Taylor, 2012; Taylor, 2012c; Allen and Taylor, 2013). These contested realities represent enduring ties which bind class distinction to intimate relations over and over again. Here, I empirically explore the significance of class inequalities in lesbian relationships, as stinging undercurrents of worth, value and (un)attractiveness. These significances that are somewhat swept away in the policy mainstream and in valorisations of agentic relational choices and arrivals. As Cathy states, often you ‘don’t have that even if you end up dating a middle-class girl’; some don’t have or don’t want the implied ‘that’ of being dragged upwards and onwards.

Dragging it up: civil contexts and its uncivil others

Recent political claims pivoting on ‘love’s entitlements’, now extended to certain same-sex intimacies, often leave matters of class inequality to one side. Increasing recognition of same-sex relationships across Western Europe² continues with the introduction of the Civil Partnership Act in the UK (December 2005) effectively mainstreaming same-sex rights and, some would say, creating the opportunity for same-sex couples to marry in all but name. Much has been written about material and symbolic gains – and losses – where the fight for equal rights can itself uphold normative frameworks for inclusion (Peel and Harding, 2008). Civil partnerships and the same-sex marriage debate instigate a number of varied viewpoints (Browne, 2011) and questions of economic value, investment and accumulation are held close by both opponents and proponents in articulating public/private commitments, expectations and capacities.

Speaking to the US context,³ Sullivan (1995), for example, claims that the mainstreaming and extension of marriage would normalise lesbian and gay relations and would thus solve all political concerns: ‘If nothing else were done at all, and gay marriage were legalized, ninety per cent of the political work necessary to achieve gay and lesbian equality would have been achieved. It is ultimately the only reform that truly matters’ (Sullivan in Hull, 2006: 81). In a rather different vein to Sullivan, but still echoing the pull of being ‘properly’ included in the mainstream, Agigian (2004) claims that changing rights to marry would solve many legal and social problems including, for example, access to reproductive technologies (Taylor, 2009, 2011b). Claims are (re)made on marriage as a foundation offering material and emotional stability to its members (property, pensions, payments), also judged to be in the ‘best interests’ of children (see Stacey and Biblarz, 2001; Taylor, 2009; Dixon, 2011). But the various problems, solutions and inclusions already involve an awkward negotiation in being and becoming ‘normal’. ‘Normal’ practical gains in accessing rights may be positioned against an erasure of different ways of living and loving (Weeks et al., 2001; Hull, 2006; Shipman and Smart, 2007).

Importantly, intimate relationships are brought into being, and negated, in interaction with institutional frameworks and through intersecting legal and material (im)possibilities (Peel and Harding, 2008; Taylor, 2011a, b). Here it is possible to view the UK Civil Partnership Act, and other similar legislation as actually materialising intimacy – perhaps most significantly through legitimising the (responsible, coupled, financially viable) ‘Family’ (Allen and Taylor, 2013). Sexual citizens are recognised in and through a relational frame which privileges affluence, asset-building and the transference of resources and (economic) rights (in the household, to and through The Family).

Despite the appeal of recognition, Weston highlights the continuation of class and sexual inequalities, rather than a sidestepping of these:

If gay people begin to pursue marriage, joint adoptions, and custody rights to the exclusion of seeking kinship status for some categories of friendship, it seems likely that gay families will develop in ways largely congruent with socio-economic and power relations in larger society.

(1997: 209)

Weston’s note of caution does not entirely reject the extension of gains (Weeks, 2007) but rather questions the scope and effect of these amongst more disadvantaged lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) groups.⁴ But the continuation of processes which reflect ‘socio-economic and power relations in larger society’ can be viewed as much more malignant than an often anticipated ‘trickle down’ of positive gay effects, to be eventually extended to even the poorest of queers. Again, working-class queers are seen as trailing behind, to be propelled forward only by others’ capacities (to act as and become citizens) (Binnie, 2004, 2011; Taylor, 2012c).

The concern about who can ‘come forward’ to capitalise upon shifting sexual citizenship is highlighted by Kandaswamy (2008) who re-positions hoped-for and achieved benefits as already animated by existing inequalities, both materially and symbolically (Hull, 2006; Taylor, 2009). The language of marriage depoliticises economic inequality, situating it in the private sphere (Jackson, 2011) in post-welfare times:

the language of marriage has displaced the question of political economy almost entirely. The assumption that inequality is caused by inappropriate family forms and might be solved by moral reform and marriage continues to structure debate about the problem of poverty [ . . . ] the language of marriage has effectively been used to undermine welfare rights and to depoliticise economic inequality altogether.

