Intimate Encounters Research Articles

Flirting and Friendship at the Periphery of Hook-up App Research


 
 
 The everyday intimacies of friendship and flirting are not typically exploredin hook-up app research, nor is there much reflection on the intimacies of researching these media. This paper considers flirting and friendship as practices and methods that broaden the scope of current hook-up app research. We ask what these intimacies can produce to expand research approaches (and thus knowledge) of hook-up apps. As users and researchers of these apps, we consider negotiations of flirting and friendship between researchers and research partici- pants by exploring what it means to research with intimacy. Attention is given to the connections, conversations, and intimate encounters within hook-up research that are mostly absent from existing presentations of research findings. We sug- gest that greater attention to peripheral and intimate communication between researchers and participants can offer valuable methods for queering otherwise stabilised ways of knowing, using, and researching these platforms. Adding to the queer ethnographic tradition, we demonstrate how a processual and affective approach to hook-up app use encourages researchers to make visible our connec- tions to the media we research, and how these connections relate to the intima- cies that hook-up apps foster.
 
 

Ellen and the little one: A critical phenomenology of potentiality in life with dementia

In this article, we outline a critical phenomenology of potentiality as it emerges in life with dementia. Foregrounding the sources of everyday creativity that are part of life with dementia, we propose a critical counter-argument to that of dementia as a form of living death. Our ethnographic vantage point is an episode we encountered during fieldwork at a dementia unit in Denmark. Here, one of the residents of the unit, Ellen, is interrupted in her ways of inhabiting the world by an intimate encounter with a polymorphous creature she calls ‘the Little One’. We argue that this interruption is an ontological event that ushers in new meaningful possibilities for Ellen and the Little One—and for Ellen’s relatives, caregivers, and several other residents—to co-inhabit the world. In critical dialogue with recent theoretical developments in the anthropology of cognitive disability and the ontological turn, we develop a differential social ontology capable of tracing how such interruptions characterize everyday life at the unit—and how various ways of responding to the potentiality of interruptions form responsive communities of care that cross often profound differences between people and between humans and non-humans, such as Ellen and the Little One. We conclude by briefly sketching some implications of these arguments for the care ethics that underlie institutional practices of dementia care.

Beyond Exotic Wet Markets: COVID-19 Ecologies in the Global Meat-Processing Industry in Brazil

In this article we argue that the overvaluation of exotic narratives about wild animal consumption and wet markets conceals how the global agribusiness establishes unhealthy ecologies. Increasing infection rates from the new coronavirus registered among meat industry workers, their families, and the community, resulted in the suspension of several establishments in this sector in Brazil. If the meat processing industry cannot be considered entirely safe, why are risks to health, morality, and civility often represented by the unregulated practices of wet markets considered exotic? This paper shows that the global meat processing industry weaves a myriad of intimate encounters between humans, animals, highly toxic chemicals, organic waste, and precarious work relationships. They are unhealthy ecologies where coexistence, infection, risk, and death are always involved. We suggest a multispecies approach to analyse and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic; instead of the exaltation of contagion and the boundaries of contention, there needs to be an effort to establish integrated policies for the health and joint care of humans, animals, and environments.

Mobilities and complexities. Ole B.Jensen, SvenKesselring and MimiSheller (eds). Routledge, London and New York, 2019. ISBN 978‐1‐138‐60143‐7

Using renowned sociologist John Urry's body of work, specifically the 'mobilities turn' as a fertile threshold point, Jensen, Kesselring, and Sheller have brought together a range of social scientists who have worked and collaborated closely with Urry, in creating this edited collection. This book is organised in five thematic sections and the authors in each of these sections speak to each other well in terms of the ways in which they document their personal encounters with the sociologist and reflect on the potentials of Urry's work in a posthuman world. This collection braids in a range of approaches – from personal anecdotes and intimate encounters that transformed into newer perspectives to speculative reflections on interactions with Urry and his work, thus, celebrating a complex array of ideas. Yet, the book remains faithful to the politics that ground Urry's methodological approach. As Thomas Birtchnell notes, in speculating: 'Will there be an Urryism?', in Chapter 3, he concludes that 'Urry's penchant for plurality does not come at the expense of clarity' (p. 16). The same can be said of the experience of reading this edited collection.

