What is disturbing and why not to disturb. On mobile phones, gender and privacy within heterosexual intimacy

Abstract

Drawing on recent research conducted in Spain, this article analyses how mobile telephony contributes to (re)create and (re)mediate gender, couple intimacy and privacy. We take a Goffmanian approach to analyse the utterances of disturb* (to disturb, disturbing, disturbed) in interviews and focus-groups on mobile phone uses and practices within heterosexual couples, showing how gendered ways of everyday management of intimate bonds and territories of the self contribute to the ordinary reconstitution of gender hierarchical differentiation. These gendered ways, in conjunction with mobile telephony possibilities and constraints, are producing the contextual norms and expectations which set the condition for privacy, or the lack of it, within current couple intimacies.