Intimacy gone public, popular, political: Questioning rupture and continuity in West Africa's genderscape
Convenors
Ricardo Falcão (ISCTE-IUL) email
Inês Galvão (ICS-UL) email
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Short Abstract
Whereas intimacy is broadly defined by kin, religion, ethics or moralities, personal relationships seem less determined by the legal categories of juridical instruments and human rights activisms, we question how popular culture, public policy and politics concur for contesting social expectations.
Long Abstract
The politicization of intimacy is a rather controversial, even ambiguous, idea. Drawing lines between what’s to remain private and what’s of public nature is as much a cultural issue as it is a political one, thus making it part of socio-historical constructs where such boundaries become meaningful.
How does intimacy become a public matter? According to human rights definitions, when fundamental rights of individuals are in peril, the state has to take the private realm into its legislative apparatus, thus trying to redefine a field where religions, moral codes and subjectivities also claim their space.
In west-african contexts, social relationships are strongly defined by traditions, kinship, public morality, socio-religious conduct, gender and generational roles, and less by these legal instruments that sometimes are actively avoided, thus creating a field of (sometimes) tense negotiation between the demand for new rights and rooted cultural identities.
Concepts of intimacy and sexual and reproductive rights are examples of such negotiation between traditions, social values and human rights. Do individuals seeking alternative life paths find available scripts? Are new narratives allowed where people make their lives meaningful away from the constraints of established social values?
In this panel we want to reflect on these intersections and question how continuity and rupture are enacted in both urban and rural settings. We welcome perspectives on intimacy empirically grounded in the study of public, political and popular cultures that focus the reception of gender idioms in domains such as those of sexuality, close relationships and daily life practices.
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