Tender archives and the closeness of Cheryl Sim’s The Thomas Wang Project

In this article, I spend time with Cheryl Sim’s multimedia artwork The Thomas Wang Project (2015), which incorporates performance, installation, original sound recordings, and a variety of familial, documentary, and cinematic archival materials in order to explore her great-uncle’s life and death in the context of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Performing an intimate archival encounter as a form of tender touching across time and space, Sim works through collaborative practices of kinship and modes of communion in order to imagine other ways of staying in touch with absences and presences across time. Ultimately, I argue that The Thomas Wang Project is a potent minoritarian performance of closeness––one that articulates feminist forms of historical work, which both center vulnerability and refuse epistemological mastery in favor of an ethics of unknowability.

Mixed-Race Adoptees and Transnational Adoption

Mixed-Race Adoptees and Transnational Adoption Kimberly D. McKee (bio) Kori A. Graves. A War Born Family: African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 328 pages. ISBN 9781479872329 (cl); 9781479815869 (ebook). Allison Varzally. Children of Reunion: Vietnamese Adoptions and the Politics of Family Migrations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 222 pages. ISBN 9781469630908 (cl); 9781469630915 (pb); 9781469630922 (ebook). Susie Woo. Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire. New York: New York University Press, 2019. 336 pages. ISBN 9781479889914 (cl); 9781479880539 (pb); 9781479827169 (ebook). Photographs shape how American middlebrow culture remembers the earliest transnational adoptions from South Korea and Vietnam. Heartwarming human-interest stories and profiles of adopted children and their parents filled the pages of magazines like Life and Ebony, in addition to local newspapers. Yet these celebratory tales of rescue and assimilation into American society glossed over the losses involved in transnational adoptions. Recent Critical Adoption Studies scholarship goes beyond the reductive understandings promoted in contemporary media to offer a more complex picture of adoptees' biological families' losses, the incongruities and contradictions of the adoption process, and the children and women whose lives were inextricably linked to the adoptees. Kori A. Graves, Allison Varzally, and Susie Woo join scholars who interrogate the limits of adoption and how these particular family formations came into being. In their investigations of the treatment of mixed-race Asian adoptees and their mothers, Graves, Varzally, and Woo reveal the hypocrisy and contradictions of the US military and government. These orphans were simultaneously embraced as mascots or seen as children in need of rescue, even as their military fathers were not required to establish paternity and Asian women encountered difficulty in accessing US citizenship for their children. These monographs reveal what happens when children are simultaneously cast aside and embraced, their affective labor used to further a particular narrative of US humanitarianism. [End Page 231] Moving chronologically, Susie Woo's Framed by War situates the Korean adoption project and adoptees in relation to Korean War brides—women who married American GIs in the wake of the Korean War—and the women whose sexual labor supported the rebuilding of the nation in the post-Korean War period. Some of those women who engaged in sex work were the mothers of mixed-race Korean children sent abroad for adoption. Other children resulted from consensual relationships between Korean women and military men. Susie Woo's monograph disentangles these overlapping threads—adoptees, war brides, sex workers—to offer a nuanced depiction of adoption's lingering effects and its intersections with other facets of US foreign policy. Focused on the intimate encounters between Koreans and Americans, Woo traces the contours and limits of these relationships while exploring the juxtaposition between Korean children's innocence and Korean women's purported deviance. Woo calls attention to the ways Korean children and women were cornerstones to American empire building in the early Cold War. Their affective and, in the case of Korean women, sexual and reproductive labor proved instrumental in US foreign policy efforts to contain communism. Yet they are often overlooked or seen as a footnote in Cold War history. The American public was first introduced to Korean children via rescue scripts with curated narratives emphasizing the children's salvation. These depictions in Department of Defense stock footage and national magazines featured American GIs forging relationships with Korean children, particularly boy orphans who became military mascots or houseboys. Coupled with media appearances and concerts of the Korean Children's and Korean Orphans' Choirs, the images humanized Korean children in accessible ways, whereby Americans could visualize them as part of their families. American GIs were, in turn, transformed through depictions of them forging familial bonds with Korean children. The girls in the two choirs promoted a feminized, innocent image of childhood warranting American paternalism. These media portrayals of Korean children made Americans see them as worthy of rescue. American missionaries were integral in working with US government efforts to rebuild South Korea, and they were also instrumental in shaping narratives of Korean children abroad. Their efforts ranged from World Vision's sponsorship of the...

