This thesis examines the concept of intimacy through exploring experiences of closeness in relationships and how such experiences are understood in the lives of South Asian married women living in the UK. In the context of a lack of empirical exploration of South Asian women’s experiences of intimacy in marriage, the main aim of the research was to consider how participants made sense of their experiences of intimacy/closeness and how such experiences were culturally mediated. The theoretical perspectives of narrative psychology and socio-cultural psychology were combined to explore the relationship between intimacy and culture in the experience of marriage. A narrative psycho-social approach was utilised along with visual research methods to focus on not only the stories told about relationships but also the physical settings in which relationships occurred. As such, the overall focus of the two empirical studies was the identification of experiences of feeling close or not feeling close in personal relationships, and how this was made sense of through narrative and photographs. Nineteen South Asian married women living in the UK were interviewed in total. The first study used life-history interviewing with participants’ own pre-existing photographs, to aid participants in talking about the places they had lived and the close relationships they had in these places, over the course of their lives. In the second study, participants produced a set of photographs of objects and spaces relevant to their everyday married lives, and constructed narratives around them, together with the researcher at interview. The accounts produced were analysed using a combination of narrative analytical approaches, paying attention to broad relationship storylines and particular spatially located episodes. By exploring understandings of intimacy/closeness in South Asian women’s lives over time, and in relation to social, material and spatial contexts, essentialised notions of South Asian women and marriages are problematised. Closeness had various meanings for each participant. While scripts of companionate marriage and disclosing intimacy were often upheld as ideals, ambivalent feelings were resolved by modifying such scripts to include more traditional values of commitment, gendered roles, and essentialised notions of South Asian womanhood. Everyday marital practices within the home, which were mediated by spaces and objects, were also associated with feelings of closeness, indicating participants’ understandings of intimacy beyond self-disclosure and sexuality. In this context, extended family dynamics were problematised as an obstacle to the creation of symbolic and literal iv spaces for marital intimacy. In relation to the lack of empirical literature on the experience of intimacy in South Asian women’s marriages in the UK, this thesis highlights the plurality of experiences and understandings of both intimacy and culture in South Asian women’s lives.

This thesis offers a detailed exploration of what it means to be living as a white mother of a ’mixed race’ child in England during the period 1930-2010. Using primary data, I piece together a story about a nation and the women who are seen to move beyond its boundaries through sexually and racially transgressive acts. I select seven official documents for analysis from public archives spanning the 1930-1950s and position these as representative of an official response to boundary incursion. Using those materials, I demonstrate the reassertion of state authority, as rules and social practices including social distancing and marginalization to secure boundaries. I examine how particular tropes of gender, sexuality, class and ethnicity, provided a rich harvest for discursive constructions of white mothering as degraded whiteness and/or Englishness. I then re-examine ‘crossings’ as gendered dimensions of movement in relation to a collective with implications for becoming, belonging and non belonging. This allows me reframe meanings and experiences of white mothering as the impact of border interaction. The research design was influenced by feminisms, an overarching body of work that adopts a gendered gaze whilst rendering different social divisions and sources of power visible. Using that framework, I examine the presence and participation of white mothers as construction sites and agents of construction in the making and marking of national boundaries (Anthias & Yuval Davies 1992). I use this logic to reason that white mothers remain anchored within the collective through legitimate and authentic means. White mothers continue to symbolise and signify national boundaries, but there is disagreement as to what those boundaries constitute and where they should be located. Indeed, using the narratives of thirty white British women, I catalogue the complex web of tender ties that sustain belongings. In intimate spaces, borders have not necessarily been crossed and boundaries have not necessarily collapsed but are conjoined in ways that have not been explored. My contribution to research in this field is to demonstrate how white mothering embodies elements of change and continuity that stretch and pull the nation’s boundaries in unexplored ways. I examine these ideas as intersecting social dimensions to reveal new identity possibilities and secure belongings. Likewise, I claim a particular vantage point for white mothers where location and perspective are shaped by their ability to straddle both positions, as well as occupy construction sites where distance has collapsed.

