{"word_count": 344, "character_count": 2518}
Women and mobile intimacy in an age of social media and affective technology  Special issue of Feminist Media Studies (Dec 2012)  Edited by Larissa Hjorth &#38; Sun Sun LimIn the burgeoning of emotional, affective labour by the rise of ICTs  (Information and Communication Technologies) and the rise of public and  private intimacies by and through social media, what does it mean to  speak of "mobile intimacy" today? In a world aflux with mobile,  ubiquitous technologies how are various forms of mobility (and  immobility) across temporal, spatial, geographic, economic,  socio-cultural and technological differences transforming how we  experience and define intimacy? One thing remains certain - these  practices are informed by gender and cultural context.Extant research suggests that women's relationships with mobile  technology are fraught with contradictions. As women domesticate mobile  technologies and employ their routine-altering affordances, they seek to  strike balances between aid-liability, autonomy-dependency,  contactability-intrusiveness and intimacy-distance. The very affordances  that give women the freedom to sustain intimate, boundary-transcending  relationships are the same ones that impel women to create distances  between themselves and their significant others. Even as mobile  technologies enable women to traverse temporal, spatial and geographic  barriers, women are not always prepared to have these barriers  dismantled, particularly as they may be averse to there being too much  intimacy. With the advent of mobile technologies, the social roles  ascribed to women - of daughter, sister, mother, friend and teacher -  have to be performed through these always accessible and potentially  disruptive platforms, thus intensifying the burden of these responsibilities. How then do women  strategically deploy technology so that they can maintain a sense of  self, while ceding some parts of their lives to the obligations and joys  of "mobile intimacy?" Please submit a 350-word abstract and abridged CV to both larissa.hjorth@rmit.edu.au and sunlim@nus.edu.sg later than May 1, 2011.IMPORTANT DATES  Deadline for abstracts  1 May 2011Decisions to authors    15 May 2011First drafts            1 December 2011Decisions               15 February 2012Second/final drafts     1 June 2012Final proofs            1 August 2012Issue publication       1 December 2012For guidelines on how to submit a paper to Feminist Media Studies please visit: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rfms