Forms Of Intimacy Research Articles

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INTIMACY AND INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS IN ASSISTED LIVING

AbstractIntimate relationships are rarely studied in the context of older adults’ care arrangements, particularly in long-term care settings. Consequently, little is known about the availability and effects of intimacy in the lives of long-term care residents. Addressing this gap, this paper focuses on the intimacy experiences of older adults residing in 8 diverse assisted living (AL) communities. We analyze data drawn from a five-year NIA-funded qualitative study (R01AG044368) guided by the “Convoys of Care” model. Previous analysis of study data shows that most residents experience some form of intimacy in their day-to-day lives. Yet, a range of multilevel factors influences intimacy and many have unmet intimacy needs in these settings. Building on this work, our aim is to understand how the presence and absence of intimacy influences residents’ lives, relationships, and care experiences in AL. Findings show that some AL residents sought out, created, and maintained intimacy through a variety of interaction and relationships and with other residents, family, and care staff. Residents who had companionship, particularly involving physical interactions, felt it enhanced their quality of life and care. In some instances, such companionship created conflict within care networks. Mostly, however, formal and informal caregivers experienced relief and satisfaction when residents established intimate connections, including friendships. Many residents desired, but lacked outlets for intimacy, which frequently led to feelings of loneliness, isolation, and sadness. This outcomes was particularly prevalent among men. Our findings imply the need for a holistic model of care that takes into account and addresses intimacy needs.

The Storytelling Quilt: Ethnic Narratives in Zakes Mda’s Cion

This essay aims to analyze the quilt in Zakes Mda`s novel Cion as a Benjaminian storytelling. As a communal heritage from the time of slav ery, the quilt bridges two stories, the one of the Quigley family in the present time and the other of their ancestors from the nineteenth-century Virginia slavery plantation. The slaves stitch their memories, escape accounts, and folktales on their quilts to assist with their fellow slaves` journey to freedom. Rather than merely communicating cartographic information, however, the quilt affects its carriers/readers as a spiritual guide and facilitates further interpretation and addition, thereby exempli fying a storyteller according to Walter Benjamin`s theorization. According to him, the storytelling does not transmit verifiable information or an indi vidual author`s consciousness but combines collective myths, undocu mented voices, and talks of spiritual wisdom. The quilt also helps to ren der the residents` ethnic identity as a storytelling. For the Quigley family and neighbors of a mixed racial background, the ethnic identity that the quilt represents is not one that is determined from the beginning by an essential origin or a particular author but one that new generations reinter pret and rewrite to cope with their present concerns. The quilt-like open, collective, and mnemonic narrative of ethnic identity is of the nature to be constantly reinvented through collective efforts so that it allows encoun ters between different times and between different spaces, and thus invokes new forms of intimacy, belonging, and solidarity.

Experience of Touch in Health Care: A Meta-Ethnography Across the Health Care Professions.

Touch mediates health professionals' interactions with patients. Different professionals have reported their practices but what is currently lacking is a well-theorized, interprofessional synthesis. We systematically searched eight databases, identified 41 studies in seven professions-nursing (27), medicine (4), physiotherapy (5), osteopathy (1), counseling (2), psychotherapy (1), dentistry (1)-and completed a meta-ethnographic line-of-argument synthesis. This found that touch is caring, exercises power, and demands safe space. Different professions express care through the medium of touch in different ways. They all, however, expect to initiate touch rather than for patients to do so. Various practices negotiate boundaries that define safe spaces between health care professions and patients. A metaphor-the waltz-integrates the practice of touch. Health care professionals connect physically with patients in ways that form strong relationships between them while "dance steps" help manage the risk that is inherent in such an intimate form of connection.

Now I See You, Now I Don’t: Screen Services, Short Stature, and the Fear of Being Seen

As psychoanalysts venture into the online world, they are confronted with both anxiety and opportunity. In this paper, I attempt to add to our collective thinking about the perils and potentials of introducing technologically mediated communication (e.g., Skype, FaceTime) into the treatment situation. I present the case of an 11-year-old boy of short stature, or Dwarfism, for whom screen relations–based sessions were used as an adjunct to face-to-face psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I argue that the introduction of screen relations provided the patient with a temporary respite from the narcissistic pain of being seen. Indeed, although I agree that relying on screen relations risks the possibility of relational disconnection between analyst and patient, it may also provide a means for the patient to begin to exert a degree of control over impinging reflected appraisals of himself via the analyst’s visual, auditory, and physical copresence without banishing them entirely. In the case I present, the introduction of screen relations presented the analytic dyad with an opportunity to work through important relational meanings attached to the patient’s experience of being small. Over time, the patient was able to risk new, increasingly intimate forms of engagement both inside and outside of the consulting room.