“Do You Read Me?”

Inaccurate interpretation of negotiated nonverbal communication during an intimate encounter has serious moral and legal repercussions. Reciprocity between bodies allows one to assess the intention of the other. However, when the intended message is miscommunicated through the sender’s embodied action or misperceived by the receiver, a sexual assault can ensue. Understanding, conveying, and responding to behavioral gestures indicative of agreement or refusal to consent, is an emotional quagmire that has received global attention through sociopolitical movements such as #MeToo. Despite the desired cogitation of a pre-reflexive intentioned message, reciprocal navigation of a shared intimate space shifts within the corporeal/intercorporeal relationship, such that a habituated behavioral response, autonomic bodily responding, and socialized dating norms all have the potential to sabotage the essence of the original message. Seeking legal retribution is compromised in its application of objectified parameters to an ambiguous, subjective human interaction. While programs promoting slogans such as “Just Say No” are well intentioned, the complexity of human behavior, unconscious processes, and subjective perception, all suggest that communicating a refusal to consent extends far beyond the verbal utterance of saying “No.”

Plainclothes Policewomen on the Trail: NYPD Undercover Investigations of Abortionists and Queer Women, 1913–1926

In early twentieth-century New York City, policewomen went undercover to investigate abortion and queer women. These early female entrants to the New York Police Department were not the middle class reformers typically associated with Progressive Era vice reform; they tended to be working class white widows who carved out a gendered expertise that relied upon their unique capacity and willingness to extend surveillance over the female, immigrant spaces that eluded their male counterparts. The NYPD instrumentalized policewomen's bodies; investigations of criminalized female sexuality required policewomen participate in intimate encounters, exposing their own precarity in the masculine world of policing. But plainclothes work also furnished policewomen with a rare route to professional renown and social mobility, “success” they won at the expense of more marginalized women. Their work reveals that the early twentieth-century state was more innovative and invested in methods to police “disorderly” female heterosexuality and same sex desire than previously understood.

LGBT ‘Communities’ and the (Self-)regulation and Shaping of Intimacy

This article draws on UK research with over 600 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT+) people, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant AH/J011894/1), which explored understandings and experiences of LGBT ‘community’. I examine the ways in which intimacy is regulated and shaped by and within social interaction, which was apparent in three main ways. First, the research identified how for some people the very concept of ‘LGBT community’ was linked to intimacy. Second, there was strong evidence to suggest that some LGBT+ people self-regulate their practices of intimacy (such as holding hands or kissing in public) so as not to be recognised as enacting a same-gender relationship. This was understood as a form of self-protection or hate crime prevention, though degrees of habit and professed concern for other people’s feelings were also contributing factors. Third, experiences of intimate relations were shaped by intersectional dynamics, particularly relating to various forms of discrimination, including ageism, biphobia, classism, (dis)ableism, racism, and transphobia from and among LGBT+ people. Whilst LGBT ‘communities’ were thought to enable opportunities to seek sexual and/or intimate encounters, this is not without its complexities. Although there have been improvements in relation to legislation and wider social attitudes, there is, for some, persistent apprehension and self-regulation which, whether necessary or not, are significant. LGBT+ people’s experiences thus suggest that intimacy can be shaped by multiple inequalities both within and without LGBT ‘communities’.

