Intimacy

For too long Indigenous queers have been forced to quiet our pleasure and intimacy to be digestible to our communities. As more Indigenous queer scholars have begun to interrogate and move in conversation between Native studies and queer and feminist theory, Indigenous queers and feminists are carefully articulating a necessary shift in approach and perspective when unpacking the erasures and displacemennt of intimacy and desire under the tyranny of cis-heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, and occupation. In the case of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) theories of intimacy can only emerge from the specific lessons our ʻāina (land, that which feeds) has taught us about how to practice an aloha (love, pleasure, and intimacy) that is just, generative, and deeply satisfying. Therefore, this article takes aloha and ʻāina seriously. And together as author and reader we explore the way kaona (Hawaiian literary techniques) demonstrate a deeply profound relationship between our ʻāina and the ways our kūpuna practice intimacy, pleasure, and consent with each other. These moʻolelo call us all to remember that if ʻāina and our relationship to her is our greatest model of intimacy then reestablishing an intimate connection to her and to each other are our most promising pathways towards decolonisation.

People diagnosed with schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders often have unmet needs around sexuality and intimacy issues. This can impact negatively upon a person's recovery and the need to lead a fulfilling and satisfying life. The aim of the current review was to explore the available qualitative literature that addressed sexuality and intimacy issues published between the years 2006 and 2016. Records were screened for eligibility. Finally, 56 studies that addressed the aims were included the review. The main themes that emerged are briefly discussed. The implications for clinical practice and future research are presented.

Winner of F. E. L. Priestley Prize for best essay published in 2017 English Studies in Canada:
"Dr Jagoe’s article stands out for its originality, its generative capacity, its critical acumen, and its accessible style. Dr Jagoe compares and critiques two popular articulations of today’s digitally immersed Zeitgeist—Sherry Turkle’s 2011 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other and Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie Her—in order to propose “an ethics of depersonalized intimacy.” Against the grain of capitalism’s production of an agentic, authentic, and coherent self, Jagoe argues for “a different form of relationality” that challenges how we imagine intimacy and how both humanism and neoliberalism demand selves to be produced. Turkle’s writing and Jonze’s film illustrate Jagoe’s argument in that their representations of human-machine couplings broach the premise of depersonalized intimacy—but fail to push those premises and instead fall back on moralistic and clichéd tropes of and arguments for genuine selfhood and human communication. In the process, their humanist recuperations of organic-machinic interaction “hamper more emancipatory projects of intimacy, community, political action, and social change” that, in contrast, Jagoe’s theory of depersonalized intimacy opens up."

Pardis Mahdavi’s Crossing the Gulf is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Arabian Gulf that investigated immobilities and mobilities as well as familial love in the lives of migrant workers. Although her data concentrate mainly on Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), her arguments are relevant to other countries in the area with a signifi- cant presence of domestic workers. The book offers a deeply original reading of migration and intimacy.

This article addresses multiple paths of desire in Egypt. To date, research has
mainly focused on the family as the realm of intimacy. To understand desire, it is important to
take into account other contexts that contribute to shaping experience. Conversations about sex among men in coffee shops are contrasted with family discourses as a symbolic locus for alternative modes shaping intimacy in homosocial circles. The  hierarchy of truth whereby confessions are supposed to give insight into subjects core feelings are reassessed, allowing the sketching of a geography of competing intimacies that outline the coordinates of masculine desire.

Information and training for anyone who wants to improve knowledge and skills for meeting people, dating, or improving intimacy in relationships.  Based upon author's many years of clinical experience and teaching college conversational and intimacy skills and upon related research.

We are still left with the issue of characterising what counts as successful outcome in sex therapy. The aim of this paper is to report the progress of the outcome measurement project initiated by the College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists. In this report, I have reviewed the existing literature to answer the following question: “Does there currently exist a validated evaluation tool (or a package of tools) by which the effectiveness and success of sex therapy in dealing with sexual problems can be measured and demonstrated?”. I start with discussing some of the key dilemmas in relation to measuring outcomes in sex therapy and arrive at a conceptual framework to address this. I finish with suggesting a few measurement tools that can be utilised in this regard.