(Kandaswamy, 2008: 707; see also Allen and Taylor, 2013)

Sexuality is placed within the private, monogamous (tax-paying, dual-income) household possibly extended to ‘but for’ lesbians; that is, lesbians exactly like idealised heterosexuals but for, as Agigian (2004) puts it, the sex of their partner. Along with the expected outrage at the appropriation of a sacred heterosexual ceremony by supposed parodists and deviants, there has also been vocal opposition from those who believe that gays and lesbians have no place within an institution, or a facsimile of an institution, which by its very nature is seen as reinforcing firmly conservative, heteronormative family values (Skeggs, 1997; Binnie, 2004; Dixon, 2011; Jackson, 2011).

Official recognition may offer the most appeal, acceptance and assets to those already closest to the mainstream. This has the effect of re-creating new normativities, including ‘homonormative’ subjects (Duggan, 2002) or ‘but for’ lesbian and gay citizens (Agigian, 2004). Such homonormativity ‘does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatised, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’ (Duggan, 2002: 50). Entitlement and assimilation based on ‘just like you’ (white, middle-class heterosexuals) models of inclusion may do little for unemployed, working-class queers (Weston, 1997; Agigian, 2004; Taylor, 2007; Kandaswamy, 2008). Similarly, the privileging of certain forms of intimacy, and the securing of capitals for some, often de-legitimatises others as a familiar process adapted to ‘new’ citizenship moments (Dixon, 2011; Allen and Taylor, 2013).

Despite this, Weeks appeals to the importance of ‘ordinariness’, set against a queer critique of assimilation into heteronormativity as an affront to ‘different’ ways of being:

at a deeper level surely, what we see here is the wish for recognition for what you are and want to be, for validation, not absorption, a voting with our feet for the ordinary virtues of care, love, mutual responsibility. We should never underestimate the importance of being ordinary. It has helped transform the LGBT and the wider world.

(Weeks, 2007: 792)

Intimate negotiations are always subject to structural framings and ‘wider world’ constraints; where ‘ordinariness’ and ‘stability’ are welcomed, there are frequent hints at something less welcome as new relational hierarchies are recast (Richardson, 2004; Cahill, 2005; Meeks and Stein, 2006). ‘Ordinariness’ may appeal to basic desires and obvious ‘normality’, but matters of responsibility, worth and value are frequently coupled with transformative or ‘failed’ capacities, where it is the extraordinariness of middle-class subjects which becomes the measure of good intimacies – and distant others. Some sexual subjects are positioned, and self-position themselves, as ‘ordinary’, but the complexity of this needs to be unravelled in terms of the subjective positions inhabited as well as the structuring contexts of relational recognition. ‘Ordinary’ can mean ‘getting-by’ or ‘getting-on’ depending on class location and identification, and intersecting with sexual identification.

In the next section I consider intimate economies and dis-identifications through the use of empirical examples from my research study. Against the prevailing post-welfare policy context of locating and blaming the wrong kind of (working-class) relations, interviewees invest worth, value and attractiveness in working-class partnerships and conversely cast doubt upon the ‘realness’ or value of middle-class relationships. Here the measure of intimacy often sits against a frame of accumulation, asset building and the exercising of financial rights and is instead re-placed in revaluations of specifically working-class ways of being and feelings, as less pretentious or superficial. Middle-class partners were sometimes positioned as pretentious ‘spoilt brats’ – rather than celebrated as representing an opportunity for upward mobility (Skeggs, 1997). That said, ‘real’, ‘down to earth’ working-class partners risked becoming too real or rough (Wilson-Kovacs, 2010). Interviewees’ dis-investments and re-investments need to be read against a mis-positioning which condemns working-class intimate lives as failing, excessive and just too queer (or not palatably queer enough): that working-class lesbians re-circulate intimate distinctions as evaluations and expectations does not mean that they do so with legitimacy or authority (Skeggs, 1997, 2004). Instead, interviewees invoke and avoid classed ideas of worth, pretention, value and excess as attached to proximate intimates and distant others. Class shapes proximity to or distance from intimate others negotiated interpersonally, as well as institutionally through new legislative frames.

The value of intimacy: affecting exchange

As echoed in other studies, some participants in my research suggest that in working-class communities the imperative to be heterosexual is intensified given the absence of financial sources of status and identification, especially for women (Skeggs, 1997; Gillies, 2006; Taylor, 2012c). Without professional or educational status, marriage and motherhood become primary means of achieving working-class respectability and female success. To be lesbian may be to wilfully let go of one’s limited capital though heterosexual feminine ‘investment’; but what is the value of intimacy with middle-class lesbians? How is value accrued, deflected and rejected? Inequalities within relationships extended to the varying resources available, circulated and capitalised upon: the inability to match the spending power of middle-class partners extended beyond the economic and informed broader noti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Embodied Exchanges: Choice, Risk, Value
• Part II: (Dis)ordering Relations: Violence, Violation, Volition
• Part III: Intimacies: Affective Proximities and Distances
• Index