Session 10: Lessons from Case Studies
Chair: Carla Hustak


Invisible Self? A Case Study on Literacy Learning of Transnational Immigrant Marriage in Taiwan
Chun-Yu Lin
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Unired Kingdom

According to the statistical survey of Ministry of the Interior, there are 149,291spouses of resident Taiwanese in total from other countries mainly in Southeast Asia by the end of 2006. Most of them involve a Taiwanese man marrying a woman from abroad. Many of these females immigrants marry to Taiwanese who are belong to the underclass in Taiwan. After they arrived, these newcomers not only have to face the different culture and adapt to their new families, but also stand the misunderstanding from the public who regard as their marriage based on economic reasons and seeking for a better life instead of the true love, they are inferior others in several ways in the society. Based on a qualitative study of Indonesia transnational marriage migrant in Taiwan, I use the participant-observation and an in-depth interview through a language course which set up for them to learn the Mandarin, then I try to demonstrate her way of knowing, the complexity of self-authorship for the female transnational marriage migrant between her important others in the daily life and the relationship with the outside connection/world. In consideration of women’s agency by analyzing the learning experience of the case, the article explores the strategies she uses to deal with the difficulty in learning and the transformation of self during the learning process. In particular, I argue that the possibility of democratization of intimate relations between the females transnational marriage immigrants and their interpersonal relationship in contemporary Taiwan society.

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Friendship and Cultural Capital: Class, Gender and Home Entertaining
Jody Mellor
University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

The purpose of this article is to explore how class influences the particular form of friendship taken by middle class people. We concentrate in particular on how friendships are ‘done’ through processes of eating together. Existing research on food consumption and social differentiation has in the main concentrated on eating out (Warde and Martens 2000), but there is little research on entertaining inside the home, despite the dominance of the ‘privatisation’ thesis. Based on qualitative interviews with middle class people, we use one example of home entertaining – the dinner party – to analyse how middle class social networks are maintained and extended. For these families, the dinner party is an important site in which friendship is done through shared class boundary making, drawing of distinctions and social closure. We indicate how gender intersects with class through an analysis of the processes of food shopping, preparation and presentation for the dinner party. Overall, using Bourdieusian theoretical framework, this article indicates how home entertaining facilitates the conversion of social networks into cultural capital (and vice versa) to perpetuate class privilege across the generations.

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Loves Me … Loves Me Not: Dimensions of Sexual Intimacy in Urban Youth Relationships in Maputo
Sandra Manuel
Department of Anthropology and Sociology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, United Kingdom

In investigating practices and understadings of sex amongst young adults in the capital city of Mozambique, it became clear that sexual intimacy was shared with a variety of partners with opposing meanings and manifestations. In occasional relationship, the main motivation for involvement seemed to be linked to desire; sexual attraction; experimentation and fantasy.
In steady relationships - locally called namoro – there was a tendency for an interaction between the partners and each others’ relatives, especially between the young woman – namorada – and the young man’s relatives. Such family intimacy together with the public exposure of the relationship and the usual serious character of the relationship helped to construct a scenario of trust and endured the love that partners declared to each other. Due to such trustworthy environment in namoro relationship the sexual act took the form of unprotected sex – “real sex” (as referred to by the young people interviewed in this study). The real sex was described as a kind of intimate connection that allowed the exchange of bodily fluids believed to fortify the relationship, promote health and considered a way of demonstrating real love and affection by allowing the partners to have access to the deepest inside of each others. Here, sex is reciprocated by the exchange of the gift of love and the proposition of commitment on the part of the young man. At this juncture, there were major possibilities for HIV/AIDS infection as: on the one hand, serial monogamy is a common practice and, on the other hand, with occasional partners protected sex is not always practiced.
In both kinds of relationships, sex was described by informants in terms of a model of heterosexual penetration in a context where the initiation of sexual activity is regarded as a transition to a new stage of life - adulthood - bypassing parental and other senior kins peoples’ control.