For most people, privacy is just one of those rights that is debated in the context of cyberspace and big data, something threatened by the commercial platforms, in name defended by the government, but not something of fundamental importance. In this article it is argued, that privacy (and the shared privacy in intimacy) is far more important, that it affects our inner world, our imagination, our ‘forum internum’. Privacy and autonomy are cornerstones of our identity, in the formation of who we are, in our learning and freedom to make mistakes, change our mind and grow, it's an essential factor in the agency of our selfhood.
This is not how privacy was seen historically, but lately the importance of privacy as an enabling factor in personal growth and creativity has been recognized, and this is impacting the importance and rank of the right of privacy among other human rights. It emerges as an essential right, a fundamental necessity.

Investigating the narrative of dalumei (mainland little sister) and daluren (mainlander) through ethnography and textual analysis, this paper understands how the legacy of the Cold War and the Chinese Civil War continues to shape a structure of feeling and mainland Chinese migrants’ everyday life in today’s Taiwanese society. This paper discusses different types of texts that signal a positional superiority (Ding 2015) entangled with the dimensions of nationality and gender. Through my fieldwork between 2018 and 2020 in the Taiwan teahouses, where mainland Chinese hostesses entertained their Taiwanese clients through singing, chatting, and dancing with them, I observed the way in which the hostesses were depicted by Taiwanese people. For example, in the teahouse district, the ideas such as “ghost,” “virus” and dalumei were used to describe an “evil” imagination of the mainland Chinese hostesses and their erotic business in Taiwan. Secondly, this paper analyses media representations in which mainland Chinese migrants in Taiwan, who once worked in sex-related industry or were engaged in “sham marriage” (jiajiehun 假結婚), are portrayed as a threat to Taiwan’s economic and political security. Tracing key moments after 1949, this paper focuses on how the Cold War and the feminist sex wars on the licensed prostitution in 1997 constructed the sentiment of anticommunism and antiprostitution and shaped a cross-strait structure of feeling. Through discussing the paradox of cross-strait intimacy and hostility, this paper argues that the affective structure against the communist Other has been maintained by the trope of “dalumei” in the post-Cold War Taiwan. Finally, this paper highlights the importance of “de-Cold War” (Chen 2010) in the context of Taiwan and China.

Legújabb könyvében Eva Illouz francia-izraeli szociológus azokat a társadalmi változásokat és feszítőerőket elemzi, amelyek hatására gyakran már az ismerkedés sem jut tovább a szexuális igények kölcsönös kielégítésének fázisánál. Miközben a szexualitás szabaddá válik és lehasad az érzelmekről és a kapcsolatokról, férfiak és nők között egy újfajta egyenlőtlenség jön létre.

In this article I explore the contemporary normative meanings of friendship, unpacking the subject through two different questions: “what is a good friend?” and “what is an intimate friend?” Drawing on survey data from a national representative sample (n = 1142), the topic is explored in the context of a southern European country (Portugal) that represents an interesting case study, for its characteristics of late, though abrupt, entrance into late modernity. Statistical analysis of the results enabled the construction of an exploratory typology of representations of friendship, according to the meanings ascribed to friends: family-oriented; trust-oriented; self-oriented; and presence-oriented. Results inspire a two-folded interpretation. On the one hand, they point to a pervasiveness of hegemonic representations such as friendship as trust and self-disclosure, namely among the younger and more educated. On the other hand, they highlight the pervasiveness of kinship ties in the definition of friendship, namely among the elderly and less educated. This suggests that patterns of suffusion may not only refer to more individualized and plural arrangements of personal life, but also to the persistence of more traditional representations and practices, characterized by an ideological commitment to the family in its more institutional forms.

