Forms Of Intimacy Research Articles

Abstract C042: iCCaRE qualitative interviews for Black prostate cancer survivors and quality of life

Abstract Intro: Compared to white men, Black men bear the highest burden of prostate cancer, experiencing a higher incidence and mortality rate, and poorer survivorship outcomes. Although prioritized, survivorship and quality of life (QOL) are under-studied in the fight against prostate cancer disparities. To address this issue, clinicians, researchers, and community advocates have formed the Inclusive Cancer Care Research Equity (iCCaRE) Consortium for Black Men. iCCaRE’s goal is to advance the science and practice of survivorship focused on the needs of Black men and their loved ones affected by prostate cancer. Methods: We developed a survivorship care plan (SCP) tailored to the whole person's needs. IRB-approved qualitative methods to preliminarily gain evaluation and guidance on the SCP. The SCP presented content in the following areas: diagnosis and treatment, follow-up care/surveillance, family history, care team, major co-morbidities, symptoms and quality of life, survivorship concerns, and health advisories. Results: 23 Black prostate cancer survivors (PCS) participated and provided feedback on the SCP Mean age was 64 years. PCS diagnosed between 2018-2023 between stages 1-4. The Majority of PCS were provided information for follow-up and side effects. But none had received a comprehensive SCP All agreed that the SCP would contribute to enhancing cancer knowledge, patient activation, and shared decision, and their QOL, if the SCP was obtained. A survivor noted “having inspirational quotes throughout the SCP is important”. An unforeseen consequence to the interviews was the emotional release for the men, justifying the need for the SCP and an expansion of its scope. Domains that the men wanted more contents were social support, sexuality, masculinity, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. All PCS understood the value of having trusted family and friends to bear the burden of the disease despite some not having a solid support system. PCS emphasized the role of family support stating, “my wife and children helped me stay positive”. Another critical lifestyle component that survivors mentioned was their sexuality and how it directly reflects their masculinity. Although PCS adapted to other forms of intimacy like couples’ activities and stronger communication with their partners, majority of men struggle with adapting to their sexual performance. A quote by a survivor encompasses the mindset expressed by many of the men fear “Like a track star in his prime who can’t run anymore”. Erectile Dysfunction can lead to fear and anxiety among survivors, ultimately affecting QOL. Lastly, PCS wanted more options to stay fit and healthy. Further research and resources are needed to address survivor concerns in this area. Discussion: Overall, PCS have acknowledged that the SCP can assist them in these areas of concern, but more research is required. Life after prostate cancer treatment is an ongoing process; while some survivors cope better than others, it is evident a need for more information and guidance is not being provided to all those affected. Citation Format: James Morrison, Kimlin Ashing, Gaole Song, John McCall, Timethia J. Bonner, Che Ngufor, Getachew A. Dagne, Arnold Merriweather, Ewan Cobran, Cassandra N. Moore, Fornati Bedell, Rotimi Oladapo, Floyd B. Willis, JoAnne S. Oliver, Ernie Kaninjing, Roxana Dronca, Folakemi T. Odedina. iCCaRE qualitative interviews for Black prostate cancer survivors and quality of life [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 17th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2024 Sep 21-24; Los Angeles, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2024;33(9 Suppl):Abstract nr C042.

Scalable intimacy: Rethinking intimate sociality and its problem of scale in digital China

With the development of the Internet in China, people have increasingly turned to digital communication and networking tools for personal connections and social relations. From messaging and dating apps to microblogging and live-streaming platforms, mediated forms of sociality constitute a significant part of people’s intimate lives. Scholarly works on modern and contemporary China have shown how practices and politics of intimacy are formulated and contested against the backdrop of the tensions between the residual culture of Confucianism, the socialist ideological regime, and China’s participation in global capitalism. On the contrary, research on global network societies has foregrounded the role of information and media technologies in mediating intimacy with conceptual frameworks such as programmed sociality and networked intimacy. Bridging these two areas of research, this essay attempts to understand how intimate sociality is configured within China’s burgeoning digital economy and culture. It first provides a review of previous works on forms of intimacy and sociality mediated by network technologies ranging from mobile phones to online dating. Using the popularity of live streaming in current-day China as a case study, this essay then introduces the problem of “scale” to consider how intimacy is mediated at scale with Internet-based media technologies and discuss how scalability shapes intimate lives in Chinese society as a shared rationale behind modernization, network technologies, and new forms of economies. This essay proposes the concept of scalable intimacy to move beyond the platform-centered approach and develop a more contextualized framework for understanding intimate sociality in digital China.

