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Accepted Paper:

Intimacy between men: sexuality & friendship  
Rosita Armytage (Australian National University)

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ways men create affective relationships with other men through participating in illicit romantic or sexual encounters with women. Focusing on the experience of men in Pakistan, the paper will examine how these interactions reinforce masculine ideals and intimacy between men.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the ways in which elite men seek to forge intimate relationships of trust and friendship with other men through engaging in and recounting experiences of illicit romantic or sexual encounters with women. The paper will explore how a façade of the illicit is used to designate gender-segregated spaces and facilitate widely held conceptions of ideal manhood involving pride, rivalry and virility, traits long associated with ideal masculinity in Pakistan (Barth, 1959).

The paper will explore how, in social contexts that retain a significant degree of social segregation between husbands and wives, elite men bond with one another through the sharing of 'illicit' interactions with women. These illicit interactions range from the ubiquitous, and largely socially acceptable, shared viewing of erotic dance performances; to more circumscribed experiences with sex workers; to romantic relationships outside of marriage with girlfriends and mistresses. By creating a designated and semi-public environment for illicit enjoyment, men both legitimise their extramarital relations with women, and create an environment of shared enjoyment and trust, without violating the private sanctity of the home. Though some of the illicit relationships elite men have with women are intensely affective involving love, desire and jealousy, I argue that for most Pakistani men, their most intimate relationships are those they share with an inner circle of men.

Panel Hier04
The private/public politics of intimacy
  Session 1