La question de la pudeur et celle de l’intimité dans le soin apparaissent facilement selon des représentations spatiales : il s’agirait d’avoir conscience d’espaces du corps ou de la chambre dans lesquels il ne convient pas de pénétrer sans consentement. On en vient à penser l’éthique dans ce domaine uniquement à partir de la question du seuil ou de la frontière, et l’intime comme une citadelle dans laquelle personne ne doit entrer. Mais une telle conception, séduisante par sa simplicité fait l’impasse sur d’autres dimensions qui enrichissent considérablement le champ de la réflexion. D’une part, il est toujours important de rappeler que l’éthique du soin n’est pas éthique si elle est tellement « centrée sur le patient » qu’elle en oublie que le soignant est lui aussi un être humain, digne de respect et animé du désir de la vie bonne. Si l’on parle de respect de l’intimité et de la pudeur, si l’on interroge les enjeux éthiques du toucher, cela ne concerne pas seulement le patient, ou le corps du patient, mais tout autant les soignants. Ainsi, la conception de la pudeur sous la forme d’un espace protégé par une frontière que seul le consentement du patient permet de franchir n’est pas juste, car le propre d’une frontière est d’être le lieu d’exercice de deux souverainetés et non d’une seule. Le consentement, voire le désir du patient pourrait devenir un impératif devant lequel le soignant n’aurait pas les moyens de résister, si la frontière n’était gardée que par le patient. Par ailleurs, il est tout aussi erroné de penser l’intime comme un espace interdit, car il est à la fois une partie de notre vie qui a besoin d’être protégée de l’intrusion et en même temps le lieu où nous attendons d’être rejoints. L’absence de protection peut-être tout autant source de souffrance qu’une protection si efficace qu’elle ne laisse approcher personne et condamne le sujet à une solitude absolue.

Previous research has revealed that individuals have expectations for the deuelopment of romance based on personal experience  and cultural images. A series of research questions and hypotheses was generated and a sequence of hierarchical log-linear analysis models was developed to test of a) the effect of gender and knowledge of relational stage and relationship type on prediction of next-occurring actions in the development of a romance, b) the use of compliance-gaining strategies intended to advance a relationship to the next stage, and c) justification of secondary goals in which participants reported why they chose the strategies they did as opposed to other alternatives. The data revealed effects for relational stage progression on prediction of ensuing actions. Ingratiation, explanation, and direct requests were popular strategies for developing intimacy. Gender differences in terms of secondary goals were reported. Results are discussed in terms of relational memory structures for the development
of intimacy.

Why do many inequalities concerning gender and sexuality prevail, even in countries that rank highly in equality measurements and where demands for equality are widely supported? This book stems from the assumptions that intimate relationships are crucial sites for producing and experiencing inequality and that inequalities are shaped in everyday affective encounters. The introduction foregrounds the idea that exploring affect in intimate relationships sheds light on such subtle power dynamics, which may easily go unnoticed. By pinning down the challenges that theoretically advanced affect studies pose to the empirical study of intimate relationships, it advances a relational understanding of affect, one that sees how affecting and becoming affected emerge in and through open-ended encounters between bodies and things. Since affects may sediment power imbalances and asymmetries in intimate relationships, the collection seeks, with the help of the concept of affective inequality, to capture empirically such phenomena in particular. The introduction concludes by outlining the sections and chapters of the book and suggesting some possible reading trajectories for it.

This article provides a theoretical framing for Zanele Muholi's visual activism in South Africa. Despite colonial, heteronormative, and patriarchal ideologies that have imaged her community of black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex people as invisible citizens of a larger society and hypervisible deviant outsiders of that same collective, Muholi's photographs attempt to shift the conventions of the gaze. Drawing on Ariella Azoulay's photography theory and Jill Bennett's affect theory for art, I argue that Muholi's photographs bring forth an affective appeal to act. Azoulay's notions of "citizenship" and the "civil contract of photography" call on photography's responsibility to act on behalf of those depicted in images of atrocities. Bennett's "empathic vision" describes a relational perception of art, where one is affectively struck by the visual imagery. Reading Azoulay's political, ethical vision and Bennett's embodied methodology for visual culture together, I suggest that Muholi's practice moves her audience to see differently-where seeing the photographed in and of itself becomes an act of political restoration.

