Showing papers on "Love marriage published in 2012"

The secret: love marriage and HIV

Abstract: Jennifer S. Hirsch, Holly Wardlow, Daniel Jordan Smith, Harriet M. Phinney, Parikh Shanti and Constance Nathanson, Nashville, TN, Vanderbilt University Press, 2009, 301 pp., US$29.95 (paperback), I...

The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV

Abstract: Michel Agier’s Managing the Undesirables is one of several texts that addresses the complex and proliferating humanitarian infrastructure that is increasingly prevalent in regions of the world besieged by violence and displacement, but his work stands out as particularly important and innovative. Agier addresses some of the central questions facing our world today: belonging, personhood, and the ability of those most cut off from political power to speak for themselves and shape their own lives, and he does so in a way that combines passion and keen observation. In doing so, his work should be of interest to a broad range of sociologists who study social inequality and the structures (even those built from the best of intentions) that perpetuate it. In this volume, Agier explores the concept of humanitarian government, the political apparatus set up during emergency situations that takes responsibility for the life and death of individuals no longer protected adequately by a state. For as Agier shows, a refugee camp is far more than a place of shelters and emergency food aid. They are places in which someone decides who gets plastic sheeting and who does not, who receives food rations and for how long, what social programs should be put into place and who should be in charge of them, and what barriers need to be constructed (barbed wired, armed guards, cinderblock walls) to ostensibly protect those inside but also to protect the local population from incursions of these displaced ‘‘undesirables.’’ Further, these ‘‘camps’’ are hardly temporary shelters; many have existed for decades, taking on the appearance of towns and cities with entrepreneurs setting up small businesses and political elites emerging from the post-flight chaos. And yet, the camp is a hybrid social form, taking the shape of something entirely new from what existed before in the lives of its inhabitants, and as Agier convincingly argues, it exists in a state of exception, outside the bounds of the political and social life that humanitarian law and human rights ostensibly guarantee. Agier uses his ethnologist’s eye for culture to analyze observations he made during fieldwork in refugee camps in Kenya, Zambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea between 2000-2007, accessing the camps through Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; in English, Doctors Without Borders). His affiliation with MSF gave him a level of flexibility and independence (particularly from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees) that allowed him sufficient time in the camps to not only observe humanitarian government at work but also the response of the refugees under its purview. He combines his observations with detailed histories of different migrations, explaining the historical and geographic paths that led different groups of refugees to the camps that he studied. Agier demonstrates the discursive power that humanitarian organizations have over defining and categorizing the displaced individuals in the camps; defining a person’s status as a refugee leads to acceptance into the camp and the security that brings, but the denial of such status leads to rejection and often deportation back to life-threatening circumstances. Once determined as a refugee, a person’s suffering and vulnerability come to define their place in the camp and the world, with moral hierarchies created around different definitions of vulnerability with different access to resources provided by the humanitarian organization. This process, Agier argues, de-socializes refugees; they lose their individual personhood and either become ahistorical, pitiable masses that the charitable-at-heart seek to keep alive, or potential threats to order and the safety of the non-displaced that must be managed or

Unhinged: Love, Marriage, and the Continuing War over Family Values:

Abstract: cey would like to see marriage and love "unhitched." Actually, Stacey would like to see marriage keelhauled, but that would have been an unnecessarily provocative title. Many readers probably think of marriage as a relatively benign institution—one, in fact, with many positive virtues. Why does Sta cey have such antipathy for marriage? Feminist scholars have traditionally taken a dim view of marriage, viewing it as the fundamental site of women's oppression. Of course, given the substantial increases in women's education, occupational status, and earnings during the last half century, marriage is a lot less patriarchal today than it used to be. Indeed, the continuing shift toward gender equality in marriage (and society more generally) is feminism's great achievement. Gender equality, however, is not Stacey's primary concern. Stacey sees two problems with marriage. First, people's needs for eroticism (sexual variety) and domesticity (long-term stable partnerships) are in tension. Many, perhaps most, people are not monogamous by nature. Consequently, expecting them to remain in life-long monogamous marriages inevitably leads to high levels of adultery and divorce. As she states, "The modern, romantic, companionate union... represents a quixotic effort to plant durable domestic turf in desire's rocky soil. History teaches that this is a Utopian, or perhaps just a naive, strategy" (pp. 203-4). If these two aspects of human nature are contrary to one another, then what are the options for those who mar ry? According to Stacey, you can either cheat on your spouse, or you can have a sexually frustrated, passionless life. This is a grim choice, indeed. The second problem involves the privi leged status of marriage in American society, where most people view it as the optimal basis for family life. But conferring a special

Uncertainty and the Future: A Reading of V.V. Ganeshananthan's Love Marriage

Abstract: This essay thinks of V.V. Ganeshananthan's recent novel Love Marriage (2008) as a novel of movement. Indeed, one finds movement everywhere in the novel—the escape; the flight; the diaspora;...