1st Global Conference
Tuesday 20th March - Thursday 22nd March 2007 |
Session 6b: Social Class and Intimacy
Chair: Christopher Swader
Bazán Intimacy and Identity in Mexican Couples when Poverty
Prevails
Celia
Mancillas Bazán
Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico
The objective of this
research was to study intimacy within couples, specifically regarding
gender roles and personal identity. Intimacy was understood by feeling
close or distant to one’s partner
in a relationship. Gender roles are the daily expected behaviors
and attitudes of a man and a woman within a relationship, and personal
identity is a person’s inner self as of his or her consciousness
and alterity.
A comprehensive qualitative and explorative methodology
was utilized, in which life histories were the source to obtain information
concerning particularly the experiences and meanings of the participating
couples. The sample size consisted of 35 people (23 women and 12
men) currently in a relationship living in the outskirts of Mexico
City, characterized by socioeconomic disadvantage. The age of participants
ranged from 18 to 40 years old, and the range of years living together
was from 1 to 15 years.
The
analytic model was composed of three methodological concepts: 1)Intimacy,
2)Gender Roles and 3) Personal Identity. For intimacy the following
categories were considered for analysis: emotional, cognitive, communicational,
sexual and interactional. Regarding gender roles: traditional, transitional
and innovative. Concerning personal identity: the permanent and transformational
aspects of the participant’s
subjectivity.
Results indicated that couple´s intimacy is constructed by
the interaction of five dimensions: sexual, affective, communicational,
cognitive, and interactional. Also, three aspects resulted relevant:
1) poverty was a source of cohesion and conflict for couples’ everyday
life. 2) For the couple to own a home represented security, belonging
and withholding amid the relationship. 3) Children were found to
be an important aspect keeping couples together, as having children
made the couple have future life projects. Personal identities within
the couple were redefined in their intimate and interactional aspects,
and in their everyday doings.
Love, Sex & In-Between: Being
Woman & Middle-Class
Goh
Shuzhen
Department of Sociology, National University of
Singapore, Singapore
It is this paper’s aim to do a cultural analysis of how Singapore’s new upper middle class women construct and negotiate their notions of romance, love and sex, and how these affect and reflect on the way in which their lives are constructed. It will enable us to have a better understanding of different social trends – the breakdown of the institutionalized notions of family and marriage; an evolutionary change in social mores, values and beliefs; the negotiation of private and public spheres with the advent of advanced economic development. This paper utilizes exiting literature, and information derived from participant observation and in-depth interviews with 12 new upper middle-class women. Adopting a Bourdieusian approach, it attempts to try to understand the negotiations and dynamics involved in the careful construction of these women’s lived realities in comparison to the theoretical and common concepts held. This paper contends that there appears to be unspoken and unseen double standards intricately built into the “man”-made structures and institutions of society that still favor the men. These biases result in a different set of standards used for judging women. In negotiating these different standards (within their positions in the work system), love and romance have been allocated into the realm of leisure, with a shifting emphasis on elements of romance. With the increasing importance placed on something as intangible, ambiguous and fleeting as “romance”, it becomes more difficult for these women to find someone that they find adequate. Secondly, sex has become an arbitrator of sorts between their fantasy realm of romantic love and the realities of their everyday life. The findings suggest that sex has actually taken on a new dimension and become an important aspect of the modern women’s relationship, and should not be dismissed lightly as promiscuity.
Intimacy Intervened: Randomness and
Social Norms as Determinants of Intimate Relationships among Mexican
Low-Income Men and Women
Roberto
Castro Pérez
Regional Center for Multidisciplinary
Research, Nacional Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico
The constitution of “intimate relationships” for love presents significant variations in the Mexican context. For an important number of individuals living in conditions of high marginalization, the presence of two apparently contradictory elements is common: randomness and strong social norms. Randomness is associated to everyday poverty and the concomitant lack of material conditions that would allow individuals for certain control over their own intimacy processes. At the same time, the prevailing social norms are associated to gender and social class hierarchies, rendering intimate relationships with a clear power unbalance. Thus, love is a social competence historically determined by the social conditions that produce it. Intimacy too. In the social production of their everyday life, individuals also produce the material conditions that make it possible for certain feelings and emotions to prevail over others, such feelings and emotions being expressed under specific norms. The “domestic production of feelings” (following Heller) is mediated by both structural determinants (such as the dominant forms of masculinity and femininity, social class, and culture), and by specific interactional patterns within the couples. These patterns of interaction are simultaneously the expression and the reenactment of the basic agreements on the distribution of power among the couples. In this presentation we will offer the main findings of a research project in Mexico on the social origin of the intimacy developed by lower social class men and women. We will illustrate the central role played by several anti-empowering mechanisms that are exerted on women and that render intimate relationships as spaces for the reproduction of gender inequalities.