Making Places of Intimacy—Ethnicity, Friendship, and Masculinities in Oslo

Abstract

Through transnational migration, practices of gender, intimacy, and sexuality “travel” with people, get incorporated into new social and cultural contexts, and are negotiated and transformed in the encounter with other such practices. The discussion here will focus on the fluid boundaries between male–male emotional and physical intimacy, male–male sexual practice, and homosexual imagery, as they are culturally understood in Pakistan and incorporated into a minority context in Norway by migrants from Pakistan. While homosexuality in Norway is gradually gaining public and political support, it is regarded as unacceptable by Muslim authorities in the country, thus making the issue of homosexuality a vital marker separating the majority population from the Muslim minority. Against this scenario, which is much debated among politicians, activists and various spokespersons from the ethnic and religious communities, practices of friendship and intimacy among Pakistani men in Norway take place. The significance given to the heterosexual–homosexual divide, however, creates a more vulnerable situation for practices of intimacy among men that are not necessarily judged against the homosexual imagery in Pakistan. By using the concept of unmanliness, it is shown how the boundaries of manliness are differently positioned within dominant Norwegian and Pakistani masculinities respectively. This can cause tension on an individual level, as well as on a group level. Therefore, Pakistani men in Norway must create particular places of intimacy, within which culturally specific practices of gender, sexuality, and intimacy are maintained and transformed.

Notes

1. The fieldwork in 1996–97 was part of a research for the M.Phil. degree in Social Anthropology (Walle 1999). The fieldwork in 2003–04 was part of a Ph.D. research project in Social Anthropology, funded by the Norwegian Research Council, focusing on issues of masculinities, ethnicity, and diasporic spaces within a group of Pakistani descendants in Oslo, Norway (Walle forthcoming). I use the term “Pakistani” to name this group of people, as this is the term they prefer to use when they position themselves within the larger society, although the term norskpakistaner [Norwegian Pakistani] is widely used in the media and in academic writing.

2. Names given in the following passage are pseudonyms in order to assure the anonymity of the persons mentioned.