Conference Report: "Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World" 

Over thirty social scientists gathered for a two-day conference at Columbia University to address how large-scale global changes affect desires, pleasures and emotions. The symposium was organized around how notions of love—both the universal meaning and specific cultural forms of affection encompassed by the term—are transforming in response to globalization.

Recent political, economic, technological and cultural transformations have both connected and separated people with extraordinary intensity. Changes in forms of labor, capital investment, population mobility, and new information technologies have clearly affected not only the economic dimensions of peoples’ lives, but their intimate experiences as well. At Love and Globalization, researchers documented the influence of a globalized economy upon the institutions of marriage, friendship, and the domestic sphere.

Love is perhaps the only resource for some people. For e-mail-order brides from East Asia or entertainers at military camps and tourist resorts in the Pacific or the Caribbean love and sexuality can be an investment of sorts, to advance in life and buy a future for themselves and for their kin.

Several papers presented at the conference exposed a blurring of moral boundaries, such as that between work and play and love and money. A true “girlfriend experience” is now widely advertised on the Internet for buyers of sex services who demand authentic romance. As people engage the global market their feelings toward one another become increasingly influenced by market relations. Love and Globalization provided a forum to discuss love and commerce not as opposites, but as intimately intertwined phenomena.

Promises of virtual encounters or Internet intimacy in the Electronic Age were also addressed, along with how medical technologies can enhance sexual pleasure and romantic commitments. Presenters showed how technologies are influenced, in turn, by national, religious, gender and sexual politics. International HIV/AIDS education and sexual health projects, for example, now frame discussions about morality and values in many nations.

The complexity of globalization, love and sexuality are apparent in how male and female sexuality are represented and how these ideas, in turn, inform medical practices and family planning, or how sexual practices and AIDS are related to the global market place.

Many presentations at the conference undermined the idea that globalization is a singular, one-dimensional project with multiple national, regional or local “imprints.” What they found instead was a complex world of desire, economic disparities, cultural difference and love transformed in the face of globalization.

The organizers of Love and Globalization: Transformations of intimacy in the contemporary world expect to present elements of the conference in an upcoming edited collection.

* Horacio Sívori is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology, National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His research focuses on science, activism and sexual identity in Argentina.