Session 2: Challenging Intimate Boundaries
Chair: Luisa Orza


Loving Care by Strangers: Crossing the Boundaries of Closeness, Love and Foreignness
Bernhard Weicht
School of Sociology & Social Policy, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

 Similar to most European societies in Austria care for the elderly depends heavily on the close family and other informal bonds. In this context, a strong relation between the care work and feelings and emotional issues is constructed in both private and public discourse which can to some extent be described as moral consensus in society. However, the informal networks that carry out the actual care work often include ‘illegally’ employed migrant carers, mainly women, who live with the people cared-for and sometimes even their families.
This paper discusses and analyses the twilight of these arrangements in which a discursive emphasis on closeness, love and affection is combined with a justification for the employment of carers to carry out the ‘labour of love’. The application of Critical Discourse Analysis (discourse-historical approach) enables an understanding of the interactions and tensions between the categories of family-responsibility and professional, but informal care. Migrant carers are thus often portrayed as heroes, angels or de facto family members which highlights the focus on the necessity of (emotional) proximity. It will be discussed to what extent the very heroisation of the carers reflects a possibility of dealing with the inner tensions of familial duty, love and commitment. As the terms, themes and narratives in the discourse on care show significant resemblance to stereotypical female categories this raises furthermore questions about the gender implications of the very discourses. Using various Austrian daily newspapers, political speeches and party programmes it will be argued that the way care and carers are portrayed, talked about and pictured can be characterised by an attempt to combine two at first site contradictory tendencies: addressing the emotionalised concept of the ‘traditional’ family carer and arguing for long-term realisation of the provision of loving care through the employment of migrant carers.

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Sweet And Innocent: Can Young Children Fall In Love?
David White
Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

People are capable of experiencing a wide range of emotions. Some of the most basic ones include anger, fear, sadness, happiness, and disgust. Such emotions can be experienced by people of all ages. But of all of the emotions that a person can have there is one that is typically thought not possible for children to experience: being in love. In fact, the term "puppy love" is frequently used to refer to the closest equivalent emotion children can have and is thought of as an immature precursor to the ability to fall in love. This paper will explore to what extent children can go beyond this and be in love.
One important debate that is unsettled in the study of emotions is the degree to which emotional experience is cognitive. A feeling like joy seems to occur naturally (given the right stimulus) without a great deal of reflection or consideration. But some emotions - like shame, for example - seem to require a more complex understanding of social relationships and their significance in order to be felt properly. So it seems a natural hypothesis that if being in love is not possible for children that it might be because such an emotion has a cognitive component that a person is only capable of having as an adult.
But if the conventional wisdom that being in love is impossible for children is wrong, then an explanation of why this is falsely believed is needed. Issues relating to children and sexual development are extremely controversial. Not only is there great disagreement about when it is appropriate for a young person to begin sexual activity, there is great disagreement about at what age issues of sex and sexuality should be discussed with them. It is possible, then, that a desire to shield children from erotic experiences and sexual knowledge could explain why some might deny that children can have romantic feelings.
This paper will examine both of the above hypotheses in depth and concludes that while neither of them alone captures the truth of the matter, there might be a middle ground that both shed light on.

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Love Variant: Limerence
Albert Wakin & Duyen B. Vo
Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, CT, USA and Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, CT, USA

The purpose of the current paper is to 1) propose the Wakin-Vo I.D.R model of limerence and 2) establish grounds for the scientific query of limerence. Limerence is an involuntary interpersonal state that involves intrusive, obsessive, and compulsive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are contingent on perceived emotional reciprocation from the object of interest. The model that the authors propose holds that although limerence resembles normative love, it is a state that is necessarily negative, problematic, and impairing, with clinical implications. The model frames limerence as consisting of three functional components: initiating force, driving forces, and resultant forces. Parallels between limerence and substance dependence, and obsessive compulsive disorder are drawn. Rationales are posited to warrant the authors’ suggestions for future scientific investigation of limerence.  

The model frames limerence as consisting of three functional components: initiating force, driving forces, and resultant forces. Parallels between limerence and substance dependence, and obsessive compulsive disorder are drawn. Rationales are posited to warrant the authors’ suggestions for future scientific investigation of limerence.  

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