The Ties That Bind: Towards Geographies of Intimacy

Abstract

AbstractThe last decade in human geography has been marked by the emergence and development of significant bodies of work on: geographies of sexuality; children; and youth/young people's geographies. Taken together, this work might be characterised as being about intimate relations. In this article, I briefly review the differential contributions to, and place in, the discipline of these sub‐disciplinary areas as well as identifying ‘family’ studies as an absent presence within geography. I then go on to explore what might bind these disparate areas of research together, and to argue that by developing their connections, through the concept of intimacy, the contributions of these sub‐disciplinary areas might be scaled up to have a more fundamental impact on the discipline of geography.