Archived seminar
05 November 2014: Practices of intimacy and the negotiation of sexual boundaries: Mothers, daughters and Sex in Hong Kong and Britain (CISC Seminar Series)
Professor Stevi Jackson from Department of Sociology, University of York
At 13:00 in 6.345.
Abstract:
Intimacy, as has been noted (Gabb 2008), is a slippery and multivalent concept. In this paper we explore its multiple meanings in relation to accounts of ‘closeness’ (or the lack of it) between mothers and daughters in Hong Kong and the UK, drawing on interviews with two generations of women: young adult women and their mothers. In so doing we distinguish a number of different forms of intimacy emerging from our data: emotional, disclosing/confiding, physical, practical and companionate. Focusing on the managing and monitoring of daughters’ sexuality I draw out some of the differences between the two societies and discuss possible explanations for such differences, locating them within the broader context of family practices and the social organisation of personal life in the two societies. Biographical note:
Stevi Jackson is Professor of Women’s Studies and Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of York, UK. She is author of Childhood and Sexuality (Blackwell 1982), Christine Delphy (Sage 1996) and Heterosexuality in Question (Sage 1999), and co-author, with Sue Scott, of Theorizing Sexuality (Open University Press, 2010) and, with Momin Rahman, of Gender and Sexuality: Sociological Approaches (Polity 2010). She has co-edited a number of collections including, with Sue Scott, Gender: A Sociological Reader (Routledge 2002)and with Liu Jieyu and Woo Juhyun, East Asian Sexualities: Intimacy, Modernity and New Sexual Cultures (Zed Books 2008). She has also published numerous articles on sexuality and intimacy. She is currently working, with Petula Sik Ying Ho (University of Hong Kong), on a project comparing women’s experiences of social change in Britain and Hong Kong and writing a book based on this research provisionally entitled Women Doing Intimacy: Gender, Family and Modernity in Hong Kong and Britain, which is to be published in Palgrave Macmillan’s ‘Studies in Family and Intimate Life’ series.
This event is open to the general public.