Co wiemy o polskich parach mieszkających razem bez ślubu? Tekst oferuje krótkie podsumowanie wiedzy płynącej z dotychczasowych badań ilościowych, wzbogacając je o wyniki badań przeprowadzonych w 2011 roku w Poznaniu. Przy tej okazji, omówione zostają problemy tego typu badań i pułapki na poziomie zbierania oraz intepretowania danych. Stają się one tym bardziej widoczne, jeśli przyjrzymy się wynikom badań jakościowych pochodzących z Warszawy i Poznania, zaprezentowanych w drugiej części artykułu. Pokazują one, że obok mieszkania razem istnieją liczne formy „pomieszkiwania” oraz różne stosowane przez pary intymne sposoby oddzielania od siebie kolejnych etapów instytucjonalizacji związku. Dzielenie przestrzeni i materialności jest doświadczeniem i etapem rozwoju będącym udziałem bardzo wielu związków, jednocześnie jednak istotnym punktem odniesienia jest dla nich ceremonia ślubu, która ma „przypieczętować” związek oraz dokonane wybory, nadać mu społeczną legitymizację oraz „wyczyścić” wcześniejszy etap mieszkania razem z cechujących go ambiwalencji.

In recent years, there has been a widespread fascination with age-dissimilar, heterosexual romantic relationships. This interest is not new - these types of couples have been featured in Western media for decades, even centuries - yet qualitative research into such relationships has been limited.

This book examines how the romantic relationships of age-dissimilar couples are understood. Based on a range of interviews, McKenzie argues that historical shifts toward greater personal autonomy in partner selection, within relationships, and in marriage and relationship dissolution have been greatly overstated. Through her focus on age-dissimilar couples, whose increasing prevalence have often been seen to be part of this shift, she suggests that these relationships are an avenue through which shared cultural understandings of relatedness, as well as individualism, might be further analysed. McKenzie argues for an approach that emphasises cultural continuity, and which accounts for complexity and contradiction in how age-dissimilar relationships and romantic love are understood.

Examining key issues of kinship, ageing and emotion, Age-Dissimilar Couples and Romantic Relationships will appeal to scholars of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Family Studies and Sociology.

This chapter explores the creators and potential consumers of sex robots. With Realbotix as our case study, we take a closer look at the language and sentiments of those developing the technology and those who are testing, consuming, or showing an interest in it. We do this by means of website and chat forum analysis, and via interviews with those involved. From this, we can see the motivation for developing a sexual companion robot places the emphasis firmly on the companionship aspect, and that those involved in creating and consuming the products share an ideology of intimacy and affection, with sexual gratification only playing a minor role.

While it is essential that we live as self-defined individuals, independently negotiating with an independent reality, this experience is not exhaustive of our reality. Such experience is importantly contextualized by two other kinds of experience, each an experience of intimacy. First, independent individuality depends upon a process of childhood development in which identity is formed through a familial intimacy in which the child lives from a non-reflective, bodily sense of a sharedness of identity with another (typically, but not necessarily, the mother). Second, independent individuality finds its healthy development in the establishment of new intimate bonds; these adult intimacies, unlike childhood intimacy, are bonds between persons who themselves have developed the sense of independent individuality and thus have experiential characteristics significantly different from those of childhood intimacy. From a developmental perspective, each of these two forms of intimacy is something good in itself but also something whose good resides in its enabling of something else, childhood intimacy facilitating the transformation into independent individuality and adult intimacy facilitating a transformative engagement with one's own limitations.

""Largely based on pre-theory that ties high testosterone (T) to masculinity, and low T to femininity, high T is mainly studied in relation to aggression, mating, sexuality, and challenge, and low T with parenting. Evidence, however, fails to support this, and the social variability in T is better accounted for by a competition–
nurturance trade-off as per the Steroid/Peptide Theory of Social Bonds (van Anders et al., 2011). Four key domains are discussed: adult–infant interactions, sexual desire, sexual behavior, and partnering. Empirical engagements with gender/sex are shown to lead to important insights over assumptions about masculinity–femininity. Humans are discussed within a comparative framework that attends to cross species principles informed by human insights alongside human-specific particularities like social constructions, which are critical to evolutionary understandings of the social role of T. This paper thus integrates seemingly orthogonal perspectives to allow for transformative approaches to an empirically supported social phenomenology of T.""