Revival from Below: The Deoband Movement and Global Islam by Brannon D. Ingram

Brannon D. Ingram’s monograph casts fresh light on the global life of the Deoband movement, which is “arguably the most influential Muslim reform and revival movement outside of the Middle East in the last two centuries” (2). The seminary (madrasa) associated with this movement was founded in 1866 in the North Indian town of Deoband by religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ) who were at once Ḥanafī jurists and Chishtī ṣūfīs. They reimagined “Sufism through law, Sufism as ethics, Sufism in politics” (3). The author elucidates this movement’s internal differences and uses its complex history, in both South Asia and South Africa, to illuminate broader features of global Islam, including “the place of Sufism in the modern world, the position of the ʿulama in Muslim public life, and the very notion of Islamic tradition” (11). The study is grounded in a range of primary texts authored by and about Deobandī scholars. The book’s title, Revival from Below, refers to how the Deobandīs have pursued “a bottom-up reform largely invisible relative to the top-down reform of Islamist political projects” (18). I will return to the limitation of this argument at the end of this review. Here, let us appreciate how the author approaches the binaries that structure his object of study in a dialectical fashion: “Deobandi tradition arises out of a tension—sometimes productive, sometimes strained—between the anthropocentric and the bibliocentric, between the centrifugal force of a global movement and the centripetal force of intimate encounters, between the dispersal of books and the proximity of bodies, between esoteric centers and exoteric peripheries, and above all, between the ‘little’ tradition of the maslak, to which they adhere as Deobandis, and the ‘great’ tradition of the Sunna, to which they adhere as Muslims” (23-24). Download

Beyond the managed heart? Seduction, subjugation and the symbolic economies of sleep

ABSTRACT Sleep appears to have been of no interest to sociocultural linguistics or communication studies. This is in spite of growing attention to the “ignored third” from sociologists and anthropologists, especially in response to rising public, medical and commercial concerns. Having said which, these cognate fields side-step the classist representational politics of sleep which are exposed nicely by a social semiotic intervention like the one reported here. In this regard, the empirical basis of my paper is an archive of promotional materials from some thirty international airlines touting their latest “premium” sleeping services, a key component of current marketing strategies. Through a largely visual, iconographic analysis, I examine the staging of sleep as a sensuous experience and as a deeply affective, intimate encounter between (often male) passengers and (often female) flight attendants. Sleep emerges as a semiotic resource for producing, circulating and normalizing relations of entitlement – a symbolic economy which exceeds and/or intensifies established forms of emotional labour. These highly seductive ways of organizing and envisioning sleep generate the kind of desire necessary for subjugating an otherwise privileged few, and, thus, for exploiting many others.

Language, affect, and carnivalesque: tourism encounters and transgressive narratives on a party island

ABSTRACT Party island tourism is construed as a type of tourism that heavily relies on sensory and intimate encounters that evince structures of inequality. In this paper, I investigate how the notion of the party influences the negotiation of sociolinguistic relations on party islands. By employing a linguistic ethnographic approach, this paper attempts to examine the affective dimensions of the narratives of “tourism frontliners” about their tourism encounters in Boracay from the perspective of the party. The party dynamics in Boracay can be described as carnivalesque, which shows “ … life turned inside out … the reverse side of the world” (Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated and edited by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 122). I argue that the coalescence of different participants, emotions, and linguistic practices in the Boracay party enables tourism frontliners to subvert various forms of inequality (e.g. occupational norms, precarity, and discrimination) through their accounts of getting even and getting by. This results in a suspension of reality – a space where transgressive behavior can potentially disrupt or reconfigure unequal sociolinguistic relations. This paper argues that while carnivalesque behaviors are inherently suspensions of reality, their iterability can lead to the establishment of sustainabile transgressive spaces.

Obscenity and fabrication in equity and widening participation methodologies

Equity and widening participation (EWP) initiatives in Australia are increasingly reimagined in policy as sites where participants are constructed as competitor‐individuals, with education considered only in terms of employability, social mobility and nation‐state market competition. In the context of EWP outreach, and with school students in particular, this can transpire into demands for narrow forms of ‘legitimate’ aspirations. Goffman defines obscenity as when (1) the very intimate is forced into the public sphere, while (2) the humanising dimensions or contexts are stripped away, with an example being pornography—where intimate encounters are reproduced as de‐contextualised acts while being made public. This article argues that dominant approaches to practicing and evaluating EWP risk obscene consequences if they force community members to present static future‐oriented valuations of intimate, fluid aspirations and experiences of education against a backdrop of increasingly individuated, competitive and standardised educational institutions. In this article, firstly we detail the context to establish a foundation for theorising consequences of particular socio‐educational discursive practices. Secondly, we engage with notions of frame, keying and fabrication as a toolbox to reveal some of the unintended (obscene) dynamics risked via certain approaches to programmatic practice and evaluation. Thirdly, we review the diversity of approaches to evaluation (and their attendant debates), highlighting the importance of these debates and diversities, making a case against methodological imperialism.

