Intimate Encounters Research Articles

Transient light: Enchanted encounters with dappled light

Abstract The Dapple Light Project is a moving video and live dance performance installation, offering intimate encounters with dappled light as a vibratory place of sensuous enchantment. The article illuminates enchantment experiences in the videoing processes and installation scenography of this project, approaching wonder as a secular attunement with the physical, the digital and the moving presence of this elusive light. Jane Bennett’s theories on materiality shape reflections on the wonder experience and inform a view of enchantment in action. Laura Marks’ writings on haptic visuality and Gaston Bachelard’s contemplations on reverie and home offer intimate and sensuous dwellings for reflecting on mysteries of body, abode and interiority as materialized in this video installation. The article contemplates the transient fluctuations of dappled light as embodied enchantment and considers this in relation to Buddhist understandings of impermanence and dependant arising.

Water matters: TUG onboard and TUG footpath

This article uses Dog Kennel Hill Project’s contemporary dance performance TUG as a case study to explore waterways as sites for performance and to consider performances on water in relation to: the specificity of water as a material, the mode of mobility in performance, the live event as a transitory experience and an intimate encounter. This article offers an analysis of the two separate audience experiences of TUG performed on a narrow boat on Watford Canal, exploring materiality and proximity through Gaston Bachelard’s ideas about the ‘intimacy’ of water explicated in Water and Dreams. The onboard version is performed for a small audience seated on the boat, while the footpath version involves participants walking alongside the boat via the towpath while listening to an audio-guide. This article will discuss the role the water plays in both of these experiences. This analysis will consider recent performance practices that engage with mobility, water and boats and argues that water in performance matters and that live performance sited on water can evoke a unique, intimate and transitory experience.

Long live the (im)material: Concept and materiality in Viktor&Rolf’s fashion

Abstract This article seeks to challenge the way in which journalistic and academic discourses on the conceptual fashion of Dutch designers Viktor&Rolf privilege ideas over the materiality of fashion. Whereas Viktor&Rolf have been considered predominantly as late-twentieth-century conceptual designers, we aim to offer an alternative reading of Viktor&Rolf’s fashion practices. Through a detailed visual analysis of renowned Viktor&Rolf collections, Russian Doll (Autumn/Winter 1999–2000) and Glamour Factory (Autumn/Winter 2010–11), and a discourse analysis of the reception of these collections in the international fashion press, we propose to rethink their conceptual approach through a material lens. Reflecting on the dominant discourse of the conceptual in the field of fashion studies, we develop an argument on the inextricable entanglement of concept and materiality in terms of a material-discursive ‘intra-action’ (Barad 1996, 2003; Parkins 2008). Instead of viewing the materiality of fashion as a blank slate awaiting signification, we offer a reconceptualization of how the meanings, signs, values, concepts and ideas of fashion objects, and their material expression, are mutually constituted. By doing so, we provide a fresh perspective on the ways in which Viktor&Rolf’s work can be understood as an intimate encounter between concept and materiality.

‘What’s bigger than a standing ovation?’: Intimacy and spectacle at the Tony Awards

Abstract In 1963, J. S. Siegels described two opposing methods by which artists could affect their audiences. The first was an aesthetic of grandeur: ‘a principle of force, based on the sheer size and power of the impression’. The second was an aesthetic of intimacy, ‘a principle of attraction: it demands a closeness of association between subject and audience, and necessitates identification and involvement’. Almost half a century later there remains a lingering understanding that intimacy and spectacle are irreconcilable. While small performances are increasingly praised for their ability to offer audiences ‘authentically’ intimate encounters with ‘real’ people, ‘largeness’ is often associated with artificiality, insincerity, the manufactured spectacular. By analysing online comments to a YouTube video of ‘Bigger!’ – the celebration of ‘Big Broadway’ performed by Neil Patrick Harris during the 2013 Tony Awards – this article shows how audiences are able to feel a sense of intimacy while watching big performances, even when these are not experienced ‘live’.