Ethnographies of social enterprise

PurposeAs a critical and intimate form of inquiry, ethnography remains close to lived realities and equips scholars with a unique methodological angle on social phenomena. This paper aims to explore the potential gains from an increased use of ethnography in social enterprise studies.Design/methodology/approachThe authors develop the argument through a set of dualistic themes, namely, the socio-economic dichotomy and the discourse/practice divide as predominant critical lenses through which social enterprise is currently examined, and suggest shifts from visible leaders to invisible collectives and from case study-based monologues to dialogic ethnography.FindingsEthnography sheds new light on at least four neglected aspects. Studying social enterprises ethnographically complicates simple reductions to socio-economic tensions, by enriching the set of differences through which practitioners make sense of their work-world. Ethnography provides a tool for unravelling how practitioners engage with discourse(s) of power, thus marking the concrete results of intervention (to some degree at least) as unplannable, and yet effective. Ethnographic examples signal the merits of moving beyond leaders towards more collective representations and in-depth accounts of (self-)development. Reflexive ethnographies demonstrate the heuristic value of accepting the self as an inevitable part of research and exemplify insights won through a thoroughly bodily and emotional commitment to sharing the life world of others.Originality/valueThe present volume collects original ethnographic research of social enterprises. The editorial develops the first consistent account of the merits of studying social enterprises ethnographically.

Discourses on Non‐conforming Marriages: Love in Taiwan

In contemporary Taiwan, arranged marriage seems a remote legend. However, the mainstream ideology of romantic love and marriage is a recent phenomenon that started only half a century ago. The debate on love and marriage that took place a hundred years ago has been reopened in current Taiwanese society on transnational marriage and same‐sex marriage debates, which are regarded as non‐conforming marriages in a specific historical period. We argue that the hegemonic ideology of romantic love has produced a powerful exclusionary effect on cross‐border marriages based on ethnic and class discrimination, but also an inclusive effect on same‐sex marriage in present Taiwan society, which underscores the power of the discourse of love in modern Taiwanese social life. The love discourse can be progressive in a specific historical conjuncture, but it can also be regressive by excluding other forms of intimacy.

Queer Time on the Early Modern Stage: France and the Drama of Biopower

In mid-seventeenth-century France, newly precise timepieces offered an unprecedented richness to the experience of time: of time passing, of haste, and of slowness. Time governed affects and desires in new ways: from certain socio-sexual tempos (paces of courtship, reproduction) to the propriety of behavior onstage (in the unity of time). The theater, fast becoming a cornerstone of Absolutist statecraft, both modeled and contested new types of embodiment and new temporalities that were on the horizon. However, instead of analyzing the explicitly political uses of theater, I examine theater’s more subtle forms of managing the population through chrono-biopower. As Foucault argues, disciplinary power, rather than deciding on the right to live or to die, sought instead to manage bodies through the controlled flourishing or strategic diminishing of life’s capacities. One essential and overlooked component of biopower includes the sensation of time as dramatized onstage. Drawing upon examples from Benserade’s Iphis et Iante and Corneille’s Le Cid, I unearth the counter-hegemonic erotics, forms of intimacies, and circulations of affect that speeds and slownesses can reveal in the theater.

The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: English Lion, 1930–1933 ed. by Jason Harding, Ronald Schuchard, and: Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 5—1930–1931 ed. by John Haffenden

