Loving over Skype: Tactile Viewing, Emotional Atmospheres and Video Calling

This article draws on research interviews taken from a broader research project, The Love Migration Project, the aim of which is to understand how and why people move for love. Many of the couples interviewed spent much of the early part of their relationship living in different countries, negotiati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of popular romance studies 2017-04, Vol.6 (1), p.1-21
Main Author: Yvonne Clarke-Salt
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
distance relationships
embodiment
emotional geographies
emotions
love
online communication
skype
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Summary:This article draws on research interviews taken from a broader research project, The Love Migration Project, the aim of which is to understand how and why people move for love. Many of the couples interviewed spent much of the early part of their relationship living in different countries, negotiating their relationship and love for each other over distance. This article focuses on how physical intimacy be negotiated over distance, particularly through online platforms such as Skype. My main question in this paper is how can seeing one’s romantic partner on a screen encourage emotional connections between romantic partners? More specifically, what are the practices that romantic partners engage in when using Skype which enable them to feel emotionally connected? In this article I will argue that the answers to these questions can be found by paying attention to the ways in which these couples used Skype. I will engage with Sara Ahmed’s idea of emotions being a “thickness in the air” (2004, 10) to examine how couples negotiate emotional aspects of their relationship via Skype calls, and argue that a more visceral understanding of the body can help us understand how emotions are communicated and felt.
ISSN:2159-4473