This thesis offers an important contribution to scholarly debates on belonging, hybridity and the role of the home through its focus on the connection between home-making practices and interfaith hybrid coupledom. I draw from five feminist case study interviews of couples comprised of British Muslim men who are first or second generation immigrants and women with Christian backgrounds. I explore the way their narratives on home-making practices, including the use of home artefacts, demonstrate fluid, intersectional and multi-scalar belonging within their examples of interfaith hybrid coupledom. The interviewees' nal1"atives have been organised into five themes which relate to coupledom practices. In Chapter Four, I examine the way the interviewees' home artefacts were significant to 'feelings settled' in the house moving process. In Chapter Five: 'Multiple Home Decorating', I argue that the negotiation of decorating styles suggests the intersection of gendered, national and cultural belonging, and that the female interviewees' support their partners' homing desires via home artefacts. In Chapter Six: 'Interfaith Home Decorating', I suggest that the interviewees' narratives around the use or absence of religious home aliefacts express intersectional belonging. In Chapter Seven: 'Gift-Giving', I argue that gift-giving expresses intersectional belonging and connections with close family and friends. In Chapter Eight: 'Cooking and Eating', I explore the shifting of gendered expectations, national belonging and the impact of cultural and religious belonging. The overall key findings include the intersection of gender and religion on home-making discussions, the effect of 'flow' on ordering home artefacts (Cwerner and MetCalfe, 2003), the importance of memories in the home-making process (Jacobson, 2009; Barbey, 1988) and the impact of class-based belonging on home-making (Reed, 2006; Jacobs, 2003; Bourdieu, 1984). Nonetheless, I have asserted that the case study interviewees have revealed how one can merely glimpse into the intersectional belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006b) within interfaith hybrid coupledom.

Marriage migration from the global South to the global North is on the political and academic agenda. Significantly, a Western notion of love is used to determine a real marriage from sham marriage thereby connecting intimacy with citizenship. Based on 20 semi-structured interviews I analyze how Cameroonian-born women (bushfallers’ wives) who have become British citizens through marriage to Cameroonian-born British men (bushfaller massa) express and perform love. It examines some of the assumptions and contradictions in governmental regulation of marriage migration. I argue that despite the controversial immigration control on marriage (bodies) within the context of binational marriage migration (nation border crossing), marriage migration is neither an entirely migration matter nor an entirely marriage one. Female bushfalling marriage from Cameroon to the UK is born from male bushfalling of the 1990s and social norms bound by love, care, kinship, obligations and expectations which greatly influence women’s marriage migration choices and experiences. Examining women’s love in marriage migration can therefore deepen our understanding of women’s citizenship through marriage which bound them more tightly to their traditional roles in the family with a subordinate status. My thesis seeks to contribute to critical feminist discourse and the marriage migration discourse in general by adding a South-South understanding of love and its link to care, identity, belonging and citizenship in female marriage migration. It offers new insights into a field which has long been dominated by marriage migration between white men from the global South and women from the global North.

A l’heure de la mondialisation, comment analyser les mélanges de castes et ethnies au sein des couples au Népal ? La recherche se situant dans une société largement hindouisée, l’analyse d’ouvrages orientalistes classiques avait au préalable donné à croire que les règles du choix du conjoint étaient principalement endogames, conformément à la structure d’une société de caste. Les observations menées au cours des sept terrains de recherche à Katmandou ont démontré, tout à l’inverse, que le Népal se trouve dans une période de transformations dans de nombreux domaines qui permettent en apparence aux individus d’être plus libres de choisir leur conjoint. La recherche présente la façon dont la multiplication des observations d’alliances mixtes "inter-castes", "inter-ethniques" ou "inter-religieuses" a permis de "découvrir" une théorie pouvant permettre de comprendre les transformations des pratiques matrimoniales au Népal. / In the era of globalization, how to analyze the castes and ethnic mixes within the couples in Nepal ? The research has been conducted within a society largely hinduised, so that the analyze of orientalists classic monographs suggested initially that the rules for finding a spouse were mostly endogamous, in accordance with the society's segmentation into castes. The observations carried out during seven fieldworks in Kathmandu conversely indicated that Nepal is in a period of transformations within many fields, and this allows individuals to be more free to choose their spouse. The research presents how the observations of mixed marriages "inter-castes", "inter-ethnics" or "inter-religious" allowed to reveal a theory that can explain the transformations of matrimonial practices in Nepal.

