The Queer Turn
Destabilizing trends and practices relating to gender and sexuality in culture and research
An interdisciplinary research group at the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, University of Oslo

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New forms of intimacy
An international conference on intimacies and sexualities at the changing interfaces between private and public

University of Oslo, Norway
Niels Henrik Abel's building, seminar room on floor 12
12-13 October 2006  
Abstracts


Thursday 12 October  
Neoliberal transformations of intimacy

On Aspiring to be Normal: Neoliberal Affect in Rosetta and La Promesse
Lauren Berlant
This talk is about some affective impacts of neoliberal economic activity as it is lived in the contemporary world, focusing in particular on the non-identity between the material conditions people work in and enduring fantasies about "the good life" (an economic/symbolic ideologeme of the everyday as it unfolds into futures). To tell a story about neoliberalism and affect is to speak about what has happened to attachments to the state, dreams of the couple form and the family, and other modern institutions of self-continuity. The question is how mutations of relationality sustain the increasingly fantasmatic fantasy of intimate zones as the stable place where labor-earned enjoyment is possible. By way of cases - the films La Promesse (1996) and Rosetta (1999), written and directed by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, I focus on some stories about the conscription of children to the sexual and economic worlds of their parents, the worlds of their parents' desires and the gaps of disappointment and failure that the children see, because the articulation of children and globalization is so crucial now as an image of the scene of structural subordination and social betrayal. The Dardennes here narrate the attrition of white European citizen economic privilege over the migrating or placeless global subproletariat: even though for both populations normativity itself is increasingly unattainable via property, a reliable job, a reliable intimate sphere, the idea of "the good life," which rarely materializes from the efforts of ordinary people, is reproduced as the fantasy norm in succeeding generations.

No Sex, No Crime, No Shame. Privatized Care and the Seduction into Responsibility
Antke Engel
The development of new forms of intimacy cannot be understood separately from neoliberal transformations of the economy and the social. The neoliberal paradigm issues a paradoxical appellation of individualization and privatized responsibilities. The latter not only refer to personal wellbeing and growth, but also demand for care-relations, which substitute for the shrinking of the social system. My thesis is that homosexual lifestyles figure as avant-garde positions, which promise to provide a "solution" to the paradoxical demands for individualization and care. Reading visual representations of lesbian and gay figures in media and advertisements I will argue that homosexual ways of living gain access to the mainstream via the mechanism of "projective integration". This mechanism stimulates a new hegemonic consensus via the disarticulation of the socio-political contradictions of the global capitalist economy and the affirmation of not only new forms of intimacy, but also new forms of exclusion. 
Gendered intimacies

'365 times in 3 weeks': The unbearable lightness of online love
Stephen Whitehead
The internet is the phenomenon of our age, challenging us to rethink our perceptions of, and possibilities for, intimate relationships. In particular, in just a few years, online dating has gone from being considered an unusual if not 'deviant' activity, to almost complete social acceptance. Around the world, tens of millions of men and women, of all ages, classes and nationalities, are 'clicking for love' nightly. Drawing on the experiences of men and women who have found 'love' online, this paper explores some of the implications this phenomenon has for our theoretical and ontological understandings of intimacy, identity, masculinities and femininities.

Making places of intimacy - ethnicity, friendship and masculinities in Oslo
Thomas Michael Walle
Through transnational migration, practices of gender, intimacy and sexuality "travel" with people, get incorporated into new social and cultural contexts, and are negotiated and transformed in the encounter with other such practices. The discussion will focus on the fluid boundaries between male-male emotional and physical intimacy, male-male sexual practice, and homosexual imagery, as it is culturally understood in Pakistan and incorporated into a minority context in Norway by migrants from Pakistan. While homosexuality in Norway is gradually gaining public and political support, it is regarded as unacceptable by Muslim authorities in the country, thus making the issue of homosexuality a vital marker separating the majority population from the Muslim minority. Against this scenario, which is much debated among politicians, activist and various spokespersons from the ethnic and religious communities, practices of friendship and intimacy among Pakistani men in Norway take place. The significance given to the heterosexual-homosexual divide, however, creates a more vulnerable situation for practices of intimacy among men that were not necessarily judged against the homosexual imagery in Pakistan. Therefore, Pakistani men in Norway must make particular places of intimacy, within which cultural specific practices of gender, sexuality and intimacy are maintained and transformed. At the same time, certain aspects of the intimacy that characterise this group, are incorporated into the practice of segments of the majority population, e.g. among youths in multicultural areas of Oslo.

