Intimate Geopolitics: Religion, Marriage, and Reproductive Bodies in Leh, Ladakh

Smith, Sara

doi:10.1080/00045608.2012.660391

Cited by 157 publications

(91 citation statements)

References 59 publications

(47 reference statements)

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“…My research suggested echoes between bodily and territorial boundaries -an intimate geopolitics (Smith 2012). The familiar, but public, turn in which I became the object of inquiry, and forthright way our acquaintance asked the very questions I had felt shy to ask interviewees, irresistibly encapsulates the absurdity of research on intimate life.…”

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confidence: 90%

Intimacy and angst in the field

Smith

2014

Gender, Place & Culture

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This article explores the paradoxes of angst and intimacy in 'the field.' One aim of feminist research is to attend to overlooked day-to-day practices through which difference and power work. Yet, this focus on intimate and submerged experience is also risky, potentially asking that people share their most intimate experiences with the researcher. How does such attention to the personal lives of others intersect with ethical demands and postcolonial critiques of representation? A desire to understand the submerged life of the geopolitical in women's day-to-day life in India's Ladakh region has driven my research on the politics of marriage and contraceptive choices. Taken by a feminist approach to the geopolitical, I sought out the ways that intimate life was inflected by territorial struggles, without adequately comprehending either the promise or the risks of making intimacy and the body a subject of research. This work was complicated and enriched by my status as a foreigner married into a local family, which provides a not-quite-outsider positionality. This article reflects on the role of intimacy in fieldwork in two senses: doing research on intimacy, and navigating intimacies in and after the field. I argue that intimate fieldwork is full of both promise and peril for feminist researchers. I call then for careful engagement with such topics, and for a rethinking of the boundaries of the field as they relate to the researcher, who carries these boundaries in his or her own body when navigating social relations in the field.

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confidence: 90%

Intimacy and angst in the field

Smith

2014

Gender, Place & Culture

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“…The sorting, counting, and policing of bodies around religious codes are a territorializing process, one awash with ideas about political belonging and imagined community. Smith (, ) recounts, for example, how Buddhist and Muslim residents in Ladakh, India negotiate government restrictions on religious intermarriage and natal policy. Through expressions of love, desire, and denial as they interface with religious identity, an intimate geopolitics bears down upon and is born, literally, from bodies (Smith, ).…”

Section: Beliefmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Smith (, ) recounts, for example, how Buddhist and Muslim residents in Ladakh, India negotiate government restrictions on religious intermarriage and natal policy. Through expressions of love, desire, and denial as they interface with religious identity, an intimate geopolitics bears down upon and is born, literally, from bodies (Smith, ). These examples of a geopolitics modulated within the moralizing landscape of religion—the politicization of religious identity in Ladakh or the rhetoric coursing through U.S. refugee policy—prompt Agnew () to write, “religion is the emerging political language of the time” (p. 183).…”

Section: Beliefmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminist geopolitics and the Middle East: Refuge, belief, and peace

Clark

2017

Geography Compass

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In this article, I draw on the work of feminist and critical political geographers to demonstrate what a feminist geopolitics can offer Middle East studies. I cite scholarship of feminist and critical geographers situated within and outside the region to address three key themes: “refuge,” “belief,” and “peace.” In each theme, I use the “body” as a starting point to convene a justice‐oriented methodology of studying and knowing the Middle East. A major objective and contribution of feminist geopolitics to geography has been to recenter political inquiry from the state to the fleshy matter of the body. A “corporeal geopolitics” understands that all bodies have geopolitical agency, that all bodies are vulnerable—albeit differentially—to politics, and that all bodies are connected within and formative of shared economic, social, and political processes across space. Here, I chart ways that a feminist geopolitical analytic focused on “bodies” can contribute to a more complex understanding of the Middle East, one that operates through specificity, accountability, and care.

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“…Feminist geography scholarship has increasingly attended to intimate spaces (Pratt and Rosner 2006;Smith 2012) and emotional geographies (Pain 2009;Sharp 2009). This emotional turn makes an engagement with the methodological implications of research focused on the intimate and the emotional even more pressing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction

Laliberté

Schurr

2015

Gender, Place & Culture

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This editorial theorizes the emotional entanglements that constitute spaces of fieldwork. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's notion of sticky and circulating emotions, we develop the concept of emotional entanglements as a way to engage with the methodological implications of the emotional turn in geographic research. Beyond providing empirical evidence for research on emotional geographies, we argue that an attention to emotions in fieldwork has the potential to reinvigorate feminist practices of reflexivity and positionality. In addition, a critical engagement with emotions can offer novel epistemological techniques for studying the politics of knowledge production and the landscapes of power in which we, as researchers, are embedded. As the papers of this themed section demonstrate, analysis of emotional entanglements in research pose critical questions with regard to power relations, research ethics and the wellbeing of research participants and researchers alike. They also make visible how the power relations of sexism, racism, capitalism, nationalism and imperialism permeate and constitute the emotional spaces of the field. We use the notion of emotional entanglements as a way to situate the five articles of the themed section and to highlight the contribution of each paper to debates about the emotional field.

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Intimate Geopolitics: Religion, Marriage, and Reproductive Bodies in Leh, Ladakh

Cited by 157 publications

References 59 publications

Intimacy and angst in the field

Intimacy and angst in the field

Feminist geopolitics and the Middle East: Refuge, belief, and peace

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