‘Honour’-based violence (HBV) is defined as a form of crime, predominantly against women, committed by the agnates of the victim, often in collaboration, which are justified by the victims’ perceived violation of social norms, particularly those around sexuality and gender roles. While HBV is often considered as a cultural phenomenon, I argue that the cross-cultural distribution of crimes fitting this definition prohibits a purely cultural explanation. I advance an alternate explanation for HBV through a deployment of the cultural materialist strategy and the anthropological theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Claude Lévi-Strauss (as interpreted by Gayle Rubin) and Eric Wolf. I argue that HBV is an epiphenomenon of the ‘exchange of women’ model of marriage transactions occurring within the patrilinear kinship structures typical of Central Eurasia, and that this is particularly marked amongst peoples with a history of agrarian and pastoral modes of production, in which kinship underwrites relations of resource and labour sharing. Within these scenarios, marriage is an aspect of the political economy of the group, since it extends or consolidates kinship networks. In post-agrarian neopatrimonial states, kinship relations remain salient to social status through nepotism and the intensification of subgroup identification. I argue that women’s embodiment of the standards of marriageability — their ‘honour’ — within their communities is a form of symbolic capital which inflects the status of their families, and their ability to participate in strategic marital exchanges. This theory is investigated through an extensive and historicised survey of kinship and marriage in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and through original survey data on marriage forms and attitudes and experiences of HBV in the region, suggesting that HBV and understandings of gender, marriage and kinship are intrinsically linked. Thus, this thesis argues that while HBV may appear to be enculturated, its aetiology may be material in nature. Efforts to reduce HBV in the Middle East should encompass reform of personal status laws which posit the patrilinear, patricentric family as the ideal model, and that campaigns to reduce forced and child marriage should be considered as part of the process to reduce HBV.

Interethnic relationships are increasingly common in society, yet interethnic couples also have a higher divorce rate compared to intraethnic couples. Given these facts, it is important that researchers identify factors that contribute to couples commitment in interethnic relationships, but to date, such research is rare. This thesis investigated the factors that contribute to the commitment of Chinese interethnic relationships. In order to do that, a qualitative study and a quantitative study were conducted. Johnson s commitment framework was found suitable in the qualitative study. Thus a cultural model that incorporated Johnson s personal commitment and a new construct couple cultural identity was established for the quantitative study to find whether love, satisfaction (i.e. dyadic adjustment) and couple cultural identity (i.e. acculturation to the partner and similarity of couple s individualism/collectivism) would predict personal commitment and whether each variable would account for unique variance in personal commitment of the participants. The quantitative study found significant relationships between love and personal commitment, satisfaction and personal commitment of Chinese interethnic couples. Also, couple cultural identity was important for women s personal commitment. These findings suggest that partners in interethnic relationships may define personal commitment in different ways with men emphasising love and satisfaction, and women emphasising love and acculturation to their partner.

This thesis explores the extent to which the incorporation of same-sex relationships into formal regulatory domains is working to reinforce heteronormativity. It focuses on this issue in relation to the provision of legal advice on civil partnership dissolution. It concentrates on three main questions: 1) How can same-sex relationships, in light of civil partnerships (and, by extension, same-sex marriage), help to challenge social and legal constructions about the gendered nature of roles in intimate relationships? 2) To what extent do solicitors construct the issues and legal framework as being identical in same-sex matters to different-sex cases? 3) How do lesbians and gay men understand and experience the law of financial relief? It is argued that heteronormative conceptions of gender have been carried over from (different-sex) marriage into civil partnership proceedings, and that lesbians and gay men have, to a large extent, been assimilated into the mainstream. That said, civil partner clients have also resisted the imposition of heterosexual norms on their relationship, preferring to settle dissolution matters on their own terms, and opposing substantive financial remedies such as maintenance and pension sharing. In this way, civil partnership dissolution does still pose some novel challenges for family law.

