Jamie Hakim

Press discourses on Roma in the UK, Finland and Hungary

ABSTRACT This article analyses the political and media discourses on Roma in Hungary, Finland and the UK, in relation to the local Roma in these countries as well as those who migrated from Central and Eastern Europe countries following the fall of communism. The authors have analysed left of centre and right of centre major newspapers in these three countries, focusing on specific case studies which were the foci of public debates during the last two decades. We also examined a common case study in 2013 (“blond Maria”) that was discussed throughout Europe. In each news paper, the constructions of Roma, local and migrant, and the changes to related discourses over the period were studied. In conclusion, we examine the multi-layered processes of social and political borderings in Europe which dominate discourses on Roma, “indigenous” and migrant, and the extent to which they constitute a coherent “European” construction of “the Roma”.

‘The Spornosexual’: the affective contradictions of male body-work in neoliberal digital culture

Abstract Since 2008 there has been an empirically observable rise in young British men sharing images of their worked-out bodies on social media platforms. This article draws on interviews with men who engage in this popular cultural practice to suggest that it is an embodied and mediated response to the precarious structures of feeling produced by neoliberal austerity. It begins by arguing that as young men’s traditional breadwinning capacities are being eroded in a post-financial crisis austerity economy, increasing numbers of them are turning to sharing images of their worked out bodies as a way of feeling valuable. Moreover, by speaking to men who engage in this practice, it becomes possible to map the affective contradictions of inhabiting the precarious spaces of austerity culture. The article concludes by suggesting that within these affective contradictions lies the potential of resistance to neoliberalism’s ongoing territorialisation of everyday life.

Mediated intimacies: bodies, technologies and relationships

In Ken Plummer’s groundbreaking study on intimacy, he notes that the word intimacy first appears in a Western dictionary in 1632 to mean ‘inmost or innermost thoughts and feelings’ (2003, p. 11). This coincides almost exactly with the emergence of René Descartes’ rational subject of modernity, equipped with his distinctive interior life (1637/1927). Over the course of modernity, various discourses of intimacy have evolved to designate types of relationship that the modern subject [implicitly male, white, heterosexual, bourgeois, reproductive] might establish with a variety of others. ‘Traditional’ discourses of intimacy have referred to physical contact, sex, romance or passionate love, invariably with a spouse. Newer discourses of intimacy have emerged that refer to the non-sexual relationships of family life (Chambers, 2013). More recently, a range of social and cultural theorists who have theorized the relationalities that became possible in the conditions of late modernity, have argued, in different ways, about the democratization of intimacy. ‘Elective intimacy’ (Chambers, 2013; Davies, 2014), ‘pure relationships’ and ‘plastic sexuality’ (Giddens, 1992), non-normative, casual and promiscuous intimacies (Berlant & Warner, 1998: Reay, 2014) have become the focus of interest, as have forms of intimate labour (Boris & Parrenas, 2010) that involve personal care, physical closeness, or familiarity and private knowledge (Bernstein, 2007; Boris & Parrenas, 2010; Constable, 2009; Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2003; Wolkowitz, 2006; Zelizer, 2005; see Burke, 2016 for a discussion). These have drawn attention to the expansion of the range of others that late modern subjects can legitimately be intimate with, as well as the modes of intimacy they might practice. They trace the development of ‘the sphere in which we become who we are, the space in which the self emerges’ (Oswin & Olund, 2010). At the same time, while the sphere of the intimate excites considerable fascination and attention, it continues to be seen as relatively unimportant within the wider scheme of political and public life. This is partly because of the division between the capitalist sphere of production and the site of social reproduction, upon which capitalism depends but does not necessarily support or sustain (Fraser, 2016). Yet politics, economics and intimacy remain profoundly interconnected. What, then, is mediated intimacy? In some sense, all the forms of intimacy outlined above are mediated – in that they require a medium through which intimate relations can be established between the subject and the other. Whether it is language, the basis of Jamieson’s ‘disclosing intimacy’ (1998) in which intimacy is established through the disclosure of information previously understood to be too private to share. Or whether it is through affect and the varying intensities of Lauren Berlant’s theorizings of intimacy (1998). With this said, mediated intimacy has emerged as a specific term in recent debates on intimacy in sociology and media and cultural studies and has, thus far, two distinct, if overlapping meanings. The first was developed by Rosalind Gill, in relation to the ways that discourses of intimacy, specifically sex and relationship advice, are mediated in women’s magazines (2009). This conceptualization of the term has been taken up by a variety of scholars looking at sex and relationship advice in a variety of contexts (Barker, Gill, & Harvey, in press; O’Neill, 2015). The second meaning of mediated intimacies comes from Deborah Chambers’ book on relationships on Facebook, and, building on a range

The rise of chemsex: queering collective intimacy in neoliberal London

ABSTRACT Since 2011, various public health organizations have observed the growth of the sexual practice ‘chemsex’ in the UK, primarily in London. The term chemsex refers to group sexual encounters between gay and bisexual men in which the recreational drugs GHB/GBL, mephedrone and crystallized methamphetamine are consumed. This article uses a conjunctural perspective to make sense of the rise of chemsex within the historical conditions in which it has emerged. Drawing on a document analysis as well as interviews with 15 gay and bisexual men, this article argues that the rise of chemsex can be interpreted as an embodied response to material conditions shaped by neoliberalism: specifically as a desire for an intimate mode of collectivity during a historical moment when collectivity itself is being superseded by competitive individualism as the privileged mode of being in the world (Gilbert, J. [2013]. Common ground: democracy and collectivity in an Age of individualism. London: Pluto Press). In doing so, this article provides a different account to pathologizing media and medical representations of chemsex that appeared in 2015, whilst also contributing to a growing literature that attempts to map the balance of forces of the present conjuncture.

Affect and Popular Zionism in the British Jewish Community after 1967

It is widely accepted within Jewish historiography that the ‘Six Day War’ (1967) had a profound effect on the British Jewish community’s relationship with Israel and Zionism. While this scholarship touches on the affective nature of this relationship, it rarely gives this aspect sustained consideration. Instead of seeing Zionism as an ideology or a political movement, this article argues that the hegemonic way that Zionism has existed within British Jewry since 1967 is as an affective disposition primarily lived out on the planes of popular culture and the British Jewish everyday. As such, it can be more accurately labelled Popular Zionism. In order to make this argument, this article uses a theoretical framework developed by Lawrence Grossberg that brings the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to bear on British cultural studies and supports it by drawing on 12 semi-structured interviews with British Jews and original archival material.