“Not, out of the whole affair, to have got anything for myself”: James’s Mediators

Abstract: This essay traces its author’s changing understanding, over forty-five years of critical engagement, of the many James protagonists who, like Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors , fail, often deliberately, to “get anything for themselves” out of the affairs in which they are enmeshed. With reference to developments in James studies since the 1980s, the essay describes its author’s own shift away from once-standard narratives of renunciation to his present re-casting of these characters as “mediators”—James’s representatives in his radical, even utopian effort to imagine alternative, less violent and appropriative, forms of intimacy, relation, and community.

Keeping the market afloat: attachments, circuits of clientele, and personalized commodity exchanges in rural shopkeeping

ABSTRACT This paper questions the conditions of possibility and limits of the most intimate forms of emotional capitalism by studying the everyday working lives of female shopkeepers in rural France. Combining an ethnography of relational work with the sociology of market attachments, it examines how they cultivate customer relationships that border on friendship through affective and caring labor as well as personalized services, without becoming completely entangled in gift-giving exchanges and overwhelming social obligations. Beyond the dynamics of closeness, this article reveals three mechanisms that enable these intimate attachments to operate with little moral or economic tension: a symbolic hierarchization of customers within circuits of clientele; the earmarking of their most personalized commodity exchanges as gifts; and the avoidance of socializing outside the shop and excessive kindness in gift-giving. By expending time and emotions and skillfully balancing closeness with distance, generosity with profitability, shopkeepers can successfully secure a steady income through the personal loyalty of a small group of customers fueled by mutual feelings of affection and indebtedness. Paradoxically, the more emotional capitalism gravitates towards these intimate commercial attachments, the more it requires the simultaneous maintenance of affective and relational distance to preserve the very existence of the market.

“It’s Complicated”: How Black and White Women Innovate with Situationships at Midlife

Abstract The sexual and romantic activities of unmarried women at midlife are often invisible in survey research based on normative categories of adult intimacy. However, women at this stage in the life course are structurally positioned to innovate with intimacy. In our interviews with 53 Black and white women between ages 33-58, outside of stable partnerships, and open to sex and intimacy with men, we find that women’s frustration with marriage and marriage-like commitment, negative experiences dating, and lack of interest in celibacy led them to experiment with a new form of intimacy. A majority engaged in ongoing liaisons in a liminal space between casual and committed—what emerging scholarship on the romantic relationships of Black women refer to as “situationships.” Black women, those with higher incomes, and queer-identified women were more likely to use situationships. We argue that women’s use of situationships challenged normative expectations that felt constraining to many at midlife and allowed women to enjoy the benefits of sexual and romantic company. Situationships enabled them to avoid casual sex and maintain autonomy and single identity. Finally, we highlight the disadvantages of situationships, emphasizing the importance of life stage and orientation to normative arrangements for situationship experiences.

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

‘What is toast?’ Language and society in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

ABSTRACT With its depiction of a ‘word man’ as the sole survivor of the human race, Oryx and Crake offers a unique perspective on the correlation between the death of a people and the death of their language: Jimmy/Snowman’s narrative perspective centres the role of language at the tipping point of society. This paper undertakes a close reading of extinction (of humankind and of human language) in the novel, using this to inform a broader conceptual study of meaning-making in social systems and the role of language in memory. The oscillation throughout the novel between memories of a peopled world and the post-apocalyptic present day facilitates discussion of how language functions in both individual and social settings, such as fashioning memory through acts of naming and renaming, and the experience of shared language as a form of intimacy.

