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This chapter considers the relationship between intimacy and economic activity. Money is widely believed to poison intimate relations, while intimate relations undercut the rational efficiency of economic activity. However, such reasoning ignores a fundamental fact: in everyday life, people constantly mingle intimacy and all sorts of economic activity—production, consumption, distribution, and transfers of assets. Intimate relations between spouses, between lovers, between parents and children, and even between doctors and patients depend on joint economic activity. No loving household would last long without regular inputs of economic effort. What's more, family firms and mom-and-pop stores often thrive despite the everyday mingling of intimacy and economic activity. Something is wrong with the conventional reasoning.

This chapter examines how sexual jealousy is an important consequence of today's sex markets and, specifically, how it is a perceived breach of the commitment between sex partners. Because cheating, shirking, and opportunism are all-too-common possibilities in intimate relations, people often seek committed sex partners. The chapter investigates commitment and jealousy in intimate relations in order to understand how sex markets affect the well-being of sexual relationships. With the appeal of non monogamous sexual-matching strategies among Chicagoans, it suggests that expectations about sexual exclusivity are frequently breached, resulting in conflicts over sexual jealousy, and making these events an important empirical concern. The chapter distinguishes between those who are and those who are not committed, investigates the causes and the consequences of breaches of commitment, and addresses the relevance of sex markets for contemporary sexual relationships in Chicago.

This chapter discusses intimate migrations, which are constituted in the geographic, conceptual, and lived spaces between the intimate and the structural. Indeed, everyday encounters with the state have increasingly dissolved the boundaries between public and private spheres. Like colonial contexts, today's state regimes shape gendered family life, and intimate exchanges are always structured by and situated within social and economic processes. Moreover, global capital is intertwined with intimate relations and identities, and transnational encounters are both deeply personal and embedded in broader relations of power. An ethnographic view reveals how intimate relations motivate, guide, and are directed by global migrations, directly linking gendered kin relations to global processes.

The introductory essay outlines the key themes of the twelve chapters collected in the volume. The authors provide an overview of the history of the three ethnocultural groups populating the American Southwest that are the focus of the chapters in the book: Native Americans, Hispanics, and Anglo-Americans. They argue that family relations played a crucial role in producing, enforcing, mediating, and contesting larger structures of social power throughout the history of the American West. Colonizers’ efforts to destroy, regulate, and transform the intimate relations of Hispanic and Indian peoples became both a means and an end of conquest and control. Intimate relations also served as a site where Indians and Hispanics could resist and negotiate the changes wrought by colonialism.

Sudhir Kakar agrees that there is a rupture between the private and the public in India, citing as an example izzat or honour of the family. He explains why homosexuality is seen as a deviation in India and yet transvestites are so easily accepted in Indian society. In his book, Intimate Relations, Kakar claims that sex is both loved and feared in India, where sexuality and morality have always been traditionally fused together. Kakar also discusses the distinction between the Oedipus complex and the Ganesha complex. He further talks about how the sexual and the erotic are intertwined in Bhakti poetry and expresses his views about Muslims and Hindus in India, mystical ecstasy and sexual ecstasy, mysticism, his novel Ecstasy where he tackles the historical relationship between Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, and whether Rabindranath Tagore’s methodology can be applied to Indian sexuality. He also talks about his translation of the Kamasutra and the flaws in Richard Burton’s translation.

This introductory chapter surveys the meanings of privacy in three domains—the first, involving intimacy and intimate relations; the second, implicating criminal procedure, in particular the Fourth Amendment; and the third, addressing control of information in the digital age. The first two provide examples of what are taken to be classic breaches of the public/private distinction—namely, instances in which government intrudes in an area claimed to be private. The third has to do with voluntary circulation of information and the question of who gets to control what happens to and with that information. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Much contemporary writing on ‘family’ and ’family law’ cites extensive changes to the family as evidence that the very concept of the ‘family’ is redundant, or that the family has disappeared. Conceptual questions (What counts as a family?) should be distinguished from normative ones (Is the family a good thing? Are some families better than others?). The use of the term ‘the family’ can be normatively innocent such that there are different family forms none of which should be privileged. Having distinguished ‘the family’ as an extra-legal concept and as a legal construct, I defend a functional definition of the family. This value-free definition can serve as the basis of evaluative judgments about the family. There are good reasons why law might recognize the family, consistent with law also recognizing non-familial personal relations. Nevertheless we need not accord familial status to such relations, or abandon the term ‘family’.

This chapter draws on data from the Generations Through Prison project to explore the familial impacts of incarceration from the perspectives of second and third generation prisoners. Focusing on the intimate relations lost, ‘suspended’, or recreated, the chapter examines how intergenerational incarceration intensifies the pains of imprisonment. The argument here is that irrespective of the ties among those who serve time with immediate and/or extended family members, the deleterious effects of incarceration outweigh the positive dimensions. Further, for intergenerational prisoners serving time ‘on their own’ — that is, without the ‘dividend’ of extended or immediate family — the search for close ties remains key to coping with prison life. As shall be seen, most of the participants in this research had very few, if any, intimates in the community who supported them while incarcerated or who would offer support once released.

Grand calls himself a “humanitarian,” yet in In the eyes of our hegemonic culture, Grand’s life exemplifies deviations. He is the father of two grown children, whom he conceived in his youth when married to a woman. Grand is close to his family of origin, which includes two lesbian sisters. He lost two brothers to substance abuse and AIDS. All siblings raise their children collectively. Grand is a black man of 65 years of age, who still works full-time. He is in a long-term relationship with a bisexual man and thinks of himself as a driven humanitarian. He has built a career and a life providing health and social services to marginalized men.