Is the notion of global intimacies a contradiction in terms?
Everyone wants to feel like they belong. Which is why moving away from everything one knows and relates to can be daunting. It brings about a strange limbo in which individuals are caught – between what was and what will be, between the desire to maintain old intimacies and the need to create new ones. Yet, in a new and exciting environment within which one might try and inscribe themselves through the development of relations with others, what then becomes of the closeness that was shared with friends, family, when the crucial factor contributing to it – i.e. proximity – is removed? Does importance shift in the face of novelty?
This essay will assess whether the notion of global intimacies presents a contradiction in terms. It will first look at the mutual incompatibility of the ‘global’ and the ‘intimate’. It will then focus on the ways in which the ‘global’ and ‘intimate’ become permeable to each other. Lastly, it will briefly address issues of conceptualisation of intimacy.
Migration has led to a globalisation of care, love, and intimacy. The EuroAmerican care deficit, in part due to more women entering the workforce, has disrupted traditional patterns of care. More than ever migrant care workers attempt to fill the care gap by stepping into these women’s old shoes and performing household work and caring duties in their place. Yet, what does this entail for the intimate relations they leave behind?
Arguably, intimacy is lost in important respects when distance comes into play. Migration and the distance it entails can fragilize and alter the relations left behind to such an extent that their nature changes, at times resulting in a displacement of intimacy. Parreñas (2001) remarks that on top of being challenging because of the ‘physically demanding load’ and ‘excruciating loneliness’, care work is made that much harder by the contradiction of having to care for someone else’s children while not being able to care for one’s own. As Vicky, a housekeeper, underlines ‘even though it paid well, you are sinking in the amount of your work… It is also very depressing. The only thing you can do is give all your love to the child. In my absence from my children, the most I could do with my situation is give all my love to that child’. Thus, love and intimacy are fundamentally reshaped by distance, with many finding it ‘easier’ to create new intimate, immediate relations with the client and their family. Coping with this loss of intimacy with family back at home manifests itself in various ways. For instance, while some resolve this ‘tension’ by pouring their love to those closest, with Trinidad Borromeo explaining that ‘when [she] takes care of an elderly, [she] treats her like [she is her] own mother’, easing her guilt of leaving her family behind in the Philippines, others avoid likening clients to kin, since, as Ruby Mercado states, ‘domestic work is depressing … you especially miss your children. I do not like taking care of other children when I could not take care of my own. It hurts too much’. There is, however, no denying that regardless of how people cope, loss is a common reality for transnational domestic workers. Parreñas maintains that ‘transnational parenting [involves] overwhelming feelings of loss. Because they missed their children’s childhood, many mothers are remorseful and admit to lost intimacy in the transnational family’. While loss may not be felt as strongly in the face of distance, with many feeling a ‘surreal timelessness during family separation’, this disappears upon reunification as they are ‘suddenly catapulted back to reality the moment they reunite with their children’, bringing to the forefront the issue of intimacy and proximity.
That intimacy be associated with proximity is contingent on conceptualisations of the family. Parreñas claims that ‘in general, it is very difficult to imagine a family whose members reside across vast geographical distances. Standard conceptions of the family associate it with proximity. For this reason, transnational households are considered ‘abnormal’, perceived as ‘broken homes’, and thereby viewed as a tragedy in Philippine society’. Children in transnational families often stress that an important marker of intimacy they do not have the privilege of is daily interactions; with one child stating ‘I want them to share with us in our daily life, and I want our family to be complete … We can share our laughter and tears’.
To accommodate the absence of daily interaction and closeness, migrant parents attempt to show love and affection in novel ways. Ties in transnational families often become commodified as a way to bridge the physical distance and attenuate the emotional distance. Lolita for instance migrated to Italy from the Philippines, leaving her children behind; however, her husband was able to follow her to Italy a couple years later, resulting in three additional children born and raised in Rome. Interestingly, despite not abandoning her children left in the Philippines, Lolita opted for different ways to parent her ‘Filipino’ and ‘Italian’ children. Although she provided for all of them, albeit differently, her youngest in the Philippines still told her ‘your children over there in Italy are those you love, they are your real children’. Despite sending remittances and providing material goods, her children in the Philippines did not consider this ‘real’ love, regardless of the sacrifices she was having to make. Parreñas claims that while both parents and children struggle emotionally with the maintenance of transnational households, a challenge parents try to resolve notably via ‘frequent communication and the provision of material goods’, these material and financial provisions ‘do not necessarily erase the emotional challenges wrought by physical distance’. Distance thus appears as a strong disruptor to intimacy and caring relations. Of note however is that while children want their mothers to ‘return to the Philippines to amend the emotional distance wrought by separation’, for many, ‘geographical distance created an irreparable gap in intergenerational relations’. Evelyn Binas, when asked whether she was close to her mother, answered: ‘No. There is still a gap between us. We got used to not having a mother, even my brother and sister in the Philippines … I was independent. I always felt that I didn’t need someone guiding me … even though we are [now] living together, there is still this gap … When my mother was home, we felt that our house was too crowded. We never stayed – we always went out. Whenever she was there, we never stayed home’. Here, intimacy appears as dependent on proximity and continuity, with distance leading to lost intimacy.