This thesis presents a cross-national, comparative study of legal recognition for lesbian and gay couples, focusing on civil partnerships in the UK and marriage in Canada and the US State of California. The study investigates the impact of same-sex marriage and civil partnership from the perspectives of lesbian and gay couples and, in particular, addresses the social implications of couples’ new legal status. The thesis investigates the impact of marriage or civil partnership within couples’ family and friendship networks and in a range of less intimate social contexts, including the workplace, the neighbourhood and commercial settings. The thesis also analyses the impact of legal recognition on couples’ sense of citizenship and assesses the effects of the Proposition 8 referendum, which repealed existing same-sex marriage rights in California in 2008. Drawing on qualitative data gathered from in-depth interviews with married or civil partner same-sex couples in the UK, Canada and California, the study analyses couples’ narratives around legal recognition to identify the meanings they attach to their new legal status. In the context of the wider policy objectives of legal recognition with regard to tackling discrimination and acknowledging same-sex couples within family and other social networks, the thesis applies Erving Goffman’s analysis of stigma to this evolving policy context. The study concludes that couples broadly welcomed the legal entitlements that flowed from marriage or civil partnership, and often saw legal recognition as providing opportunities to seek social recognition from within their personal networks. However, legal recognition did not in itself guarantee social recognition, and sometimes revealed the continuing marginalisation of lesbian and gay couples within family networks and in other social settings. This highlights a distinction between legal and social recognition, and points towards a significant gap between the policy ambitions attached to marriage and civil partnership and their micro-social impact.

Changing notions of marriage and family across the globe—from kinship obligation, social reproduction, and complementary labour to an ideal of marriage based on affective bonds, emotional intimacy, and pleasure—is widely read as indicating the shift from tradition to modernity. The modern companionate marriage ideal is then linked to a larger cultural transformation: the development of the modern individual self. The emergence of modern conceptions of the self in North America and Western Europe that emphasizes personal autonomy over the authority of the patriarchal family is said to have resulted in the decline of power parents and kin had over the choice of marriage partner with marriage coming to be seen as a person’s individual choice. Moreover, because companionate marriage demands a high degree of emotional and personal commitment it is generally accepted that such marriages must be entered into voluntarily, thereby recasting marriage as a contractual agreement between two people rather than an alliance between two families. Narratives about choice in marriage are, therefore, part of a historical process that emphasizes an “inner self” as integral to modern subjectivity and gives credence to individual agency in intimate relations. My thesis explores how marriage norms, family structures, and kinship relations amongst the middle-class in Sri Lanka have been transformed by social change from the early part of the twentieth century to the present. It aims to understand the ways in which modernity is reconfiguring people’s expectations of intimate relations and shaping women’s experiences and presentations of the ‘self’. In doing so, it attempts to answer three main questions: How do changing expectations of marriage structure people’s narratives about individual agency? To what extent do kinship obligations, caste considerations, and class mobility structure people’s choices in marriage? And finally, what implications do these findings have for the feminist theorization of agency and personhood? Based on fifteen months of fieldwork amongst Sinhala Buddhist middle-class families living in the city of Colombo, I argue that the urban middle-class in Sri Lanka have collectively invested in the narrative of choice through which a choosing person is consciously created as a mark of modernity and progress. However, people’s life histories show how, rather than indicating a radical shift in the way people negotiated between individual desires and social norms, the emphasis on choice signals a shift in the narrative devices used in the presentation of the self. Moreover, I argue that rather than signalling freedom, these narratives reveal how people are often burdened with the risks and responsibility of agency and grapple with making the “right” choices. By carefully deconstructing people’s anxieties that underline their narratives about choosing the right kind of partner, I reveal how choices are, in fact, structured by social norms and the expectations of family. I argue that marriage continues to be a principal strategy for social mobility and the assertion of status in contemporary Sri Lanka. Therefore, I demonstrate how caste and class considerations form the basis on which collective manoeuvring is undertaken to influence individual choices. I then argue that the trope of individual agency is not universal to all narratives about marriage and family. By examining alternative stories about marriage that defy the accepted convention I show how narratives of agency, which are deployed in certain contexts, are downplayed or denied in others; that the ‘self’, which is presented as making individual choices and actively shaping its own destiny in one context, is presented as the object of fate and circumstance in others. I conclude that because what it means to be middle-class is always a process of negotiation between competing and contradictory notions of tradition and modernity, people’s presentation of the self reveal the perpetual striving that seems to characterise modern subjectivity.