Transcending prison walls: Prison podcasts, the listening experience, and narrative change

Prison stories play an important role in people’s understanding of incarceration with the underlying messages often supporting it as an effective solution for the crime problem. While core elements flow between most types of prison representations, advances in media technology present new ways of constructing these stories, making it easier for those who have experienced incarceration to control the message. Podcasting is one such development. This easily accessible medium is able to present a unique listening experience that has been found to induce empathy, strengthen the connection to the subject, and has the potential to contribute to changes in attitudes. This article compares two incarceration narrative podcasts, Ear Hustle and Red Onion Randy—Life in a Supermax, to demonstrate the potential power of this intimate form of media. Drawing from transportation theory, as well as literature on literary journalism and auditory storytelling, it considers how podcasting can be utilized to create a lived or felt experience for listeners that has the potential to begin to shift popular incarceration narratives.

Interlocked: kinship, intimate precarity, and plantation labour in India

AbstractThis article examines the employment of kinship relations in sustaining the plantation economy and in perpetuating the precariousness of child labourers who later became temporary workers in the tea plantations of Kerala, South India. Kinship ties locked diverse workers into a moral obligation of care that could easily be manipulated by plantation management as a form of labour control. Plantation capitalism, therefore, sustained itself not only through overt forms of violence but also through manipulating the precarity of employment in relation to intimate forms of love, care, and obligation that were bound up with kinship ties. Kinship networks of different kinds need to be understood as integral to the plantation society and as occupying a fundamental place within the capitalist order of plantations. I observe that the entangled relationship between workers’ precarity and plantation capitalism can be understood only if we pay attention to what I call the intimate precarity produced by the employment of kinship networks within plantation capitalism.

Etched in Flesh: The Philosophy of Tattoos and Tattooing

Tattooing is an ancient art form, dating back to Neolithic times and is today widely practiced the world over. Given tattooing’s popularity and its wide acceptance in the modern world (a recent survey found that 30 percent of the adult American population has at least one tattoo), philosophers’ continued silence with respect to tattooing is mystifying. If philosophers have nothing to say about tattooing, what could be the reason for such a glaring omission? This disregard is telling: It may be that philosophers consider tattooing too “low brow”, and hence, not worthy of their consideration. In what follows, we offer a few reasons why philosophers of art should take tattooing seriously as an art form. We will also expand on our contention that tattoos represent one of the most intimate forms of art known to humanity (indeed, perhaps the most intimate). Lastly, we will consider tattooing as a representational art form, and attempt to discern what can be gleaned of the tattoo artist’s intentions from her work.

Felicia Donceanu – The cycle of lieds Three songs for Til on lyrics by George Călinescu

Born on Moldavian soil, on January 28, 1931, in Bacău, the composer Felicia Donceanu completed her musical studies at the “Ciprian Porumbescu” Conservatory in Bucharest, under the high supervision of some already established personalities of Romanian music. She composed for various genres, from instrumental theater, children's music, to chamber music, stage music, vocal-symphonic, choral, thus exhibiting, with exquisite skill, her mastery of laying down the notes on the musical scale. With a special love for Romanian poetry and literature and beyond, Felicia Donceanu dipped her writing pen in ink to give voice to her music and through the power of her own words. Authentically feeling this vein of poetic art, she also stood out with texts dedicated to various choral works of Romanian composers. She wrote scripts for various musical-choreographic performances, or radio dedicated, and with her painting talent she gave life to illustrations in children's books. As for the admiration that Felicia Donceanu gives to the distinguished man of culture, George Călinescu, it is drawn in two directions, holding a profound respect for the originality of the personality and the works of this illustrious representative of Romanian culture and literature, who ravished souls and became a source of inspiration, both for the young students of the Faculty of Letters and for people of culture in general. It is not surprising that Felicia Donceanu found in the creation of the poet George Călinescu a never-ending source of inspiration. In 1964, the cycle Three songs for Til was born, including the lieds: The Steps, The Leaf and The Living Water. It is based on the love poem structured and rendered in three different forms from a poetic and compositional point of view. Felicia Donceanu thought of the three lieds, in a “suite in pre-classical style: gavotte (The Steps), saraband (The Leaf) and courant (The Living Water)... each of them being doubled by meanings close to popular creation... in the first one, the game..., in the second one, the romance (with depressive, chromatic accents) and in the third one, the enchantment” (Constantinescu, 1966, p. 24). The musical interpretation of the poems is not a simple metaphorical game, the musical character of the poems, in general - far from being just an ornament - being part of the act of creation necessary for a fair reception, because it is created in a certain mood and a special tension of tone, and the reader or listener will have to perceive it in the same tension and texture. The quality of the sound, the form and the point of crystallization of the feeling make up an act of creation and not a borrowing, made by the poet or performer, from life. Poetry is the intimate form of creation, the acquired vocal timbre that identifies itself entirely with the musicality of the content.