However, some argue that although distance may adversely affect intimacy, it does not make it disappear, rather it prompts adaptation. Parreñas (2001) underlines how migrant mothers who are absent most of their children’s and partners lives, explain that this transnational family arrangement, although difficult, is for the family’s benefit. Vicky states that while her children were saddened by her departure, they were not ‘angry when [she] left because they were still very young when [she] left them’, and as for her husband, he ‘could not get angry either because he knew that [this was] the only way [she] could seriously help him raise [their] children, so that [the] children could be sent to school’. This highlights how resilient and adaptable people are in the face of change, and how, in the case of her children who were so young when she left that they did not know anything different, love, care, and intimacy was still expressed and proved, albeit in their own way. Further, contemporary realities of transnational households are facilitated by new communications technology. Parreñas argues that ‘although transnational family members perform daily activities across vast geogrpahical distances, they overcome spatial barriers through the rapid flow of money and information. Due to advancements in technology, information about family members can be received instantaneously, communication can be constant, and money can be transferred to urban centres of Third World countries immediately’. Chiefly, social media, video calling platforms, or instant messaging services, help bridge the gap caused by physical distance.
Moreover, in a sense, lost intimacy can lead to newfound intimacy. Ehrenreich (2003) shows how the ‘global loss’ of intimacy resulting the migration of a parent in order to become a carer or domestic worker, not for their family but for others’, enables immediate intimacy. Indeed, Ehrenreich underlines the gendered inequality in domestic chores, noting that ‘between 1965 and 1995 men increased the time they spent scrubbing, vacuuming, and sweeping by 240% - all the way up to 1.7 hours per week – while women decreased their cleaning time only by 7% - to 6.7 hours per week’, a stark contrast potentially leading to the fragilization of the relation. As such, domestic workers are something of a godsend, a ‘deus Ex Machina’. Cleaning ladies, Ehrenreich suggests, allow for the ‘restoring [of] tranquillity as well as order to the home’, with marriage counsellors recommending hiring them ‘as an alternative to squabbling’. A Chicago cleaning woman quotes one of her clients as saying that, were she to give up her services, ‘my husband and I will be divorced in six months’. Thus, newfound intimacy in couples can be a direct result of the arrival of a domestic worker; yet, while this allows for new expressions of care and intimacy for the former, it entails loss of the latter’s own family intimacy.
Further, Stout (2015) in her work on commodified kin and the affective economies of queer tourism in Cuba, stresses that global intimacies are not inherently antithetical and mutually exclusive. She shows how in Cuba, male sexual labourers maintain both a Yuma (foreigner) and a wife or girlfriend. While gay clients might understand this as social homophobia, Cuban wives explain that homoerotic relationships are in fact motivated by economic hardship. Stout outlines that ‘unlinke the heterosexual sex trade in which female sex workers [foster] illusions of fidelity by calling their clients boyfriends, queer transnational families [incorporate] male sex worker’s foreign clients alongside their female partners’. Interestingly, it is when gay foreigners find themselves in cramped kitchens and overgrown backyards alongside the female partners, parents, and siblings of Cuban sexual labourers that ‘kinship imaginaries [emerge] and become salient’. In fact, while male sex workers do not introduce foreigners as husbands or boyfriends, family members often address tourists as ‘son’, ‘brother’, or ‘uncle’, to make sense of these ‘unprecedented encounters’. This leads to unexpected feelings of intimacy in these relations, with one tourist, Anthony, describing the satisfaction gained from feeling ‘seen for who they really [are] and simply loved by Cuban families’. Stout notes that ‘while tourists might label male sexual labourers as opportunistic, they often describe hustlers’ families as generous, accepting, and empathic’, with many tourists ‘astonished to have older generations of Cubans such as sex workers’ mothers or grandmothers wholeheartedly embrace them, constantly offer food when supplies are limited, and protectively watch over them’. It is worth noting that this newfound intimacy is not necessarily lost in the face of distance. For instance, John and Michael, a wealthy North American couple, continued to send money every month to the Cuban sexual workers they had been visiting over the years, even when sexual relations with these younger men ceased. They even went on to ‘pay for the emigration of two young Cuban sex workers to California, who stayed with them briefly before moving to Miami’. Additionally, when the couple vacationed in Havana, they would make a point of visiting the families of the men who had migrated. Stout accompanied them on such a visit and relates how she watched as ‘one young man’s mother cried and thanked them for their help’. She states that these visits, where John and Michael were referred to as ‘brother’ or ‘son’ left the tourists feeling ‘appreciated and as if they had ‘done something that mattered’ with their wealth’. Hence, intimacy can take on unexpected forms and manifest itself in various ways.