Intimacy Mobilized: Hook-Up Practices in the Location-Based Social Network Grindr

In this paper we present an ethnographic exploration of the situated use of the smartphone app Grindr, a mobile hook-up device that is usually used for location-based real-time dating. It allows its users to search the geographic vicinity for men who are potentially willing to engage in intimate encounters. The study of Grindr allows us to observe the way in which technology-induced shifts in the notions of “nearby”, “close”, or “intimate” make a difference in the very nature of contemporary intimacy.

The intimate and the stranger: Approaching the “Muslim question” through the eyes of female converts to Islam

Drawing on an ethnography among Quebecois and French female new Muslims, I consider how converts epitomize and embody the “encounter” between Muslim and western societies. By choosing Islam, converts position themselves on the margins, giving them a unique perspective on the “West.” My participants’ reflexive narratives hinge on continuity/disruption dialectics that dissolve the commonly held dichotomy between Sameness and Otherness. In analyzing these narratives, I view subjectivity as a rhetorical construction and elaborate upon converts’ daily intimate encounters and dialogues with Otherness in social spaces. In light of Simmel’s figure of the Stranger based on distance and proximity, I show that converts’ experiences echo the “pacific coexistence” that Muslim and European populations have experienced historically. I argue that narratives are crucial to understanding how Islam—as a political and symbolic language of Otherness—can help frame and profile emergent western subjects and identities.

Intimate Encounters: Affective Labor in Call Centers

By examining the affective regimes generated by call center workers in Bangalore, the authors argue that the forms of alienation and intimacy they generate are coimplicated, rather than in opposition, to each other. In contesting the presumption that the intimate is in contradistinction to the public, the authors join scholarly conversations that trace how relations of intimacy are constructed through processes of labor. This analysis of intimate encounters and affective labor draws upon several years of intensive ethnographic field research in call centers in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. The authors argue that the affective labor of call center agents is service work but that it takes the form of intimate labor provided at a distance. While intimacy implies a proximity that may be physical, corporeal, emotional, and/or geographical, the affective labor of the informants underscored the ways in which it reconstituted their very experience of time and space, proximity and distance. On the one hand, their success at work was contingent on their construction of a relationship of proximity with their clients, eliciting and producing affects that generated intimate encounters. However, although these workers did not engage in physical travel, their virtual and imaginative travel was generative of new modalities of proximity that compel the authors to review existing assumptions about intimacy and distance, and about the relation between intimacy and capital.

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.

‘To Lay Down the Frontier of an Empire’: Circumscribing Identity in Northeast India

Northeast India is in an apparent state of being marginalized, rediscovered and redefined. The region, it might be said, is a historical problem. This article explores ways in which India’s northeast is represented and experienced that signal deeply-rooted, contradictory and contested narratives of history, geography and identity. It further proposes an agenda for historicising the northeast by way of three interconnected strands of inquiry. First, it argues that an analysis of governance is essential to determine the ways in which the northeast frontier as British and Indian buffer zone has been shaped by the personnel, agencies and regulatory systems of imperial authority. Second, it proposes that a deeper study of Christianity and the ways in which particular experiences of belief, conversion and intimate cross-cultural encounter can exemplify tensions at the heart of colonial power and identity. Third, it turns attention to the ways in which ecological history can determine the extent to which the experience of colonialism as a political, economic and cultural regime thus conditioned local ecologies and socio-religious practices in forest and town. In this way, the article advances an understanding of the frontier as both a literal and imagined space, that is, at the same time locally and centrally produced and resisted.

