Synopses & Reviews
Discussions of globalization usually focus on political, economic, and technological transformations, but fail to recognize how we experience these processes in our daily lives, including our most intimate acts and practices. In this volume, anthropologists and sociologists draw on long-term ethnographic research on love, gender, and sexuality in a broad range of regions to discuss how global forces shape marriage, commercial sex, the political economy of intimacy, and lesbian and gay expressions of companionship.
The richly-textured ethnographies provoke a series of questions about emerging vocabularies for friendship and romance; the adoption of cultural forms from faraway places; the emergence of new desires, pleasures, and emotions that circulate as commodities in the global marketplace; and the ways economic processes shape public and private expressions of sexual intimacy.
Review
It is remarkable that romantic love is so seldom linked to scholarship on sexuality. Finally in this wonderful collection we have a group of original, timely, and savvy essays that dare to speak of the intimacies of love and passion. The authors represent a broad array of anthropologists who combine feisty theorizing with deliciously contoured ethnography from across the globe. This is a stimulating volume bringing together compact studies of late-modern love.
--Matthew Gutmann, author of Fixing Men: Sex, Birth Control, and AIDS in Mexico
About the Author
Mark B. Padilla is in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan Jennifer S. Hirsch, Miguel Muñoz-Laboy, Robert Sember, and Richard G. Parker are in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: "Love and Globalization: Exploring the Nexus Between Intimacy and Global Processes" (by the co-editors)
Part I: Love and Inequality
2. Carla Freeman: "Neo-liberalism, Respectability, and the Romance of Flexibility in Barbados"
3. Mark Padilla: "Tourism and Tigueraje: The Structures of Love and Silence Among Dominican Male Sex Workers"
4. Saskia Wieringa: "'If there is no feeling...': The Dilemma Between Silence and Coming Out in a Working Class Butch/Fem Community in Jakarta"
Part II: Love, Sex, and the Social Organization of Intimacy
5. Jennifer Hirsch: "'Love makes a family': Globalization, Companionate Marriage, and the Modernization of Gender Inequality"
6. Linda-Anne Rebhun: "The Strange Marriage of Love and Interest: Economic Change and Emotional Intimacy in Northeast Brazil, Private and Public"
7. Heather Paxson: "A Fluid Mechanics of Erotas and Aghape: Family Planning and Maternal Consumption in Contemporary Greece"
8. Marcia Inhorn: "Loving Your Infertile Muslim Spouse: Notes on the Globalization of IVF and Its Romantic Commitments in Sunni Egypt and Shi'ite Lebanon"
Part III: Fantasy, Image, and the Commerce of Intimacy
9. Kate Frank: "Playcouples in Paradise: Touristic Sexuality and Lifestyle Travel"
10. Elizabeth Bernstein: "Buying and Selling the 'Girlfriend Experience': the Social and Subjective Contours of Market Intimacy"
11. Denise Brennan: "Love Work in a Tourist Town: Dominican Sex Workers and Resort Workers Perform at Love"
12. Sealing Cheng: "Romancing the Club: Love Dynamics Between Filipina Entertainers and GIs in US Military Camp Towns in South Korea"
13. Nicole Constable: "Love at First Site? Visual Images and Virtual Encounters with Bodies"