Reviewed by: The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: English Lion, 1930–1933 ed. by Jason Harding, Ronald Schuchard, and: Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 5—1930–1931 ed. by John Haffenden Matthew Creasy (bio) Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard, editors. The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: English Lion, 1930–1933. Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. xlvii + 873 pp. £n/a. isbn 978 1 4214 1891 9. John Haffenden, editor. Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 5—1930–1931. Faber, 2015. lxi + 862 pp. £40. isbn 978 0 5713 1632 8. Towards the end of his final Charles Eliot Norton lecture at Harvard on 31 March 1933, T. S. Eliot addressed “the vexed question of obscurity and unintelligibility,” identifying “several reasons” for difficulty in poetry that range from “personal causes which make it impossible for a poet to express himself in any but an obscure way” and “novelty,” to the nature of readers’ expectations and the “difficulty caused by the author’s having left out something which reader is used to finding” (689). The editors of the most recent volume of the ongoing edition of his Complete Prose, Ronald Schuchard and Jason Harding, suggest that these comments indicate how “stung” Eliot felt by “perplexed responses” to his meditative poem, Ash-Wednesday, after it was published in 1930 (xxix). Eliot’s correspondence in the fifth volume of John Haffenden’s edition of his letters, provides some confirmation about his personal motives. Sending [End Page 559] copies of Ash Wednesday to friends and acquaintance proved a mixed experience for Eliot, who discerned disappointment in the response of the critic, A. L. Rowse and took humorous umbrage at Virginia Woolf’s observation that she could not “fathom” it (“Are you not aware,” he wrote, “that there are many people who consider your own works the depths of obscurity?” [229]). He also had to field earnest inquiries about the poem’s “symbolism” from Oxford students and other enthusiasts. Away from his audience in a Harvard lecture theatre, Eliot took a slightly different stance on “obscurity.” Writing to a new friend, the Reverend Geoffrey Curtis, he observed: As for obscurity, I like to think that there is a good and a bad kind: the bad, which merely puzzles or leads astray; the good, that which is the obscurity of any flower: something simple and to be simply enjoyed, but merely incomprehensible as anything living is incomprehensible. (220) This reference to “the obscurity of any flower” recalls Mallarmé’s “Crise de vers” (“I say: a flower!”) with its relish for formal poetic difficulty as a response to the inevitable disparity between language and the objects it seeks to describe. Ten years previously Eliot had felt a sense of obligation or imperative here. In his essay on “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), he had declared that “poets in our civilisation, as it exists at present, must be difficult.” Whilst not wholly incommensurate, tensions between his open critical pronouncements and his correspondence in the 1930s make it clear how much Eliot’s sense of his public position and the degree to which he felt accountable to readers had shifted over time. The allusive connection to Mallarmé broadens the scope of Eliot’s letter to Curtis, suggesting a consciousness of the way that other voices might impinge on their conversation, drawing it into relation with wider literary discourse. It illustrates how letter writing is not simply a private act and straddles public forms of utterance too. Eliot, for example, wrote officially as the editor of the Criterion magazine or on behalf of Faber and Dwyer, the publishing company where he worked, but also adopted more intimate forms of expression when writing to friends on other occasions. As Haffenden records, Eliot expressed dislike to an old girlfriend, Emily Hale about the idea of exposing his “private life” to public scrutiny by publishing [End Page 560] his letters (xxi). But for someone of Eliot’s stature and repute, it must have been hard not to write with a sense that his words might resonate beyond his immediate interlocutor. The Complete Prose and Letters speak to each other in important and significant ways. For example, Eliot...

The intimate intensity of Evangelical fighting ministries

The author discusses what she learned from her participation in evangelical fighting ministries, paying special attention to how these communities sought to connect with God through interacting with each other. In training with and interviewing the members of these ministries in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the author found that as evangelical Christians, many struggled to establish and maintain the primacy of their personal relationships with God over their interpersonal interests. Yet they also believed their relationships with God were meant to be witnessed and experienced by others. During moments of worship they shared emotional intimacy, granting each other opportunities to make outwardly perceivable their internally felt relationships with God. During their Brazilian jiu-jitsu training, they were encouraged to feel God’s presence as they grappled with each other at very close contact. Using the concept of compartmentalisation, the author analyses how these evangelical fighting ministries demarcated their practices into emotional and physical forms of intimacy, thereby finding different ways to achieve what they perceived as personal contact with God in their intense interactions with each other.

Sexting: adolescents’ perceptions of the applications used for, motives for, and consequences of sexting

ABSTRACTThis study explores adolescents’ perceptions of applications used for sexting, the motives for engaging in sexting, and the consequences they relate to sexting behavior. We conducted 11 same-sex focus groups among 57 adolescents (66.67% females; n = 38) between 15 and 18 years old in Flanders, Belgium. The analysis revealed that sexting mostly occurs through smartphone applications, such as Snapchat, which are perceived to be a more intimate form of communication than other digital applications, such as social networking sites. Both female and male respondents observed that girls might sometimes feel pressured to engage in sexting. They did so mostly out of fear that otherwise they would lose their boyfriends. Female and male respondents mentioned three main ways in which sexting photographs could be abused: (1) they could be used to coerce or to blackmail the victim, (2) they could be distributed out of revenge after the breakup of a romantic relationship, or (3) they could be forwarded or shown to peers in order to boast about having received the digital photograph. Anecdotes, which illustrate our findings, are included in the results. Suggestions for future research and implications for practice are discussed.