An Intimate Encounter: Negotiating Subtitled Cinema

The question of subtitling has received little attention in Film Studies, despite being the primary means by which foreign-language cinema is experienced. Current literature focuses on important matters of language and translation, but there are other aspects that exceed these matters when we watch subtitled films, aspects which are able to affect and move viewers without relying on explanation through translation. My paper shows how viewers have to negotiate these affective elements in order to apprehend foreign-language films, with special attention on their indeterminate characteristics that escape representation. It considers the negotiation of subtitled cinema from numerous theoretical perspectives. Gilles Deleuze’s film-philosophy is popular in Film Studies for its theoretical flows and lines of flight, but this paper engages another Deleuzian thread—one of gaps and fissure—in order to explore the indeterminate negotiations of subtitled films. But in thinking about subtitling, we also have to reconsider the constitution of media. Cinema is not just made up of individual parts; rather, it is made of many interacting media, which cannot be separated. I argue that subtitled cinema consists of multiple affective elements that go beyond the interpretive methods of language and translation, and that the practice of negotiation is one way to apprehend them. In conclusion, this article, by exploring non-linguistic issues, argues that subtitling is not simply supplementary to cinema.

Textual Bodies, the Digital Surrogate, and Desire: Guillaume de Machaut’s Judgment Cycle and his Protean Corpus

This article explores the overlapping experiences of Guillaume de Machaut’s medieval manuscript readers and modern viewers of the digitized codex to argue that they share a nostalgic desire for a multi-sensorial and intimate encounter with the textual body. This study first considers Guillaume’s disgruntled reader in the Jugement dou roy de Navarre before turning to later readers who reenacted her desires when dealing with Machaut’s manuscripts. Finally, nuancing complaints that digitization distances us from the manuscript artifact, I consider how the digital surrogate reignites a desire for the textual body that defined the late-medieval reading experience.

Responding to violence in post-apartheid schools: On school leadership as mutual engagement

Schools in post-apartheid South Africa appear to be under siege by violence. In turn, school leaders find themselves in the unenviable position of not only having to deal with inadequate educator professionalism and learner underachievement – particularly in previously disadvantaged schools – but are under pressure to find ways to counteract the violence, and to restore schools as safe sites. Among the biggest challenges facing school leaders is that they have not necessarily acquired sufficient training to deal with violent encounters, and often have responded in equally violent and violating ways, which, to some extent, has enhanced the expulsion and alienation of learners. In drawing on our own project work at five high schools in the Western Cape, we explore the challenges school leaders experience in responding to school violence. In questioning the often equally violent responses of school leaders, we contend that they ought to adopt practices of becoming. That is, school leaders should engage in intimate encounters with the other; not based on a desire to change the other, but rather for the purpose of mutually engaging with the other in an effort to inhabit practices of coming into presence that are humane and just.

Intimacy and power: body searches and intimate visits in the prison system of São Paulo, Brazil

In this article, I discuss some injunctions and constraints that enable and regulate heterosexual intimate encounters inside male prisons in São Paulo, Brazil. From considerations about the body searches of prisoners´ relatives and intimate visits inside these prisons, I intend to contribute to the field of prison studies in three main areas. First, I reveal certain elements that improve the characterization of the prisons of São Paulo and Brazil that has prevailed in the international literature; second, I aim to problematize current forms of the phenomenon of mass incarceration based on the dynamics and prison conditions specific to the context of the global south; finally, I intend to widen the field of empirical and conceptual references in the analysis of the social experience of families of prison members, especially women who visit their partners who are behind bars.

A qualitative investigation comparing sexual effects of alcohol and marijuana among adults

