Materializing Intimacy

Abstract

What part do physical environments play in materializing relationships? How is intimacy created in specific places, through specific objects? What do these places and objects imply about our understandings of intimacy? To answer these questions, I draw on fieldwork I conducted in Québec, Canada, and mobilize the tools of ethnography and qualitative social research to create a methodological bricolage with the aim of making familiar cultural processes seem strange (Clifford 1986). My project of making intimacy “strange” draws from queer studies and materiality and affect theories, which aim to deconstruct heteronormativity and to de-center the focus on humans, based on the work of Bruno Latour (2005), Tim Ingold (2012), Judith Butler (2002) and Sara Ahmed (2004). I use the material as a point of entry to understand how intimacies are performed and subtly mediated by elements that go unnoticed in common sense definitions of intimacy. From this perspective, intimacy is created by a combination of things: humans, objects, spaces, affect and texts that are each more or less attached to collective and personal aspirations. My contribution lies in showing how some objects and places are involved in the performativity of intimacies, and how the material can create ephemeral intimacies and concretize relationships. The cases I work through indicate a capacity for the (re)creation of intimacy, the reproduction of normative ideas, as well as a kind of distributed agency through the multiplicity of things that are necessary to achieve intimacy.