The rise of Internet-mediated BDSM communities and resources is slowly eliminating the perceived need for engaging in the bar scene (in which S&M is thought to stand for Stand and Model) as a precursor to finding the "real" scene. The implications for this in terms of BDSM/leather identities are discussed in this paper. This new sphere of participation is at once more involved than previous forms of BDSM public sphere discourse and at the same time is more removed from individual sexual identity in that it does not require special equipment or dress to participate. I suggest that this change has parsed the leather and BDSM communities, so that a leather identity is no longer seen as a pre- requisite for participating in organized BDSM culture.

En el marco de la cultura digital se analizan transformaciones en las relaciones íntimas ante los usos de tecnologías afectivas de jóvenes urbanos en México. Se identifican tres escenarios para las relaciones íntimas vinculados a las redes sociales, los grupos virtuales y las aplicaciones de citas, tales como la intimidad lenta, la intimidad especializada y la intimidad rápida. Cada uno de ellos implica desafíos normativos y de experiencia que van dando cauce a nuevas formas y criterios para emparejarse y evaluar la calidad de una relación.

As an attempt to critically unfold and reconcile the mingled public/intimate frameworks in architecture we propose the intimate-extimacy relationship to turn the breach into a bridge, since they are not reducible to a dialectical synthesis, and do not act as opposites but work as a continuous differing from the conventional public/private antagonism.
Slavoj Žižek describes Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece as an opportunity for bridging the parallax gap through “the staging of an architectural antagonism”: is Norman not split between the two houses, the modern horizontal motel and the vertical Gothic mother’s house, forever running between the two, never finding a proper place of his own?” (Žižek, 2009). We offer a dramatic traversing of the public/intimate gap, as a critical short-circuiting between the two apparently distant aspects, the internal closeness, intimate convolutions of the disciplinary object with the open common good of the social, public ingenuousness.
Extimacy, the term coined by Jacques Lacan extimité from the term intimité which is a superlative of the Latin positive adjective intra or within, its comparative interior or deeper than, and superlative intimus or deeper of all, innermost. In the same manner extimacy is not the contrary of intimacy and it problematizes the apparent oppositions between inner and outer, between container and content. As Jacques-Alain Miller proposes, “it is necessary in order to escape the common ravings about a psychism supposedly located in a bipartition between interior and exterior. (…) The exterior is present in the interior. The most interior—this is how the dictionary defines “intimate” (l’intime)—has, in the analytic experience, a quality of exteriority” (Miller, 2008).
At the inner-outer surpassed deadlock, internal and external architectural worlds have no more consequential meaning for its micro-territorial extimacy, revealing a namely public intimacy. By losing contrast they become reversible: the extime refers now to the innermost, the intimate, which is found on the outside—as the culture determining the subject, referring to a topology that vacillates between interior and exterior.
Architectural extimacy, being very intimate and familiar becomes radically strange. Here being intimate turns into the most distant and un-localized… the familiarly unknown. For Lacan, the inner-center of the subject is out, it is ex-centric. The Other as "something strange to me, although it is in my heart" (Lacan, 1959-1960) becomes a programmatic architectural engine, revealing and undertaking the shock of the overwhelming Real—the primordial object, as the mysterious something of the ordinary object where the sublime dimension shines through it.