Aims: Alcohol andmarijuana (cannabis) are the twomost commonly used psychoactive drugs and each appears to have its own unique sexual effects on users. With marijuana use increasing in the United States, along with more liberal state-level policies, it is important to examine and compare sexual effects and sexual risk behavior associated with these drugs in order to inform prevention of HIV, other sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancy. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 racially and ethnically diverse adults in New York City (mean age=27.4, SD=5.8). To be eligible, subjects must have (1) been between ages 18–35, (2) had sex while high on marijuana in the last 12 months, (3) had sex while not high on marijuana in the last 12 months; and (4) must not have used any other illicit drug in the last 12 months. All subjects self-identified as heterosexual and HIV-negative, and 50% were female. Results: Thematic analysis yielded various themes. Many subjects described differences between the two drugs with regard to interactions and contexts in use before sex, partner choice, perceived attractiveness of self and others, disinhibition, adverse sexual effects and sexual dysfunction, and dose effects. Differences were also commonly described regarding libido, length and intensity of sex and orgasm, specific sexual behaviors (including risk behavior), and feelings such as regret after sex. Compared to marijuana, alcohol was more likely to be associated with atypical partner choice and lead to regret. Illegality ofmarijuana sometimes facilitated intimate encounters. Conclusions: Results can inform prevention efforts regarding specific sexual risks and allow us to design more realistic prevention programs and interventions to guide potential users to make safer choices. Financial support: This pilot study was funded by the Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (P30DA011041).

Moderators of electronic screening and brief intervention for marijuana among students in a health center: eCHECKUP TO GO bolsters efforts of those who are already trying to change

Aims: Alcohol andmarijuana (cannabis) are the twomost commonly used psychoactive drugs and each appears to have its own unique sexual effects on users. With marijuana use increasing in the United States, along with more liberal state-level policies, it is important to examine and compare sexual effects and sexual risk behavior associated with these drugs in order to inform prevention of HIV, other sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancy. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 racially and ethnically diverse adults in New York City (mean age=27.4, SD=5.8). To be eligible, subjects must have (1) been between ages 18–35, (2) had sex while high on marijuana in the last 12 months, (3) had sex while not high on marijuana in the last 12 months; and (4) must not have used any other illicit drug in the last 12 months. All subjects self-identified as heterosexual and HIV-negative, and 50% were female. Results: Thematic analysis yielded various themes. Many subjects described differences between the two drugs with regard to interactions and contexts in use before sex, partner choice, perceived attractiveness of self and others, disinhibition, adverse sexual effects and sexual dysfunction, and dose effects. Differences were also commonly described regarding libido, length and intensity of sex and orgasm, specific sexual behaviors (including risk behavior), and feelings such as regret after sex. Compared to marijuana, alcohol was more likely to be associated with atypical partner choice and lead to regret. Illegality ofmarijuana sometimes facilitated intimate encounters. Conclusions: Results can inform prevention efforts regarding specific sexual risks and allow us to design more realistic prevention programs and interventions to guide potential users to make safer choices. Financial support: This pilot study was funded by the Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (P30DA011041).

“I’ll Have What She’s Having”: Fake Orgasm, Affectation, and Other S(t)imulations

