Dr Tam Sanger - Exploring the Ethics of Intimacy: Trans people's partnerships

Date: 23 November 2011, 4.00pm
Location: Seminar room 9.01 - Social Sciences Building

Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Visiting Speaker Seminar Series

Title: 'Exploring the Ethics of Intimacy: Trans people's partnerships'. Dr Tam Sanger, Research Fellow, Faculty of Education, Anglia Ruskin University

Has intimacy changed over time? Does Western society now make more space for previously untolerated intimate possibilities? Can the identifications and experiences of trans people and their partners add to our understandings of intimacy and change? Using a Foucauldian framework of governmentality, ethics and the care of the self I consider the experiences of trans people and their intimate partners, as interviewed in my doctoral research. Governmentality offers a framework for examination of how intimacy is regulated in society, while my exploration of ethics focuses upon the need for a more open and less proscriptive understanding of intimate possibilities.

The ways in which trans people and their partners negotiate their relationships both within and beyond current dominant discourses of intimacy are considered through analysis of interview data. I examine the limits such discourses impose upon all intimate relationships, as well as those legal discourses - for example, marriage and civil partnership - which strongly influence how people live their intimate lives. To this end I also briefly consider a current research project focused on the intimate lives of young adults with learning disabilities. I shall discuss a number of relevant case studies and their implications for the governmentality and intimacy literatures, focusing on the diversity of intimate lives currently being lived and exploring whether examination of the experiences of those attempting to live beyond social norms can expand our understanding of intimacy with respect to relationality, legal frameworks and social change.