Love and intimacy in men's lives
Jørgen Lorentzen
What is the relationship between masculinity and intimacy? Do men have intimacy in their lives? Is the meaning of the concept at all adequate to describe men's lives? The discussion will be based on critical reading of central books/theories within international research on masculinities and their ideas of men and intimacy, Connell, Kimmel, Whitehead. These theories will be opened up and looked upon together with material from new research on the history of fatherhood in Norway. This material gives us glimpses of men's intimate life during the last century. 
Friday 13 October 
Processes of sexualization of public spaces in Norway

The policing of intimacy? Rethinking the boundaries between public and private
Jorun Solheim
Should the private always be political? Or rather, has it not always been? The paper will explore how debates over the separation of public and private spheres have evolved within feminist theory, in particular within the Norwegian context. Drawing on concepts like "governmentality" (Foucault) and "the policing of families" (Donzelot), I will be asking some questions about how intimacy and sexuality is constructed within present Norwegian culture. The main focus of the paper will be on the "sexualization" of public space, and whether this breakdown of boundaries between privacy and publicity may in fact be producing quite conservative forms of gender stereotypes. Do we need to reinvent the concept of the private sphere - in order to escape excessive normalization?

Sexualization: anti-feminism or potentials for a new generation of cultural feminism?
Wencke Mühleisen
Processes of sexualization mark a wide range of popular and high-cultural public spaces in media and cultural life. In this paper I argue that the polarization between the repressive and the subversive in an aesthetic, substantive or contextual sense fails to allow for processes of sexualization as forms of mainstream experimentation. Since the mid-1990s, we have witnessed the emergence of a new feminist trend in public spaces in media and cultural life the Nordic region, a trend that re-politicizes feminist questions. I will show that this development of the public sphere makes it problematic to argue that sexualization implies anti-feminist tendencies, as is proclaimed in the Nordic academic debate. Discussing the critical reception of Rosa prosa (Pink prose), a new feminist anthology of work, containing auto-biographical, non-fiction and literary texts on sexuality, I argue instead that processes of sexualization contain elements of exploration, entertainment and utopian desires, which offer potential for a queer new feminist agenda. 
Transformations of conjugality and friendship

Queer Individualization: Practices of Sociability, Sexuality and Self in the Early 21st Century
Sasha Roseneil
This paper proposes a new way of understanding recent social change in intimacy and personal life. As the title suggests, its focus is on three dimensions of personal life - sociability, sexuality and self - the relationship between them, and transformations in their social organization. Engaging with debates in contemporary European social theory, my argument is two-fold: ontological and socio-historical. Firstly, I suggest that an adequate understanding of intimacy and personal life must be psycho-social, not just psychological or sociological, as most work on the subject has been. Drawing on psychoanalysis and feminist philosophy, and contra the sociological theorists of individualization, I propose a model of subjectivity as both fundamentally relational and individual. Secondly, on the basis of empirical work carried out in the UK, I argue that a set of counter-heteronormative relationship practices are emerging amongst those at the cutting edge of social change: the prioritization of friendship, the de-centring of sexual/ love relationships and the forming of non-conventional sexual partnerships. I call this process queer individualization.

The importance of intimacy for the destabilization of conjugality and friendship
Arnfinn J. Andersen
We live in a society marked by an increased attention to the personal and to closeness. From news media to glossy magazines, the media are saturated by reminders that our lifestyles, looks and time management - all of which refers back to our most personal sides, to who we are - are vital to attend to. At the same time, there is little focus on the implications this attention might have for the institutions that traditionally have contained the private and the personal: the family and conjugality. Does this turn towards the personal imply an expropriation of the conjugal couple and the family as the domain of the private and of closeness? Does the contemporary focus on closeness and intimacy imply an expansion of the territory of intimacy? For, what can intimacy contain and what are its boundaries - where is its real place? What are the implications for our understanding of gender, when intimacy intervenes in new arenas? In order to visualize the shifts in intimacy and their implication for our understanding of the conjugal couple and friendship, I will discuss the film Brokeback Mountain along with other materials. The analysis focuses on forms of representations of intimacy that, rather than turning the movie into a typical gay movie, turn it into a movie about the modern parameters of love as a modern friendship bond. The aim of the paper is to show how discourses on conjugality and friendship respectively are gradually meeting each other, as they are increasingly constructed around the same ethos. In developing this theoretical approach, I draw on authors such as Foucault (History of Sexuality, vol. 1) and Giddens (The Transformation of Intimacy).

Between labour and love: the re-erotizing of Homemaking in Egalitarian Couples
Helene Aarseth
The paper explores the transformation of homemaking in egalitarian dual-career couples in a Nordic context. It has been suggested that the shift from a complementary gender division of work to an egalitarian dual-earner relation involves a rupture in the heterosexual love- and labour arrangement: either by way of a new taylorism at home, draining the family of meaning and desire; or by the accentuation of erotic desire as the primary glue in the equal relationship. In contrast, this paper argues that the transgression of the sexual division of work rather fabricate new forms of intertwinement of love and labour. The paper suggests a re-erotizing of homemaking as a response to tensions between commitment and desire in the egalitarian love and labour companionship.