Katila2018
| Katila2018 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Katila2018 |
| Author(s) | Julia Katila |
| Title | Touch Between Mother and Child as Affective Practice: Reproducing Affective Inequalities in Haptic Negotiations of Bodily Borders and the Interpersonal Space |
| Editor(s) | Tuula Juvonen, Marjo Kolehmainen |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, Affect, Touch, Video-based analysis |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Year | 2018 |
| Language | English |
| City | London & New York |
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| Pages | 201–217 |
| URL | Link |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | Affective Inequalities in Intimate Relationships |
| Chapter | |
Abstract
Experimental psychological studies have shown the importance of an intimate caregiver relationship for children’s healthy development (e.g. Bowlby 1969) and that the caregiver–child touch is crucial for establishing this embodied tie (e.g. Feldman 2011). Furthermore, psychological studies (e.g. Hernstein 2002; Jean & Stack 2009), affect studies (e.g. Kinnunen & Kolehmainen under review; Paterson 2005) and interaction studies (e.g. Cekaite 2016; Cekaite & Holm 2017; Goodwin 2017) have shown that touch and affect are strongly intertwined. Nevertheless, empirical studies on the connections between affect and touch in naturally occurring caregiver–child interactions are still scarce. There are a few recent interaction studies that discuss the intersections between affect and interpersonal touch (e.g. Cekaite 2016; Cekaite & Holm 2017; Goodwin 2017; Goodwin & Cekaite 2013), but these studies have mostly focused on caregivers’ touch and caregivers’ ability to control the embodied actions of children. The manner in which children touch their caregivers and are able to control their caregivers’ actions has remained understudied. To fill this gap, this study examines touch between a child and mother in naturally occurring settings and focuses on the haptic actions of the child. Specifically, the study investigates the detailed manner in which a child claims embodied access to her mother’s body and how the mother responds to these haptic actions. The chapter identifies and analyses two different haptic affective practices (Wetherell 2012), haptic offer and haptic home base, through which a child can momentarily negotiate the bodily separation and unity with her mother and establish a specific relation to her mother’s body in the interpersonal space. Moreover, the study analyses how, through these haptic affective practices, a child and her mother are able to do and undo their bodily borders in momentby-moment flowing embodied negotiation of the bodies’ separation and unity. The study suggests that these haptic affective practices construct a platform to (re)produce affective inequalities in an intimate relationship.
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