Disjunctive belongings and the utopia of intimacy: violence, love and friendship among poor urban youth in neoliberal Chile

ABSTRACT

The paper analyses practices of intimacy among youth in a poor, crime-ridden neighbourhood of Santiago. It argues that their sense of belonging to their neighbourhood and broader society is disjunctive: they inhabit the nation-state without complying with expectations of proper citizenship. Similarly, they dwell in their neighbourhood without identifying with it. Instead, they turn to intimate relations with friends and lovers as spaces of belonging. Through these often failing relationships, they pursue emotional and socio-economic stability and seek to fulfil expectations of social becoming and mobility. These intimate and romantic practices can both be understood as an utopian, affective promise that allows for imagining possibilities of a good life and as a moral exercise in the realisation of an adjacent self and we argue that intimacy constitutes a key site in the quest for social belonging among subaltern youth in neoliberal Chile.

KEYWORDS:

• Belonging
• nation
• intimacy
• youth
• utopia
• subjectivity

Acknowledgements

The original research team was formed by Helene Risør (principal investigator), Ignacia Arteaga, Sebastian Bueno (ethnographic fieldworkers) and Alejandra Lunecke and Adriana Sanhueza (theoretical and methodological advisers). We thank Sebastian Bueno for letting us use his field note about Roce in the introductory section of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Los Acantos is not the real name of the neighbourhood. The names of our interlocutors have also been changed in order to protect their anonymity.

2. Domestic violence is known to affect all social classes in Chile, which holds true despite the difficulties posed by systematic underreporting by the victims. Statistical evidence is available by council at http://www.seguridadpublica.gov.cl/estadisticas/tasa-de-denuncias-y-detenciones/delitos-de-violencia-intrafamiliar-casos-policiales/.

3. Comisión Investigadora de las Privatizaciones Durante el Período 73–90. Cámara de Diputados.

4. We are aware that the urban segregational dynamics have been reshaped during the democratic transition. Recent research has demonstrated some beneficial outcomes perceived by the poor as a consequence of the settlement of wealthy families in exclusive gated communities in the vicinity of poor areas (Perez 2011; Sabatini and Salcedo 2007). Yet, this dynamic is not characteristic of Los Acantos or the council where it belongs. Here, the neighbourhood remains homogeneously low income, and the perception of some of the neighbours is that the area is worse off than 30 years ago.

5. Two-for-ones are schools specialised in courses where people can pass two school grades in one year, instead of the normal one per year.

6. The so-called ‘emblematic neighbourhoods’ have come about as land occupations that were subsequently legalised by the authorities in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s (Operación Sitio). These areas are characterised by high levels of internal social cohesion although some of them are known for the drug-related violence akin to the kind that take place in Los Acantos (Castells 1973; Márquez 2004; Salcedo 2010).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Chilean Home Office through the Fondo Nacional de Seguridad Pública (2012).