Access, Place and Australian Live Music

The role of place in cultivating artistic practice, communities and audiences is well established and the economic, social and cultural benefits that flow from this are becoming better understood. By contrast, the factors impacting and influencing access to these places is poorly theorised. This paper identifies and examines these factors as they apply to live music in Australia, through a qualitative survey of live music patrons and venues. We compare the themes identified from our data with existing theories of access in the arts, with a particular focus on the ways in which place-based music scenes may encourage or exclude participation. We address the question of how access affects participation within these scenes, as well as how access might be improved.

WHAT DO WE DO WHEN WE EAT? Part II: A THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY

What do we do when we eat? In the second part of this contribution the fivefold typology offered in the first part is supple­mented by three (more or less) theological approaches on the basis of the concepts of recycling, kenosis and superfluous joy. In an inconclusive proposal it is suggested that eating is best understood as a form of intimacy, not enmity. Indeed, one becomes what one eats. One litmus test for any adequate theological interpretation of eating is an eschatological one: would “eternal life” involve both eating and predation, eating but not predation, or no eating and therefore no predation? What kind of life would that be? Or is our last best hope merely for life on earth to continue as long as possible, if not forever?

Systematic and Dramatic Tuning on Gas Sorption Performance in Heterometallic Metal–Organic Frameworks

Despite their having much greater potential for compositional and structural diversity, heterometallic metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) reported so far have lagged far behind their homometallic counterparts in terms of CO2 uptake performance. Now the power of heterometallic MOFs is in full display, as shown by a series of new materials (denoted CPM-200s) with superior CO2 uptake capacity (up to 207.6 cm(3)/g at 273 K and 1 bar), close to the all-time record set by MOF-74-Mg. The isosteric heat of adsorption can also be tuned from -16.4 kJ/mol for CPM-200-Sc/Mg to -79.6 kJ/mol for CPM-200-V/Mg. The latter value is the highest reported for MOFs with Lewis acid sites. Some members of the CPM-200s family consist of combinations of metal ions (e.g., Mg/Ga, Mg/Fe, Mg/V, Mg/Sc) that have never been shown to coexist in any known crystalline porous materials. Such previously unseen combinations become reality through a cooperative crystallization process, which leads to the most intimate form of integration between even highly dissimilar metals, such as Mg(2+) and V(3+). The synergistic effects of heterometals bestow CPM-200s with the highest CO2 uptake capacity among known heterometallic MOFs and place them in striking distance of the all-time CO2 uptake record.

The Materiality of Intimacy in Wildlife Rehabilitation: Rethinking Ethical Capitalism through Embodied Encounters with Animals in Southeast Asia

Southeast Asian wildlife rehabilitation centers, such as an orangutan rehabilitation center in Malaysia and an elephant sanctuary in Thailand, facilitate commodified forms of intimacy between endemic animals, their caretakers who also hail from the region, and transnational commercial volunteers. These forms of intimacy include cleaning animal feces as well as gaining physical proximity and even tactile contact. At first glance, commercial volunteerism at such sites appears to convey the idea of ethical capitalism, which Slavoj Žižek describes as “consumption for a cause.” However, ethnographic investigation of these sites reveals that focusing on clean consumption alone cannot account for the ways in which dirty bodily effects fuel the industry of commercialized volunteerism. This article ethnographically examines how intimate encounters across species, specifically between people and endemic charismatic megafauna, fuel a transnational economy. It is based on ethnographic research conducted in Sarawak, Malaysia, and Chiang Mai, Thailand, between 2008 and 2010. Ultimately, it helps show how a global industry is produced through the commodification of intimate encounters across difference.

Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer by Michelle Ann Stephens

Reviewed by: Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer by Michelle Ann Stephens Brandon J. Manning (bio) Stephens, Michelle Ann. Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014. In Skin Acts, Michelle Stephens explores the labor and function of the corporeal, specifically the epidermis, and how it is imbricated in the black masculine performances of Bert Williams, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, and Bob Marley. Stephens centers Paul Gilroy’s and Franz Fanon’s earlier exploration of the “epidermalization” of blackness in order to theorize the intersections at which black skin informs the reception, performance, and meaning of black masculine performance throughout the twentieth century. In a theoretically heavy introduction, titled “Fleshing Out the Act,” Stephens cogently articulates a theoretical terrain that better understands the relationship of black subjects’ minds and bodies and their proximity to a world that mediates its understanding through skin, complexion, and facial expressions by highlighting historical theories of the skin and body with the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. In the first chapter, “Seeing Face, Hearing Sings,” Stephens analyzes the importance of facialization in black face minstrelsy by critically engaging the performance, portraiture, and fictionalized biography of Bert Williams. Stephens highlights the falsity of blacks donning blackface to portray a perception of blackness put forth by white minstrel actors and rounds out her conversation by pulling from other historical and literary engagements of Bert Williams—specifically Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark (2005). Here, Stephens troubles Ralph Ellison’s repudiation of the black minstrel performer to demonstrate an “ironic performing consciousness in the songs and lyrics created by the musicians and composers who produced black minstrel acts” (53). In addition to convincing readings of In Dahomey (1903) and Dancing in the Dark, Stephens includes portraiture and song sheets to demonstrate moments of resistance in Williams’s minstrel performances. Stephens asserts that within the parodic work on the minstrel stage Williams attempts to reclaim the black male body at the expense of his voice and body. “Bodylines, Borderlines, Color Lines,” Stephens’s second chapter, “mark[s] an important shift in the visual culture of modernism” by deconstructing the centrality of skin in Paul Robeson’s artistic works (72). Stephens cogently argues that this shift from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries’ emphasis on the face within a black minstrel tradition, as typified by Bert Williams, was broadened to the entire body by early modernism. Thus, it is Robeson’s body—his physique—and not simply his face that American popular culture was interested in during this early modernist moment. To underscore this point, Stephens analyzes Antonio Salemme’s full-length nude statue of Robeson, Negro Spiritual, and then interrogates the modernist gaze of Salemme’s statue of Robeson with H. D.’s Red Roses for Bronze (1931) to elucidate how a modernist gaze of Robeson was invested in “a more intimate form of recognition” (77). After discussing the white gaze of Robeson’s body, Stephens analyzes Robeson’s films Borderline (1930) and Song of Freedom (1936) to engage the title of the chapter and work through the formal aspects of framing in film, and theorize the boundaries of bodies and complexions on the screen. Stephens ends the chapter discussing the importance and intention behind Robeson’s blurry body in Song of Freedom and the distance it creates between him and his audience. The author’s third chapter, “The Problem of Color,” explores the shift in technologies in film production—specifically Technicolor—and how the 1950s and film technologies [End Page 715] ushered in a new white gaze “reifying and phallicizing blackness as ‘color’ in a new social and political ideal” (120). Stephens begins the chapter by retelling a story of Baldwin and the racial dynamic of what he refers to as a schizophrenic gaze at a civil rights march in Montgomery, Alabama, and how the audience’s—specifically white women’s—contempt shifted to adulation at the sight of Harry Belafonte. Indeed, Stephens’s reliance on the writings of James Baldwin function as a sort of through line for the chapter, making her contributions to the iconicity of Harry Belafonte a project that extends...

Tra rito e performance: la "regolata devozione" milanese nel Settecento

Starting from the analysis of documentary sources, the study covers some historical joints to the delicate relationship between popular devotions - analyzed from the standpoint of performance - and the Austrian Government, in Milan. The ambiguous relationship between ecclesiastical power and civil power in the town of Lombardy, since 1950, will tend to limit the baroque magnificence of external worship, without being able to eliminate entirely some emotional events; the result will survive the reforms of Giuseppe II, albeit in a more intimate form of “regulated devotion”, re-emerging also in the Jacobean three-year period.

“What Happened to Jokes?”