Living Apart Together (LAT): A New Family Form in Urban India

With the rise of globalisation, a considerable number of married couples are opting to live apart from each other post marriage. Several studies in the West have examined the concept of living apart together (LAT). However, this marriage arrangement has not received much attention in Indian scholarship. LAT is being adopted in both (arranged and love) forms of marriage systems in India. Against this backdrop, the present study aims to understand why this form of a marriage system is gaining prominence among educated urban couples in India. Using Anthony Giddens’s theory of pure relationships and relying on in-depth qualitative interviews, the study will highlight the formation of a new form of intimacy among couples practicing LAT. Finally, the study will demonstrate how the role of the family, changing gender norms and individual aspirations shape LAT in urban India.

Playing That Crystal Flute: Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives

Playing That Crystal Flute:Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives Kristin Moriah (bio) Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. By Daphne Brooks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. 608 pages. $39.95 (hardcover). Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll. By Maureen Mahon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 408 pages. $29.95 (paperback). Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive. By Mark Anthony Neal. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 232 pages. $27.00 (paperback). Black women and Black musicians have a contentious relationship with archival practices and popular memory. Take Lizzo, for example, and the moment she played James Madison's previously untouched two-hundred-year-old flute at a concert in Washington, DC, in fall 2022. In that instance, she was, as the kids say, her ancestors' wildest dreams. She certainly seemed to be creating a full circle, reaching toward the eighteenth century and grasping hold of a powerful symbol of the Enlightenment cherished by a founding father whose most notorious achievements would be used to disenfranchise women like Lizzo for generations. Common wisdom tells us that she was not meant to touch it. The crystal flute's very status within the Library of Congress calls attention to its symbolic power and its distance from Black women's marginalized position in society. Can you be Lizzo, a Black musician, and play the flute? More specifically, can you be Lizzo and play that flute? In their recent books, Daphne Brooks, Maureen Mahon, and Mark Anthony Neal reckon with such questions raised by Black musicians and musical archives at a time when Black music and its influence on popular culture is both ubiquitous and contentious. They write from a cultural context in which the roots, nuances, and implications of Black musical life have often been obscured and whose continued existence, in the [End Page 395] case of Black musical archives, is often tenuous. Their scholarship represents a deep engagement with a diverse set of sonic archives and innovators. The need to theorize work so foundational to American popular culture, to mine sounds always seemingly present and in motion, arises from a sense of urgency spurred by the fascination with and furor over Black popular musicians. In Liner Notes for the Revolution, Daphne Brooks argues that "Black women of sound" have "a history unfolding on other frequencies while the world adores them and simultaneously devalues them" (1). Brooks takes "seriously the centrality of sound in Black women's lives as a foundation for developing and sustaining pivotal, profoundly meaningful world-making sociocultural networks and forms of intimacy with one another" (12). In doing so, she recalls the work of scholars like Jayna Brown when she argues that "what these Black women musicians offer, in short, is another way of hearing, reading, theorizing, making the modern. Black women of sound sign and sing themselves through their listening such that they reframe archaic philosophies of the 'Self' born out of high Enlightenment—thought that never had them in mind" (17). In Brooks's work, readers will also find echoes of Paul Gilroy, Sylvia Wynter, and Alexander Weheliye and their interrogations of Western Humanism and modernity. What is more, while rigorously engaging with critical theory from a range of fields, Liner Notes is structured like a vinyl record. Thus the text speaks to the influence of material culture on Black sound studies. Black media form part of the message. Side A of Liner Notes is "a meditation on the importance of intellectual labour and Black women's sonic cultures" (45). Side B is "an exploration of elusive Black women musicians and the critics and artists who have focused their attention on their legacies in a variety of ways" (45). Side B takes inspiration from the experimental nature of B sides and moves more fully into "the speculative terrain of revolutionary possibility" (45). Taken together, each side is a reminder that listening is a central critical practice. Liner Notes is a manifesto that offers a blueprint for the work that Black feminism can accomplish in the field of sound studies. While Brooks is interested in how theory and cultural criticism can...

