Session 4a: Self, Knowledge and Intimate Negotiations
Chair: Chad Wolf

Lover's Knowledge, Feelings and the Self
Sunny Yang
Department of Philosophy, Seoul National University, Korea

In Lover’s knowledge, Nussbaum argues that someone’s recognition of his emotional change is cognitive feature [Nussbaum 1990]. Nussbaum sees this cognitive feature as being in the state of ‘a detached, unemotional, or intellectual deliberation’ [Nussbaum 2001: 24]. However, in this paper, I demonstrate how affect or bodily feeling also plays an important role in our self-knowledge of emotional changes by taking an emotion, love, for example, in Remembrance of Things Past by Proust. When Marcel hears the news of Albertine’s death, he suffers great anguish. Up until this point he had believed that he did not love her. However, upon hearing the distressing news, he realizes with certainty that he did indeed love her. According to Proust, Marcel has deceived himself about his love for Albertine. If we hold, like the cognitivist, that recognition of our condition can be best explained by a detached unemotional and non-affective cognition, then we do not have the resources to explain Marcel’s shock and suffering. Marcel’s feeling -anguish- is said to have the power, just in terms of its own felt quality, ‘like a thunderbolt’, and forces his assent to his state of love. His state is revealed by his feelings, not his intellect. Hence, I argue that the attempt by Nussbaum to reduce the role of cognition and affect in our recognition of emotional change to a single cognitive element is implausible, since both cognition and affect play an important role in our mental lives.Having established the intimacy between emotion, love, for example and self-knowledge, I explore the relationship between emotion and the self. In order to do this, I elaborate on the concept of ‘experiential memory’ suggested by Wollheim.

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Care of Self as Demarcation: Everyday Life Practices of Self Care as Intermediation of "Work" and "Life"
Sabine Flick
Department of Sociology, University of Frankfurt, Germany

This Work-in-Progress presentation discusses questions of self care as demarcation, assuming that new forms of labour regulations are challenging practices of self direction .
This is embedded in the discussion about the dissolution of the boundaries between "work" and "life" [German: Entgrenzung]. This “Entgrenzung”, that is a primal hypothesis, changes the requirements of self care and ideas of the inner-self or, in other words: the subjectivity. Results of an empirical PhD study based on biographical interviews with highly self-directed employees (by means of flexible time) will be presented. The main focus lies on their practices of self care related to the question of how to draw the line of demarcation between work and life and what ideas of a “good life” are possibly important for this.
Following ideas of the recognition theory of Axel Honneth and Jessica Benjamin, I assume that self care is related to the giving and receiving of care for/of others. The care of the self marks the crucial point of reproduction in such highly flexibilized workplaces. This perspective avoids the dichotomy of work and life, a question that gender research raised already decades ago with the public/private debate.
Moreover, I’m interested in how these more or less new working conditions influence the intimate relations of the employees. One research result is that friendship significantly matters to these people, which implies that classical individualisation theory misses the essential point since it only looks out for singles vs. couples. Another is that despite the changes in gender relations gender specific particularities in the practice of self care are still relevant.

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Negotiating Intimacies in an Eroticized Environment: Xiaojies in the Nightclubs, Karaoke Houses and Massage Parlours in South China
Yu Ding
Department of Social Work and Social Adminitration, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

This paper draws on the experience of a group of xiaojies ( Xiaojie (literarily ‘little sister’) is the Chinese term to call prostitute women, and also is a term how prostitute women would like to address themselves, instead of ‘sex workers’) with their clients and intimate partners in both their work places and everyday life, in two South China metropolis Guangzhou and Shenzhen. They work in erotic or semi-erotic environment such as nightclubs, Karaoke houses and massage parlours, where they utilize their bodies, youth, sexual and social skills to negotiate intimacies with their clients. During the interactions with both the clients and the physical environment, they accumulate their experience, skills learned and strength to achieve autonomy in this complicatedly sexualized spacetime. For them, the waiting time, causal time, and time in between each transaction is not meaningless but opportunities to explore new ways of survival in this eroticized environment as well as in the broader social environment that is always adverse to them. It is argued in this paper that even discursive and mundane act like talking, putting on make-up and waiting can be a site for potential change and subversion in existing social/gender relations. This is reflected in their desire of being freed from existing man-woman relationships which become an obstacle to the pursuit of their ideal life, i.e. a life that they have total control over hence a sense of security. As we can see from their daily life outside work, they have already projected new thoughts into the relationship with their husband or intimate partner. Some have chosen to jump out of the exclusive or unsatisfactory relationship of marriage and use their ‘sexual capital’ in exchange for social capitals that can buy them an urban life style; some have decided to stay single to avoid possible harm from the intimacy with their male partners; and some have given our conventional thought on child-rearing a hard punch in that giving birth to a child means women’s own enjoyment and achievement which has nothing to do with the father.

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