Since 1989, commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have mourned the death of jokes in postsocialist societies. While in fact humor has not gone away, the everyday experience of sharing jokes as an intimate form of political criticism has indeed vanished. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and archival research on the history of Hungarian humor, this article contributes a new perspective to the recent wave of scholarship on Soviet laughter, by examining the “loss of the joke” as both a cultural phenomenon and a critical discourse in postsocialist Hungary. First, we argue that a series of important shifts in the way Hungarians work, socialize, communicate, and engage in politics has led them to be far more circumspect in sharing political humor. Second, we analyze the self-reflexive perception of loss as a form of cultural criticism that indexes broader anxieties about the challenges of interpreting the operations of power under postsocialism. With this shift in political sensibility, we argue, the lament that the joke is “lost” may now offer more effective political commentary than a joke itself.

A Touch Too Much: Negotiating Masculinity, Propriety and Proximity in Intimate Labour

This paper explores how men who perform intimate labour negotiate perceptions of themselves and their work through complex intersections of masculinity, proximity and propriety. Its focus is on the ways in which embodied organizational negotiations are shaped by gendered perceptions of bodily propriety in three examples of physically, sexually and/or emotionally intimate forms of labour: male massage therapists; men who work in sex shops; and men working as Santa Claus performers. While ostensibly quite different forms of work, each is shaped by the expectation that a ‘quality’ interaction with customers or clients will be based upon the nurturance of a close physical, sexual and/or emotional bond between the service provider and recipient, at the same time as maintaining appropriate bodily boundaries and professional distance. Mediating both imperatives requires a careful negotiation of being appropriately close while at the same time understanding that social perceptions of their work, themselves as workers, and their interactions with customers and clients mean that they are frequently under heightened scrutiny, requiring constant vigilance on their part. Drawing on insights from phenomenological writing on embodiment, specifically Merleau-Ponty’s (2002 [1945]) Phenomenology of Perception, the analysis considers the ways in which intersections between masculinity, propriety and proximity are perceived and negotiated in intimate forms of labour, reflecting on instances when a touch becomes ‘too much’. It considers what these instances reveal to us about gendered experiences of embodiment within organizations and the importance of perception in understanding embodied negotiations of workplace intimacy.

The abject single: exploring the gendered experience of singleness in Britain

This paper explores the gendered experience of singleness in Britain through a theoretical and empirical understanding of the abject. Drawing on the writings of Judith Butler, we argue that singleness is culturally pathologised as an abject ‘other’, a liminal state which renders the legitimation of the single subject unintelligible. Through 14 active interviews with British singles, we demonstrate how our participants negotiate their marginal status vis-à-vis the marketplace and the broader society that continue to uphold heterosexual partnership as a normative form of intimacy. Our data uncovers persistent and powerful gender stereotypes of how singles ought to organise their lives and conform both to social, as well as market-driven pressures. We therefore highlight research gaps in the experience of singleness and critique the heteronormative framework that remains dominant, yet concealed, in gender research.

The Wakley Prize, 2015: what do you know?

12 www.thelancet.com Vol 386 July 4, 2015 What do I know? That question was the impulse behind Michel de Montaigne’s essays. Whether he was writing about illness, vanity, drunkenness, or sleep, Montaigne wrote with informality, intimacy, and incisive knowledge. As another great essayist William Hazlitt said of Montaigne, “he did not set up for a philosopher, wit, or orator or moralist but he became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed through his mind”. In the centuries since Montaigne mastered this form, the essay, a discursive and intimate form of personal refl ection, has remained a powerful way to inform, engage, and entertain readers. So what do you know? And why does it matter to clinical medicine or global health now? We want you to tell us by entering The Lancet’s annual essay competition, the Wakley Prize—named after Thomas Wakley, the radical founding Editor of The Lancet. The Prize will be awarded to the best essay on any clinical topic of importance to health. Whether your focus is global or local, we expect provocative originality, fi ne writing, and invigorating argument. We’re looking for fresh writing that engages both our hearts and minds about what matters most to you in contemporary medicine. We invite submissions from anyone around the world working in a health-related fi eld, whether you’re a student, established in mid-career, or approaching the end of a lifetime of service in health care or biomedical science. Allow your imagination the freedom to develop your idea into the informal prose of an excellent essay. Essays of no more than 2000 words should be submitted via The Lancet’s electronic submission system by Oct 26, 2015, with “Wakley Prize” selected as the publication type. Essays should not contain any information that might identify individual patients. Entries will be anonymised, and judged by the editors of The Lancet. The winner of the Wakley Prize will receive £2000, and the essay will be published in The Lancet and feature in our podcast. We will only accept one submission per author. We look forward to reading your essays and fi nding out what you know and why it matters.