The Global and the Intimate

Feminism in Our Time

Geraldine Pratt, Victoria Rosner

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780231520843
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

By placing the global and the intimate in near relation, sixteen essays by prominent feminist scholars and authors forge a distinctively feminist approach to questions of transnational relations, economic development, and intercultural exchange. This pairing enables personal modes of writing and engagement with globalization debates and forges a definition of justice keyed to the specificity of time, place, and feeling. Writing from multiple disciplinary and geographical perspectives, the contributors participate in a long-standing feminist tradition of upending spatial hierarchies and making theory out of the practices of everyday life.

I

THE
ANATOMY
OF
INTIMACY
Bodies,
Feelings,
and the
Everyday

1

INTIMACY

A USEFUL CATEGORY OF TRANSNATIONAL ANALYSIS

Ara Wilson

THE WORK OF INTIMACY

Recently, feminist and queer studies of global power have turned to the concept of intimacy both as a subject and as an analytic rubric. They pair intimacy with globalization, or with its predecessors, colonialism and imperialism, or with the umbrella concepts, modernization and capitalist modernity.¹

I see three reasons for this global-intimate pairing. One reason is that global political economic conditions have profound effects on human relationships, notably by introducing and then altering sweeping divisions between realms deemed public and private. Second, as feminist and queer works insist, intimate life is not confined to the private sphere but plays a role in the presumably impersonal spheres of government and economy, which in turn regulate the intimate domain. The third reason that scholars are examining intimacy alongside globalization stems from their dissatisfaction with the established terms used to understand the relationship between these domains, alternately macro and micro, global and local, public and private.

This essay offers an overview of interpretations of intimate life in global capitalist modernity. It centers on critical approaches to the political economy of intimacy—frameworks that are designed to understand how patterns of intimacy occur in relation to social power. Accordingly, the essay emphasizes concrete descriptions that rework received interpretations of globalization, government, capitalism, and intimacy. The cases discussed include particular countries (the United States, Thailand, Australia) and studies of transnational processes that cross countries’ borders.

The concept of intimacy captures deeply felt orientations and entrenched practices that make up what people consider to be their “personal” or “private” lives and their interior selves, and includes positively valued feelings like affection but also problematic feelings like fear or disgust. The works I discuss here use intimacy to describe modes of relatedness associated loosely with personal feelings or identifications, in contrast, at least officially, to formal interactions within governments, markets, or modern institutions. As readers will see, if they do not already, the meanings of intimacy in these discussions vary quite a bit. The meanings are not fixed and can often seem vague: intimacy is not a term of art in any field. Why, then, does this loose term hold appeal for global analysis? I reached for the term intimacy in my own ethnographic work on Thailand.² My mixed results led me to become interested in understanding how other scholars are using the term and why they find the rubric of intimacy productive.

My conclusion is that the term’s very lack of fixity is part of its appeal. It allows scholars to produce descriptions of the world order that do not re-create but rather scrutinize concepts that have often unwittingly perpetuated the inequality produced by governments and capital. By not building on the inherited associations of concepts associated with intimacy—concepts like family—the rubric facilitates a nondeterministic, nonreductive exploration of structures of feeling,³ public feelings,⁴ and biopolitics in relation to globalizing contexts. Used critically, the concept of intimacy facilitates the simultaneous recognition of social patterns in relationships and ideological norms about relationships. The term “intimacy” offers an appealing rubric for interpretations that undo familiar connotations about “private” life by emphasizing its historical and social situation—for example, in the everyday effects of global modernity or the inner operations of social hierarchies. The essay explores the promise of “intimacy” as an analytical, not merely descriptive, term for critical scholarship on globalization.

Collectively, much of the critical work on intimacy shows how patterns in intimate life have changed with realigned boundaries of public and private in civic life, governments, commerce, and nuclear families. As an illustration of these shifts, the essay offers the example of gated communities and shopping malls in the United States. Then I look at ways that norms about intimacy are bound up with hierarchies of race, nation, and sexuality. These examples focus on Europe’s former settler colonies that are now multicultural liberal nation-states and a substantial portion of what is called the first world. I then turn what is known as the third world or global south, emphasizing a transnational orientation to global/local relations that recognizes linkages across richer and poorer countries (or global north and south). The rubric of “intimate economies” provides one model for thinking about global intimacy in ways that avoid a top-down image of impersonal forces “penetrating” intimate life, understood as local. The final section of the essay extrapolates from these cases the key themes informing the study of global intimacies in order to outline the emerging use of intimacy as a critical analytical term.

GATED INTIMACY

Wherever the title of streets and parks may rest, they have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions. Such use of the streets and public places has, from ancient times, been a part of the privileges, immunities, rights and liberties of citizens.

