The author examines the relationships between women and men in the region of Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan, drawing on 86 interviews, as well as participant observation, to understand intimacy, emotions, love, and marriage in the population. She focuses on women's perspectives and deconstructs gender stereotypes, discussing gendered forms of daily life in Gilgit city, its suburbs, and adjacent valleys; women's emotion of modesty, reserve, and respectability; and the types of love in couple relationships, particularly growing affection, passionate love, and romantic love. Annotation ©2022 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Intimate Connections dissects changing ideas, feelings, and practices around love, marriage, and respectability in the remote high mountains of northern Pakistan. It offers deep insights into the affective lives of local Shia women, gender practices, and young couples mobile phone relationships in South Asia as well as in the wider Muslim world.
Intimate Connections dissects ideas, feelings, and practices around love, marriage, and respectability in the remote high mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan in northern Pakistan. It offers insightful perspectives from the emotional lives of Shia women and their active engagement with their husbands. These gender relations are shaped by countless factors, including embodied values of modesty and honor, vernacular fairy tales and Bollywood movies, Islamic revivalism and development initiatives. In particular, the advent of media and communication technologies has left a mark on (pre)marital relations in both South Asia and the wider Muslim world. Juxtaposing different understandings of love reveals rich and manifold worlds of courtship, elopements, family dynamics, and more or less affectionate matches that are nowadays often initiated through SMS. Deep ethnographic accounts trace the relationships between young couples to show how Muslim women in a globalized world dynamically frame and negotiate circumstances in their lives.
