Chapter 4

Bonding

This chapter looks at the manifold ways people address social ties and relationships that bring them together in sexualized contexts, or in those contexts where sex (talk) plays a major role – and through which people’s dependencies upon each other, especially in unequal relationships, become evident. By discussing the (verbal) practices of bonding at sex tourism sites beside the Indian Ocean, bonding through substance, magic and words in Ugandan nightspaces, bonding games in Congolese family contexts and the materiality of bonding through love locks and carved planks at a wooden bar in Jamaica with a historical burden, practices of inclusion and exclusion take place. These experiences of ruinous yet bonding relationships reflect the metalanguage about intimate practices of social cohesion that we explore in this chapter.