This paper elucidates how film may offer itself as a tool for both the representation and conception of space that can strengthen an alternative , phenomenological and transcendental position in architecture. Through an analysis of two films, it points to the medium of film as both a tool and an environment, based on Gernot Böhme's 'Raum leiblicher Anwesenheit (Böh-me 2006). These films illustrate how the film's picture frame becomes almost like a skin and through its surface and sound projects both a site and a near-sensual experience simultaneously. The medium of film as both tool and an environment thereby supports an extended sensory-intimate reflection on outer experiences and inner sensations that – in its audiovisual and time-space-based presentation – is close to a human experience. This transference and performance may lead to an extended awareness of touch, as the base for intensive projections of becoming and a new affective architecture. The medium of film as a sensory transference tool of atmos-phere(s) In design and architecture, perception and conception often take place in an abstract space, where space is dealt with conceptually – a space or special spatial condition is mostly worked out without physically inhabiting it. Here, for example, an experience or a wish for a special atmosphere comes to express a (more) desirable state of space. How we engage with space bodily, both the physical and an abstract design space, is crucial for architectural practice. We need to work more critically with how bodily perception engages with and influences design processes. Our overall thesis is that bodily experience and knowledge – what Gernot Böhme (2006, p. 120) has described as a körperunabhängiger Raumerfahrung (space perception autonomous of the body) and the ability to perceive and project bodily sensations without being physical bodily present in space (Munck Petersen 2010, p. 200) – may be supported or strengthened in the design process by using film as a research and projection medium. The medium of film can increase an awareness of how space and the experience of space is defined by the bodily subject (Merleau-Ponty 2012) and confer the ability to experience bodily affect even while the viewer is not in a

“I do not believe in gender equality!”  “Do not delay marriage! Do not be too picky in choosing a spouse!”  “Have at least three children!”  “Abortion is murder!”  These are the words of the previous prime minister and the current president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose blunt statements on gender issues has become a characteristic of the Turkish political landscape of the 21st century. Erdoğan’s comments are part of a contentious array of government discourses and policies around gender, sexuality, reproduction, and family that were developed particularly in the later years of conservative Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP, Justice and Development Party) rule in Turkey. Yet, Erdoğan’s comments are often dismissed as mere discursive maneuvers intended to change the political agenda and distract from the “real” politics. I argue that dismissing Erdoğan’s comments as distractions reduces the politics of intimacy to a lower order of significance and creates three obfuscations that hamper critical political analysis and coalitional politics. The dismissal of Erdoğan’s comments denies their vital significance for the lives of women and LGBTQ peoples, hides the very centrality of the politics of intimacy to the economic and political governance of the country, and obscures the gendered nature of political rule at large and the value of feminist and queer politics in the exposure and challenging of this gendered rule.

While past societies have acknowledged different forms of love, such as the Ancient Greeks who acknowledged eros, agape, and philia, contemporary America is quite tone deaf to them; instead “love” has taken unique qualities from other forms of love and combined them together into one dysfunctional form of overdramatized amore, known as the soul mate myth. The soul mate myth describes how once a person finds their “soul mate” one will feel “completed” by other person filling the roles of best friend, lifetime partner, and lover simultaneously. These roles include a form of loving that can be defined as intimate, romantic, or sexual, and while there is some overlapping in these definitions they should not be used as synonyms.  The purpose of this paper is to show how this dysfunctional “love” formed by tracing the history of love using Irving Singer’s model from his series “The Nature of Love,” then pull the threads from the other forms of love to show how they were combined into the soul mate myth. Ultimately, by showing this misconception of love I would like to redefine a form that is already present, but not recognized, in contemporary society, the romantic friendship, more specifically the romantic friendship between members of the same sex. The romantic friendship is a form of love with intimacy, which is often misconstrued as sexuality; my hope is by identifying the romantic friendship more clearly it will alleviate the pressure to identify relationships between members of the same sex solely by their sexual nature.

This book offers a long overdue, extensive study of one of the most significant programmes in the history of television, namely Friends. This sitcom has become a cultural phenomenon, but received rather little scholarly attention thus far, and the available critical literature tends to lack in-depth analysis. Featuring original interviews with key creative personnel (co-creator Marta Kauffman, executive producer Kevin S. Bright, director James Burrows and production designer John Shaffner), the book pays detailed attention to Friends’ use of humour, performance, style and set design. It also considers the programme’s politics of representation and the critical backlash it has been receiving in recent years. Moreover, the book looks beyond Friends to consider the show’s impact on global television production and reception by viewers across a range of national contexts. The book’s central argument is that Friends has become such a seminal success because it adopts a strategy of intima...

