Intercultural Intimate Relationships

Abstract

As transnational social networks expand, people increasingly form intimate relationships with partners from a different sociocultural background. While intercultural intimate relationships are not a new phenomenon, they have attracted research only recently due to their global proliferation. Scholars are particularly interested in how such mixed relationships communicate and how their interculturality impacts on partners' (and their offspring's) identities. Some studies have been criticized for overemphasizing cultural differences and identification problems of intercultural partners. This depiction of intercultural coupledom as problematic in early research echoed initial societal perceptions of it. Contrastingly, recent works explore how intercultural partners can effectively communicate and negotiate their complex sociocultural repertoires. The hybrid cultural forms and meanings that intercultural couples create are shown as empowering rather than debilitating. This new approach is also reflected in society and the media, which increasingly represent intercultural families in a positive light, gradually normatizing or even endorsing them.

Representations of Inter-Faith Couples: “Inevitable Violence” and the Israeli Arab Conflict

“…These representations tell us a lot about the way in which religious Jewish authors would like their readers/viewers to view Arabs and Islam, and how they construct their own identities in relation to these. Such representations echo perceptions that have existed for many years in the academic literature on mixed couples and which mainly emphasized the difficulties and challenges such couples face and their negative consequences (Byrd and Garwick 2004;Wilczek-Watson 2017). Such couples were often presented as experiencing a "cultural clash" and as representing "stereotyped, essentialised cultures, traditions, languages and thus identities, which are fixedly different and perpetually clash" (Wilczek-Watson 2017, 4).…”