Using Facebook Messenger versus Groups for News Engagement

For online news organizations trying to improve audience engagement strategies, Facebook Groups and Messenger chats constitute promising avenues. We explore whether these meso news-spaces, with different discourse architectures and group sizes, affect the substance of the discussion and people’s impressions. In this study, we experimentally tested how training and intimate forms of news engagement in small-group discussions on Facebook Messenger compare with larger conversations in a Facebook Group. The study draws from a real-world experiment in collaboration with Vox Media and its popular Facebook Group for the political podcast The Weeds. Results show that participants perceive the Messenger group as more civil and respectful and report being less prone to self-censor in the Messenger group. Comments in the Messenger group, however, are less relevant to The Weeds podcast and participation in the Messenger group leads people to have less favorable views of the large Facebook Group. The ways in which discourse architecture and group size affect digital discussions provide theoretical and practical insights.

Cross-sectional study of the association of social relationship resources with Staphylococcus aureus colonization in naturally occurring social groups along the US/Mexico border.

Asymptomatic carriage of Staphylococcus aureus is a major risk factor for subsequent clinical infection. Diminishing returns from mitigation efforts emphasize the need to better understand colonization, spread, and transmission of this opportunistic pathogen. While contact with other people presents opportunities for pathogen exposure and transmission, diversity of social connections may be protective against pathogens such as the common cold. This study examined whether social relationship resources, including the amount and diversity of social contacts, are associated with S. aureus colonization. Participants were community members (N = 443; 68% Hispanic) in naturally occurring social groups in southwestern Arizona. Four types of social relationships and loneliness were assessed, and samples from the skin, nose and throat were obtained to ascertain S. aureus colonization. Overall S. aureus prevalence was 64.8%. Neither the amount nor the diversity of social contacts were associated with S. aureus colonization. The concurrent validity of the social relationship assessments was supported by their moderate intercorrelations and by their positive association with self-rated health. The results suggest that the association of social network diversity and susceptibility to the common cold does not extend to S. aureus colonization. Conversely, colonization prevalence was not higher among those with more social contacts. The latter pattern suggests that social transmission may be relatively infrequent or that more intimate forms of social interaction may drive transmission and colonization resulting in high community prevalence of S. aureus colonization. These data inform communicable disease control efforts.

