Queer Intimacies & Activism: A Conversation Across the Social and Historical Sciences

Holding Tight: understanding the psychosocial grip of the couple-norm

Sasha Roseneil - UCL Executive Dean for Social & Historical Sciences

Recent decades have seen enormous change within the intimate citizenship regimes of European societies, as processes of individualization, de-familialization, gender equalization and homo-normalization have transformed the legal and policy frameworks governing intimate life. However, against this backdrop, the tenacity and ubiquity of the couple-norm have become increasingly apparent. Drawing on a cross-national study of intimate citizenship in four European countries, this talk offers some glimpses of an anatomy of the couple-norm that I have been developing, which seeks understand its psychosocial workings and the power of the grip that it continues to exert on our lives.

Lesbian patterns of intimacy and same-sex marriage activism in post-war Britain

Rebecca Jennings - UCL History

Marriage equality has emerged as the central focus of queer intimacy activism in many countries in the last two decades and both advocates and critics in the debate have cast campaigns for same-sex marriage as very recent in origin.  Gay and queer theorists have reinforced this turn-of-the-Millennium timeframe by presenting l marriage equality activism as a move away from the more radical sexual politics of the 1970s towards a neoliberal quest for respectability and acceptance. However, historical research has demonstrated that both the practice of same-sex marriage and calls for state recognition of same-sex relationships have a much longer history. This paper will build on this work to explore both calls for relationship recognition and same-sex marriage practices between women in the post-war period. Although North American historians have documented the practice of lesbian weddings in post-war urban bar communities, comparable British ceremonies were typically private affairs practised by socially isolated or geographically remote women without reference to a broader community. As a result, both the practice of same-sex marriage, and the development of a discourse which advocated state or Church recognition of same-sex marriage in Britain, was, I will argue, located largely outside of the urban and activist lesbian and gay communities for much of the post-war period.  Rather than emerging in the 1990s as a conservative trend away from the earlier radical sexual politics of the 1970s and early 80s, I want to suggest that calls for marriage equality have a continuous history throughout much of the post-war period and thus developed in tension with an alternative feminist and left-wing discourse critiquing marriage and the nuclear family, articulated from the late 1960s onwards.

‘Out of my head and into my body’: returning to intimacy through self-performance in sex work

Chloe Dominique - UCL Anthropology

Focusing on notions of intimacy, intentionality and material practices, this paper works from the premise that there is no subject without a body, and no body without a subject. As part of ongoing research with full-service sex workers in London, this paper explores the processes by which sex workers understand and ‘return to’ their ‘selves’ after work through bodily acts that centre on ingestion, exertion and isolation in many forms. The sex working subject must negotiate the implications of becoming the object of the Sartrean ‘look’ of the client. The performance that is required of the sex worker to become the object/subject of the client’s desire requires an unbecoming, a counter performance for the self. In other words, sex workers must engage in techniques and practices that ‘return them home’ to their body. One of the ways to enact this unbecoming includes engaging in particular body-cum-material practices that reorient the intentionality of body techniques to meet the desires and needs of the sex worker herself. Beyond the ethnographic scope, this paper asks how can sex for payment help us to understand the intersubjective nature of sexual performance and intimacy?

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