–1939 U.S. SUPREME COURT DECISION

The critical intimacy scholarship I discuss here places intimacy in relation to global modernity, in particular to late-twentieth-century social shifts associated with transnational capitalism. The kinds of intimacy these works consider include but go beyond conjugal couples and nuclear families. In fact, they want to recognize a form of public intimacy, the intimacy of public assembly, the kind of relations that involve “discussing public questions,” which the 1939 U.S. Supreme Court decision cited above used to argue for the right of union advocates to discuss labor rights in public. Critical explorations of global intimacies explore ideals about relatedness (particularly the ways in which race is involved in norms for intimate life); the infrastructure for intimacy; and ways people live out everyday relations.

One of the main sites for investigating modern intimacy is the United States, which surely is due to the solipsism of U.S. researchers and to U.S. global power, but which is also an understandable focus, given that the United States represents a frontier of capitalist social experimentation. The portrait that has emerged in American Studies is of privatized public intimacy. Understanding that public civic life is formed through connections that involve forms of intimacy, this work shows how changes over the past few decades have supplanted public intimacies with privatized commercial or domestic forms. (Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which expanded the rights of corporations to speech designed to influence elections, offers an illuminating contrast to the 1939 Court’s understanding of free speech as a public good.) At the same time, valorized forms of intimacy—particularly the conjugal couple, usually heterosexual but now also homosexual—have become national symbols in ways that exclude other relationships and that reinforce racial or national hierarchies.

One concrete example of the new geography of intimacy in the United States is the rise of the gated community. The names of many of these planned communities suggest roots in aristocratic estates, conveyed by Anglo-Saxon words for woods (oaks), water (creek, falls, lake), or large houses (manor)—“names that whisper exclusivity,” as USA Today puts it.⁶ This fantastical heritage aside, these residential arrangements represent a new mode of creating community, one that numerically represents a significant proportion of American residences.⁷ As Setha Low explains in her study of such a community, gated communities are “a response to transformations in the political economy of late-twentieth-century urban America.” She summarizes the broad trends: “Globalization and economic restructuring also weaken existing social relations.… Social control mechanisms, such as the police and schools, are no longer seen as effective. This breakdown in local control threatens some neighborhood residents, and the gated residential community becomes a viable and socially acceptable option.”⁸

Commentators agree that people’s attraction to planned communities reflects frustration with the government’s provisioning of security or services: in short, they seek solutions through private property rather than through public government. Such fears of lessened control, Low notes, are imagined through racial and class terms. Gated communities allow residents to use capitalist markets and property rights to construct a controlled mode of intimacy. Gated communities strictly regulate their space, limiting house colors, street parking, number and kinds of pets, or numbers of visitors. One woman, described in the report as a grandmother, violated policies by kissing a friend goodnight outside her house.⁹ Gated communities thus restrict the behaviors of their members in ways that bear upon their relations with other people (and animals). They also restrict the freedoms of nonmembers. These regulations put pressure on contradictions between private contract, property rights, and individual rights that have led to legal challenges in court.¹⁰

Residence associations selectively substitute private services for public services. While some of these developments build from the ground up, most convert preexisting public roads and infrastructure into private spaces, using law to authorize this transformation. Gated communities, analysts suggest, replace public space with privatized spaces, yet still they do not entirely fund themselves: rather they draw on public resources, including fire departments or special education for children, or rely on lessened obligations to the region or nation in the form of tax breaks.¹¹ Some legal reasoning proposes that, because the residential associations wield power associated with the state—they are “virtual governments”¹²—they should be treated as statelike bodies in the law. The point here is that the changes to public allocations of security, education, land, and so forth, and the increasingly private versions of neighborhood life, represent crucial conditions for intimate life, broadly understood. The withdrawal from surrounding publics creates a separate space for local relations that are predicated on exclusivity and defined by private property. The intimacies that are prioritized in these secure residential formations are nuclear families, intraclass, and planned rather than serendipitous: they are also often racially homogenous, and often populated with white people (although a relatively high proportion of Latinos reside in gated communities as well).¹³ The conditions that enable such a withdrawal, and the desire for it, are indicative of trends in modern American intimacy.

Shopping malls also privatize the public, while being subsidized by public funds. The new trend in shopping malls, the “lifestyle mall,” recreates old-time shopping districts, with “pedestrian friendly streetscapes”¹⁴ and pseudo village greens, usually in upscale suburbs. In Columbus, Ohio, the Easton Town Center is a large mall that incorporates luxury rental apartments. It offers a fountain for toddlers’ enjoyment. The planners of Easton emphasize their “philosophy of ‘place making,’ or positively impacting communities through the creation of dynamic mixed-use town centers.”¹⁵ In architecture and imagery, lifestyle shopping malls and gated communities invoke the symbolis...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Global and the Intimate
• I. The Anatomy of Intimacy: Bodies, Feelings, and the Everyday
• II. Memory, History, Community: Personal Narrative in a Transnational Frame
• III. Legislating Intimacy: Women’s Work, State Control, and the Politics of Reputation
• IV. Global Feminism and the Subjects of Knowledge
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Series List