“This Is My House!”: Producing and Protecting Intimacy in the Platformed Cancer Community

Abstract

Based upon a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with popular cancer influencers, this paper examines the practices by which intimacy is co-produced and managed in the online cancer community. Drawing theoretically from feminist theory, affect theory and cultural studies, the authors explore the complex boundary work that cancer survivors and caregivers engage in to establish, sustain, and protect themselves as an intimate public. The findings show that outsiders, difference, and the threat such things pose to community harmony are actively operationalized to sustain intimacy among cancer community insiders. In the discussion, the authors reflect on what these findings suggest about the politics, possibilities, and limits of platform-mediated forms of intimacy.