MOROCCAN-SPANISH COUPLES’ DECOLONIAL RESPONSES ON TIKTOK

In the past years, the use of social media has allowed migrants and other minority groups to communicate, obtain information and build an identity through self-representation and content creation. The possibility to talk about their experiences, connect to other content creators and interact with the platform allows to decentralize the European narrative and offer visibility to other cultures. In this context, TikTok emerges as one of the platforms where traditionally marginalized populations narrate their experiences and enter public debates. In this case we study Spanish-Moroccan mixed couples who must face the cultural stereotypes derived from the geographical, historical, and colonial confluences between these two nations. To carry out the study, a qualitative analysis was carried out by identifying TikTok videos using the hashtags #mixedcouples and #SpainandMorocco in their Spanish and English versions. We then identified other hashtags of interest that appeared together with these and found other videos of interest. We viewed a total of 8,653 videos and identified six profiles of interest from creators that self-identified as being part of a Spanish-Moroccan mixed couple and had more than 10K followers. This analysis reflects the difficulties faced by people who chose more intimate forms of integration and the existing colonial paradigms in terms of mixed romantic partners. At the same time, these creators exemplify the existence of points of encounter between seemingly opposite cultures and nationalities through their (self)representations and discourses on this platform, as well as the increased visibility they are achieving through their content and profiles.

‘90 per cent of the time when I have had a drink in my hand I’m on my phone as well’: A cross-national analysis of communications technologies and drinking practices among young people

Greater use of communication technologies among young people, including mobile phones, social media and communication apps, has coincided with declines in youth alcohol use in many high-income countries. However, little research has unpacked how drinking as a practice within interconnected routines and interactions may be changing alongside these technologies. Drawing on qualitative interviews about drinking with young people aged 16–23 across three similar studies in Australia, the United Kingdom and Sweden, we identify how communication technologies may afford reduced or increased drinking. They may reduce drinking by producing new online contexts, forms of intimacy and competing activities. They may increase drinking by re-organising drinking occasions, rituals and contexts. And they may increase or reduce drinking by enabling greater fluidity and interaction between diverse practices. These countervailing dynamics have likely contributed to shifting drinking patterns and practices for young people that may be obscured beneath the population-level decline in youth drinking.

Comparative adversaria of Gandhi and Marx: self-clarification through thinking in diaries and letters

ABSTRACT We can now see in the public sphere almost everything written by Karl Marx and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Both are widely read, and both have had major impacts on how many people, if not all in some way, understand political activity. Both were prolific writers, but their ideas would exceed the forms in which they were expressed. Access to even their most intimate writings—diary, drafts, notebooks, personal letters—perhaps allows us to better see, in a retrospective way, their thinking unfold. Looking at private correspondence, notebooks and diaries of famous political figures reveal writing as a tool of self-clarification, providing insight into the labour required as a prelude to formal publication. Seeking out how public texts were rehearsed and assembled in more intimate forms for the ears of others also raises questions about who gets to write and read, and of course, what is retained and what is excluded by publication. Comparing Marx’s notebooks and drafts with Capital or Gandhi’s daily diary with its published versions might mean asking different self-clarifying questions, in our different contexts of distraction. And of Marx and Gandhi, might we ask if it is still possible for someone politically engaged to write all the time? An emphasis on “adversaria” may itself be a privileged diversion, available only to those who will be measured in turn.

Fisting intimacy: The sexual scripting of intimacy in gay men’s anal fisting

ABSTRACT Anal fisting has often been caricatured as an aggressive, if not violent, mode of sexual and erotic practice between gay men, circumscribed by discourses of risk, danger, and even death. In this study, I explore how a sample of 28 South African gay men who regularly incorporate anal fisting into their preferred sexual practices construct and understand the experience of intimacy in the practices and relations of their fist-fucking. Through sexual scripting theory and a Thematic Analysis of unstructured individual interviews conducted with participants, the results highlight a scripting of intimacy with/in anal fisting that is grounded on three recurrent and interrelated themes: trust and vulnerability; connection and communication; as well as pleasure and skill. The results of this study draw attention to the ways in which anal fisting is not only experienced as a deeply intimate form of pleasure and lovemaking for its participants, but, moreover, how the construction and understanding of intimacy in fist-fucking is framed as a queer/er mode of anal sex/uality and erotics that defines and constitutes itself in contradistinction to both hetero- and homo-normative scripts.

Archiving Black Diasporas

Archiving Black Diasporas