Archived seminar
13 November 2014: Together/Apart: intimacy and autonomy in contemporary personal life (CISC Seminar Series)
Professor Sasha Roseneil from Birkbeck
At 16:00 in 6.345.
Abstract:
We long to connect, to be close to another, yet we also want our own space, need to do our own thing. That a fundamental tension exists between intimacy and autonomy has long been recognised by psychoanalysis, and that this tension has intensified amidst the transformations in gender and sexuality of recent decades has been acknowledged by feminism. In this talk, Sasha Roseneil will argue that these psychosocial dynamics of togetherness and apartness are vital to an understanding of the phenomenon that is known as “living apart together”. Research carried out by Roseneil and colleagues suggests that 9% of adults in the UK are in relationships in which they do not cohabit with their partner, and the figures seem to be similar across the industrialised world. This sizeable minority has only recently been recognized by social researchers, even though people have always had relationships outside the confines of domesticity. Roseneil will present the findings of this UK-based study, and another four-country European study, offering an overview of the practices and values of those in non-cohabiting relationships, and then delving more deeply into their biographies and narratives to explore the complex web of personal biographical and relational factors that play a part in living apart together relationships, and that problematize the idea of “choice” in matters of intimacy. Zooming back out again, to the macro-societal level, she suggests that both the struggles and pleasures described by LAT partners speak to the wider conditions of intimate citizenship in the early twenty-first century.Biographical note:
Sasha Roseneil is Professor of Sociology and Social Theory & Director of the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, Birkbeck, University of London. She is also Professor II in Sociology at the Centre for Gender Research, University of Oslo. Prior to her appointment at Birkbeck in 2007 she was Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Leeds, where she was the founding Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (1997-2004). Alongside her academic life, she is a group analyst (Member of the Institute of Group Analysis) and a UKCP-registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist, practising part-time for a number of years in an inner London National Health Service psychotherapy unit. Her recent books are: Social Research after the Cultural Turn (2010, Palgrave, ed. with Stephen Frosh), Remaking Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: Women’s Movements, Gender and Diversity (2012, Palgrave, ed. with Beatrice Halsaa and Sevil Sumer) and Beyond Citizenship? Feminism and the Transformation of Belonging (2013, Palgrave, ed.).
This event is open to the general public.