Intimacy, then, is conditional to its conceptualisation, rather than universalised. Intimacy perhaps is best understood as multifarious and context dependent. Arguably, intimacy can be expressed at various levels, that is, the group, the family, the individual. Berlant (1998) contends that intimacy extends beyond the private into the public. Therapy, for example, she argues, ‘saturates the scene of intimacy, from psychoanalysis and twelve-step groups to girl talk, talk shows, and other witnessing genres; as does jurisprudence, which has ‘also taken on a therapeutic function … notably as it radically recasts interpretations of responsibility in cases of marital and child abuse’. She further claims that ‘intimate lives absorb and repel rhetorics, laws, ethics, and ideologies of the hegemonic public sphere, but also personalise the effects of the public sphere and reproduce a fantasy that private life is the real in contrast to collective life: the surreal, the elsewhere, the fallen, the irrelevant’. What is more, she maintains that ‘while fantasies associated with intimacy usually end up occupying the space of convention, in practice the drive toward it is a kind of wild thing that is not necessarily organised that way, or any way’; notably, it can be ‘portable, unattached to a concrete space: a drive that creates spaces around it through practices’. As such, the ‘kinds of connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living, do not always respect the predictable forms’, and while they can be those between ‘nations and citizens, churches and the faithful, workers at work’ they can also be ‘writers and readers, memorisers of songs, people who walk dogs or swim at the same time each day, fetishists and their objects, teachers and students ... sports lovers … fans and celebrities’. Here, Berlant challenges the taken for grantedness of intimacy and its association with the private, showing how intimacy might better be understood as relational and personal.
This echoes Gardner (2006) and Bauer’s (2018) notions of intimacy being able to transcend the private, immediate relations commonly associated with it. Gardner mentions a form of group intimacy, with Bengali women who had migrated to join their husbands in the UK, finding solace in intimacy, not with her husband, but with her community. Gardner suggests that ‘for all women, physical proximity to other Bengali families in Britain had been crucial’. Syeda Bibi explains that, when she arrived as a young wife in Hampton Court, ‘[she] didn’t like it al all. [She] really hated it’ as she would have to stay at home on her own, but, she notes that ‘slowly Bangladeshi women came here and I used to mix with them and became friends with them, so it wasn’t so bad after that’. This parallels Bauer’s claim that Caribbean migrant mothers turned to spirituality in order to feel part of and close to a community. For Bella for example, while the church was not initially significant in her life, it later became an important avenue for ‘giving meaning to relationships in her life, while also providing her with a sense of belonging’. Yet, while this reconceptualization of intimacy as nit inherently limited to close, physical relations, its boundaries with belonging are rather unclear.
To conclude, while intimacy is not inherently incompatible with the ‘global’, the fundamental distance the ‘global’ entails does have adverse effects on intimacy, often leading to necessary reconceptualization and re-affecting of meaning to new relations that result. An important interrogation remains however in the face of these new understandings of intimacy as not necessarily private, that is how intimacy differs to belonging.
Bibliography
Bauer, E. (2018). Racialized citizenship, respectability and mothering among Caribbean mothers in Britain. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41(1), 151-169.
Berlant, L. (1998). Intimacy: A special issue. Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 281-288.
Constable, N. (2014). Born out of place: Migrant mothers and the politics of international labor. University of California Press
Ehrenreich, Barbara & Arlie Russell Hochschild 2003. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. London: Granta
Gardner, K. 2006 “The transnational work of kinship & caring: Bengali-British marriages in historical perspective” in Global Networks 6, 4 (2006) 373-387.
Parreñas, Rachel 2001. Servants of Globalisation: Women, Migration & Domestic Work. Stanford University Press: Stanford
Stout, N. (2015). When a Yuma meets mama: Commodified kin and the affective economies of queer tourism in Cuba. Anthropological Quarterly, 665-691.