Affects may dissemble, but they can be very hard to fake. Take, for example, orgasm. Understood as affect, or series of intersecting affects bundled under the auspices of named intensity, orgasm presents useful problems regarding apparent oppositions between simulation and authenticity, intentionality and reflex, fake orgasm and the real thing. The most iconic representation of fake orgasm in popular American culture is likely Meg Ryan's magisterial performance at Katz's Deli in When Harry Met Sally. Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Ryan) are proud of defied convention by building sexless friendship across gender lines, though they both recognize the fragile indeterminacy of such relation. Sally's fake orgasm begins over sandwiches, precipitated by Harry's apparent callousness toward women: he beds them and leaves them before the sun comes up. Initially, Sally wants to shame Harry for his selfishness in the wake of intimate encounters, denouncing his post-coital flightiness as a human affront to all women. Then Sally shifts the conversation to fake orgasm, staging assault on Harry's manhood by disrupting his fantasy of sexual connoisseurship. When Harry defends his late-night departures by bragging that he doesn't hear anyone complaining, Sally wonders how he could possibly know that the women he sleeps with are really an okay as he smugly attests. Harry: What do you mean, do I I know. Sally: Because they ... Harry: Yes, because they ... Sally: And how do you know they're really ...? Harry: What are you saying? That they fake orgasm? Sally: It's possible. Harry: Get outa here. Sally: Why? Most women, at one time or another, faked it. Harry: Well they haven't faked it with me. Sally: How do you know? Harry: Because I know. Sally: Oh. That's right, I forgot-you're man. Harry: What is that supposed to mean? Sally: Nothing. It's just that all men are sure it doesn't happen to them, but most women at one time or another done it, so you do the math. Harry: You don't think that I could tell the difference? Sally: No. Harry: Get outa here. Sally then acts out raucous spectacle of feminine ecstasy, complete with moans, shouts, convulsions, and invocations of God. As her performance builds momentum, surrounding conversations hush and Sally's climax draws the rapt attention of every deli patron, one of whom deadpans to her waiter, I'll what she's having. What exactly is it that Sally is which inspires the woman next to her to it too? Can the enigmatic quality of her simulated pleasure be understood as more than spectacle for others' consumption? And in what ways do the conventions of her affectation (the moans, shouts, convulsions, and invocations of God) mimic the lived conventions of orgasm itself, determined reflexively by simulated representations of orgasm they aspire, or been disciplined, to match? To what extent does the nearby patron's desire to have what she's having express the contagious property affect and its mimetic other, affectation? I take fake orgasm as this essay's primary analytic instance because, I argue, the enigmatic enjoyments it produces are affective consequences of simulated affect. In other words, its pleasures are occasioned by, rather than antithetical to, affectation. The relationship between affect and affectation turns on the question of intentionality, highly contested concept in recent literature associated with the diverse field of affect theory. (1) The scholarly interest in affect has proven particularly influential in the study of gender and sexuality, in some ways reformulating feminist theory's long-standing attention to lived experience. At the same time, affect theory marks significant site of interdisciplinary engagement between the hard sciences and the humanities, shifting away from expressive models of affect toward theories of biological autonomy. …

Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community by Kenneth T. MacLeish (review)

Reviewed by: Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community by Kenneth T. MacLeish Keith Brown Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community. By Kenneth T. MacLeish. Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 2013. ix + 265 pp. Map, photographs, tables, notes, references, index. $29.95 cloth. In this theoretically rich, empathic, and revelatory ethnography, Kenneth MacLeish ably tackles the challenges that face all US anthropologists who engage with the military. As the discipline has increasingly shifted left politically and reputations are built on robust critique—be it anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist, or anti-militarist—the task of establishing the kind of respect for the dignity and positionality of those on whose voices ethnographers depend for their insight is tricky when they are part of a military-industrial complex that embodies so much that US anthropologists in general oppose. MacLeish, refreshingly, does not engage in adversarial framings or dwell on these in-house anxieties. In his close focus on a small community of US Army veterans battling their own combat injuries and an overstretched and underresourced care delivery system, he shows more than he tells about the inconsistences, injustices, and indignities of military service in the long decade of intensive deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Gently [End Page 180] criticizing colleagues’ stereotypes of military life (42), the book demonstrates his close attention to military hierarchy and symbolism, habits, and ideals. The portraits MacLeish paints of his principal interlocuters are vivid. They impressively convey not just the content but also the affect, tone, and mood of their observations and interventions. His account of Dime’s yelling into the microphone, for example (207), or Stewart’s stand-up-ready riff on civilian overthanking (191–92), are captivating reminders of the virtue of paying attention. Together with the unique perspectives offered by Cindy, an army wife who ran the “Foundation” that provided MacLeish’s ethnographic anchor, they also demonstrate the analytical acuity of non-anthropologists. The book is impressive and engaging in theoretical terms. Beyond the near-obligatory references to neoliberalism’s pernicious effects on institutions and in particular on the delivery of care, it offers provocative and (to this reader at least) fresh insights on topics of recurrent anthropological interest: power, embodiment, intimacy, and debt. The chapter on injuries and trauma, whether visible or invisible, inflicted swiftly or slowly, by a surfeit of moisture (foot rot, fungus) or not enough (dehydration, kidney infection), is built on the narratives and experiences of combat in Iraq offered by veterans in the bureaucratic limbo of recovery and rehabilitation. Drawing on literature from anthropology and beyond, MacLeish deftly points out how the reality of violence violates the boundaries by which we, and the institutions we construct, order the world—and how the burden of repair, though structural in nature, is thrust onto the wounded themselves. MacLeish’s depiction of a significant staged ceremony honoring veterans for their service is an ethnographic and theoretical tour de force. Besides an account of social forces that is reminiscent of Gluckman’s classic Analysis of a Social Situation in Zululand, but further enriched by Dime’s and Stewart’s cameos, MacLeish also draws on a range of economic writings, notably including Georges Bataille’s concept of the “accursed share,” to speak to the nature and societal consequences of the unrepayable debt that soldiers impose on civilians by their service, in a context where the military-civilian disconnect is so profound and deep. This is a marvelous book, at once rooted in and derived from intimate encounters with memorable individuals, while also urging its readers to think beyond the methodological individualism and blinkered moralism that can so easily creep into the anthropology of the US military. In offering both intimate, personal accounts of military service and sophisticated reflection on its contemporary function and meaning, MacLeish has made an incisive contribution to military anthropology that will be of particular value to students of violence, care, US society, or fine ethnographic writing. Keith Brown Brown University Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The Animal Mirrors: The Human/Animal Divide in Derrida and Deleuze

