A response from home: Intimate subjectivities and (im)mobilities during Covid-19

In Transnational Geographies of the Heart, I examined the significance of intimacy in understanding the social geographies of everyday life, with empirical illustrations from ethnographic research with British migrants in Dubai. Yet, as I write this response from home in Brighton, England, during the Covid-19 pandemic, I realise that ‘lockdown’ is also revealing of many of the book’s central arguments. The premise that intimate subjectivities are coproduced in private and public life (Oswin and Olund, 2010), for instance, has been sharply brought into focus in the UK by rules on social distancing and staying at home that instruct us on where and with whom we can be together and when we should remain apart. The surrounding regulatory discourses have strongly connected notions of citizenship, and Britishness more specifically, with the unusually ordered ways Britons must now conduct intimacy in everyday life in order to ‘stay safe, protect the NHS, [and] save lives’. As recognition of lived complexity emerged, initial instructions were qualified to explain, for example, that those at risk of domestic violence could leave their homes if necessary and parents sharing care were allowed to transfer children between households. The need for government approval of such exceptions, demonstrates the sudden and unexpected shifts that the UK has experienced during this pandemic, but intimate subjectivities are shaped by public regulation at all times. Heteronormativity – as a set of norms that privilege marriage, family and biological reproduction – is thoroughly encoded in governance, citizenship, and the moral discourses surrounding social policy and social life (e.g. Lubheid and Catnu, 2005). The opening of Yasser Elsheshtawy’s review detailing the arrest and conviction of a British couple for kissing in Jumeirah Beach residence, is an important example. The book shows how this operates in the UAE, where ‘Decency Laws’ criminalise and prohibit intimate practices that are taken-for-granted in the UK, such as sex outside marriage and sexualised contact in public. Elsheshtawy’s commentary reminds me of the extensive risk assessment needed to take UK undergraduate students on field classes to the UAE. For anyone occupying privileged social locations in heteronormative societies, the spatial and temporal contingency of intimacy norms and the textures of their public coproduction may only emerge as highly visible through migrant mobilities, lockdown immobilities, and other transformative episodes, but they are there always.

Elsheshtawy also highlights the constraints on the intimate subjectivities of low-income migrants who are excluded from the nightclubs, malls, cinemas, restaurants, and hotels that higher income residents, including Britons, frequent. Now that I am less naive to the wealth that exists among the global elite, I am always surprised how my friends and I were able to access some of the events and spaces that we did. Given our relatively low incomes relative to the UAE’s more affluent middle and upper classes, it is evident that whiteness and the postcolonial status of British migrants really mattered. Fifteen years later, the consumption spaces of Dubai are unrecognisable and my (mostly) white British students on their field class often note their discomfort in the malls: Britishness and whiteness no longer automatically afford them such privilege. Yet, James Sidaway’s review is hugely important in raising questions about race, faith and class in relation to Britishness. Dubai was and remains a postcolonial city where a strongly racialised social hierarchy influences social lives through the determination of job opportunities, income, and social networks. Nearly every British migrant cited in the book is white British, yet Sidaway reminds us that ‘a fifth of British citizens do not identify as white’ and ‘around one in twenty Britons is a Muslim’. Critical examination of whiteness and dominant British migrant cultures was a crucial first step in understanding British migration (Benson and O’Reilly, 2018; Cranston, 2016; Higgins, 2019; Leonard, 2010): to disrupt assumptions about who is a migrant, to reveal the work the terminology of ‘expatriate’ does, and to examine the privilege of these migrants. However, a much more inclusive picture of British migration is needed. One starting point is to recognise ‘return’ migration of first and second-generation BAME communities as British migration (e.g. Bolognani, 2014; Leonard and Walsh, 2018).

In the book, I demonstrate that intimate subjectivities are also a thoroughly geographical concern because they are made in particular spaces, unfolding dialectically through key sites, including the home. ¹ In the UK, Covid-19 has had a gendered impact on households, with women ‘bearing the brunt of extra childcare and housework’ (Topping, 2020), including women academics (Fazackerley, 2020). As Cranston notes, in her astute review, bickering ‘points to a reworking of gender relations in migration, reconfigurations of patriarchy in space’. Many of the British women in Dubai reporting an increase in bickering (or frustration or sadness) were graduates and had previously been employed in professional roles. Their careers had ended on moving to Dubai (or a previous country): due to the increased incomes of their husbands making them unnecessary, visa regulations prohibiting their employment, and other challenges in maintaining a dual career household during international relocations (see Coles and Fechter, 2007; Hardill and McDonald, 1998). It is perhaps not surprising that these tensions were shared frequently with me. As an unmarried woman in my mid-20s, when I conducted fieldwork in Dubai I was more an observer than participant in this large sub-section of the British ‘community’. I was not living in their neighbourhoods, appearing at the school gates, or bumping into them as a member of the British club, so my marginality enabled me to safely hold the resentments some married women wished to share about their husbands and the regrets they had about giving up their own careers. What I hope the book also conveys, however, is that women’s on-going commitment to marriage in such difficult contexts, demonstrates the significance of our intimate selves to feeling at home.

For those households in the UK with access to devices capable of digital connectivity – smart phones, tablets, and laptops – the relational enactment of intimate subjectivities during lockdown has to a large extent been moved online. Video calling platforms and apps like Skype, Zoom, MS Teams, What’s app, House Party, and Facebook Messenger have made it possible to maintain intimate friendships and family relationships online, without physical proximity. As such, those who stay put increasingly shared everyday practices of family life that resonate with those of highly mobile transnational families. At the same time, the resilient adaptation of our intimate selves should not be cause for uncritical celebration (Klein, 2020): concerns have been raised about those excluded from these digital social worlds, by a lack of digital literacy or insufficient income, and others, including many young children, have been unsettled by the disembodied interactions that such technologies require of us. During Covid-19, the British government was criticised for overlooking the needs of 300 British citizens on holiday in Pakistan and in need of repatriation (Shahid, 2020), an event that was highly revealing of the significance of visiting friends and relatives (VFR) face-to-face in transnational families. For this reason, the language of connection should not replace that of intimacy. In this respect, Aija Lulle’s review is helpful in encouraging a deeper exploration of the sensory dimensions of our homes and cities. As Lulle notes, exploring intimacies is to consider embodied relations with the world and each other, in which the feel of the climate, the smells and the touch of our environment, are key to how we experience place and attachment in ways that shape our everyday lives. I thank all the reviewers for their constructive engagement with the book and I look forward to seeing how geographical research on intimacy, migrant home making, and postcolonial cities continues to grapple with these concerns.