This essay analyzes three cases of the changing ontology and epistemic conditions of the practice of handwriting after digitization. It does so by developing a theory of post-digital handwriting, that is, writing on paper by hand which is then digitized as image and disseminated online. The theory draws on scholarship in media theory on the post-digital as well as insights from new materialism. The cases discussed are penmanship porn, bullet journaling, and the political signature, all phenomena which highlight the intimacy and singularity of handwriting as a physical and sensory practice reminiscent of the modern understanding of love letters.

Infidelity is commonly understood as hurtful communication because it involves a relational transgression and devaluation. This qualitative study of 65 women who survived a partner’s sexual affair expands the literature on infidelity and hurt by exploring its coexistence with intimate partner violence (IPV). IPV organizes the infidelity narratives into six categories: social, economic, emotional, and psychological
aggression as well as sexual and physical violence. Infidelity’s coexistence with IPV is not infidelity as a precipitating factor for IPV or infidelity as part of a pattern of violent or aggressive behaviors. Instead, in these narratives, infidelity embodies the aforementioned
forms of IPV.

While past studies have measured several indicators of relationship quality in relation to types of relationship agreement, most have not included polyamorous relationships, and have almost exclusively included samples of gay men. The purpose of this study was to address this gap by examining five dimensions of relationship quality and eight dimensions of relationship equity in a sexually diverse Canadian sample (N = 3463) across three types of relationship agreements (monogamous, open, and polyamorous). The data were collected online as part of a larger study. In order to compare relationship types on relationship dimensions, MANCOVAs were computed using age, relationship duration, cohabitation status, sex, sexual orientation, and an interaction term of sex and sexual orientation as control variables. High scores of relationship quality and equity were reported by the overall sample, and scores on all scales did not significantly differ by types of relationship agreement. Overall, these results strongly suggest that these types of relationship agreements are equally healthy viable options.

The article presents selected results of research conducted within the project „Women in intimate relationships. The empirical and critical study”. The Author characterises practices involved in the process of constructing intimacy in relationships from the women’s perspective. The important components of this process are discursively shaped partnership-family rituals. They are presented as the analysis of research material derived from in-depth individual interviews. The identified rituals are of two types: universal, used in many relationships and individual, created for only one relationship. The rituals of the first type include the ritual of sacrifice for children, the ritual of family activities, the ritual of dating, the sharing of meals, the kisses of “good morning” and “good night”, giving presents, “having a good cry” and sex. On the other hand, the second type of ritual is the evening “assessment”. The presented rituals most likely have their origins both in the intergenerational family relations of socialisation and in the public discourse.
Keywords: discursiveness, intimacy, ritual, gender.

Accompanying YouTube Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo9XEJ6bshP61F-3R1PT3BFvDFqZEhtAd

Los Angeles, called Tehrangeles because it is home to the largest concentration of Iranians outside of Iran, is the birthplace of a distinctive form of postrevolutionary pop music. Created by professional musicians and media producers fleeing Iran's revolutionary-era ban on “immoral” popular music, Tehrangeles pop has been a part of daily life for Iranians at home and abroad for decades. In Tehrangeles Dreaming Farzaneh Hemmasi draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Los Angeles and musical and textual analysis to examine how the songs, music videos, and television made in Tehrangeles express modes of Iranianness not possible in Iran. Exploring Tehrangeles pop producers' complex commercial and political positioning, and the histories, sensations, and fantasies their music makes available to global Iranian audiences, Hemmasi shows how unquestionably Iranian forms of Tehrangeles popular culture exemplify the manner in which culture, media, and diaspora combine to respond to the Iranian state and its political transformations. The transnational circulation of Tehrangeles culture, she contends, transgresses Iran's geographical, legal, and moral boundaries while allowing all Iranians the ability to imagine new forms of identity and belonging.

Duke University Press, April 2020