Starting with an analysis of Jacques Derrida’s most intimate encounter with an animal by way of a similar scene in Balthus’s paintings, this essay examines Derrida’s criticism of Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the human-animal relation and proposes a way of conceiving the animal-human encounter beyond the traps of narcissism.

‘A pig is a person’ or ‘You can love a fox and hunt it’: Innovation and tradition in the discursive representation of animals

In contemporary urban society, animals have been erased in many people’s lives. They are generally encountered only as meat, pets, pests or vicariously in fiction and documentaries; yet the relation of humans to other animals is a matter of pressing environmental, social, economic and philosophical concern, and across the social and natural sciences there is increased interest in human–animal interaction. This situation gives rise to many different and often irreconcilable ways of talking about animals, and current debates about human–animal interaction are frequently polarised and based on incompatible standpoints, such as those of animal rights and human exceptionalism. This article analyses two interviews which exemplify such radically opposed views: one with a spokesperson for the Vegan Society, and one with a spokesperson for the Countryside Alliance, a pro-hunting pressure group. Both are placed against the background of other interviews collected as part of an ongoing larger research project on the discursive representation of animals. Each is shown to use and promote a way of speaking about animals which is at odds with mainstream establishment discourse. It is suggested that they represent two mirror-image reactions to the erasure of animals in contemporary urban life which, despite their differences, reflect a more intimate encounter with actual animals. One actively seeks to preserve and promote a traditional discourse, the other to innovate a new non-speciesist discourse. They thus reflect, in their uses of language, contrasting possible reactions to a major social and environmental change.

'Difficult' exhibitions and intimate encounters

Over the last thirty years museums around the world have shown an increased willingness to take on what is often characterized as ‘difficult subject matter.’ Absent in Anglophone museum studies literature, however, is a sustained discussion on what it is about such exhibitions that render them ‘difficult’ and, most important, what can be achieved by making painful histories public. This paper sets out to stimulate such discussion, illustrating the relevance of our concerns within the context of a comparative analysis of two recent Swedish exhibitions: The Museum of World Culture’s No Name Fever: AIDS in the Age of Globalization; and Kulturen’s Surviving: Voices from Ravensbrück. Very divergent in their presentation strategies and in the type of information presented, these exhibitions attempt to position their viewers in relation to violence and suffering of ‘others’ distant in time, place, or experience. We conclude by discussing the ways in which public history might animate a critical historical consciousness, a way of living with and within history as a never-ending question that constantly probes the adequacy of the ethical character and social arrangements of daily life.