Presents

Authenticity, intimacy and trust in internet-mediated transcultural courtship

Speaker

Kathryn Robinson
Visiting Senior Research Fellow
Asia Research Institute
National University of Singapore

Abstract
The world wide web offers a space for the expansion of intimacy and interpersonal relations. Transcultural international marriages are increasingly a common feature of a globalizing world that exhibits ‘time-space compression’ (Massey 1994). Adult emotional attachments are a critical part of the structure of gender relations (alongside power relations, production relations, symbolism [Connell 2002:9]), involving ‘difference and dichotomy’ but encompassing many other patterns, such as hierarchies among men on a global scale. Structures of gender relations are historical assemblages, constantly shifting and realigning. This anthropological study of web-mediated intimacy investigates the manner in which adult subjects pursue intimacy and attachment in the virtual community of the world wide web and the constitution of gendered subjectivities in that space. Transcultural unions by way of the global reach of the WWW critically engage specific forms of gender relations and gendered subjectivities in ways which require negotiation and transformation. This research explores the questing for partners and relationships involving heterosexual emotional attachment by way of the internet. The analysis attends to the intersection within this space of differing structures of gender relations which have been impacted by global discourses and global political economy. What constraints and possibilities for women as social agents, and for male-female relations, are forged through the negotiation of these partnerships? The paper is based on ethnographic analysis of a website established for ‘Fil-West’ (Filipina-Western) couples. How do they narrate their expectations and desires, and the negotiation of intimacy and trust which is acknowledged as foundational to adult relationships based in emotional attachment? What kind of (re)negotiation of gender relations is required in order to negotiate marriage relations in this global field?

About the Speaker
Professor Kathryn Robinson recently commenced a three-month visiting appointment at ARI in the Changing Family/Migration Cluster. She is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, at the Australian National University. She has been researching in Indonesia since 1976 on issues including mining and development, gender relations, and migration, and currently has an Australian–based research project on social relations and the internet. Her major publications include Stepchildren of Progress: The Political Economy of Development in an Indonesian Mining Town (1986); Living Through Histories: Culture, History and Social Life in South Sulawesi (1998) (ed. with Mukhlis Paine); Women in Indonesia: Gender Equity and Development (ed. with Sharon Bessell); Asian and Pacific Cosmopolitans: Self and Subject in Motion (ed, 2007) and Gender, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia (2009). She is editor of the Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology.

Convenor : A/P Roxana Waterson      (6516-3723)

ALL ARE WELCOME!