Volumes, caves, bodies, relatedness: The case of Cuban speleology and national defense

Scholarship on voluminous geographies not only takes seriously geopolitics’ three-dimensionality, but also the ways bodies experience the diverse materialities and vulnerabilities of volumetric infrastructures on the one hand, and the earth and its dynamic ecosystems, on the other. Focusing on the relational sociality among bodies—or rather, beings—as they explore and map caves, I emphasize the shared quality of how voluminous—and in particular, subterranean—geographies are created, experienced, and represented. The history of collaboration between Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces and Cuban speleologists dedicated to the exploration, study, and conservation of the country’s thousands of caves, illustrates the geopolitical implications of this focus. Based on interview and ethnographic data, this paper examines the varied perspectives on the relationship between speleology and defense, beginning with an institutional history, and then shifting to the affective relational qualities of speleological practice, which I argue constitute a shared intimate geopolitics. These relational qualities manifest themselves in forms of relatedness among speleologists and places, some of which structure the organizational (including spatial) features of their practices and their resulting knowledge. Viewed through this lens, cave maps assume an intimate quality as well: as substances that bind, as heirlooms, and as tokens of reciprocity. This perspective challenges approaches to caves as disconnected voids empty of life and sociality. Indeed, caves not only amplify the social, they gather. To speak of caves as only geological phenomena is inaccurate and actually limits scholarly appreciation of their geopolitical transformative potential. In the case of Cuba, this paper makes an important contribution by accounting for intimate encounters with the earth and its representations as key players in geopolitics.

Illness comes to bed. Chronically ill lesbian women discuss sex, intimacy, and sexual practices

This article aims at discussing the intersections of disability and sexuality as narrated by lesbian women with chronic illness. It draws from an empirical study conducted in Portugal and Italy between 2016 and 2018 with LGBTQA + chronically ill people: in particular, the article focuses on fifteen biographical interviews collected among participants that self-identify as lesbian. The interviews highlight intersections of sexuality through the experience of chronic illness, showing different strategies through which lesbian women re-invent their own self-definition and their sexual practices in intimate encounters with partners. The first part discusses the contributions of feminist disability studies and crip studies in the understanding of the entanglements between able-bodiedness and heteronormativity. In the second section, the analysis focuses on narratives around dating: in particular, it explores the difficulties reported by participants in coming out as chronically ill to their sexual partners. In the third section, the paper discusses desires and sexual practices: since illness influences the way desires are embodied and negotiated, participants find ways to face their vulnerabilities and establish self-caring sexual encounters. The last section addresses the importance of communication in this process, enabling forms of transformative actions and resilience through sexual practices. The article aims at contributing to the existing literature on disability and sexuality, shedding light on the specific aspects of the experience narrated by lesbian women with chronic illness: such aspects challenge normative assumptions over the entanglements between disability and sexuality and question some of the pillars on which disability is constructed.

‘Queer’ Objects: The Art Practice as a Tool for Shared Sensory Understanding

AbstractThis article is structured around three art objects I created and presented during the iJADE Conference in 2019. Through the description and manipulation of these tactile objects, which are designed in a way that allows for ease of interaction, we arrive at the concepts of familiarity and strangeness, attraction and repulsion that underpin encounters with the art object, the other and the environment. In this article we will rediscover the sense of touch as our singular access to the environment and a means of perceiving closeness. We will also examine experiments with students in an effort to understand how the art object can be significant through its affective value, and explore the concept of private and public boundaries in search of a suitable atmosphere for intimate encounters. Finally, we will ask how the art object functions as a tool that allows our distinct sensitivities to meet through a shared sensory experience, the answer to which may be found in the notions of ritual and games, in order to come to a definition of the ‘ethics of contact’.

P-02-14 Intra-Urethral Alprostadil Gel Usage in Male Sexual Dysfunction Restores Not Only Erectile Performances but Improves Also the Conjunct Premature Ejaculation

To assess the extensive satisfaction of the intra-urethral utilization of Alprostadil gel in men having both erectile dysfunction (ED) and premature ejaculation (PE). A cohort of 67 men with ED and PE (Gr. A), taking Alprostadil gel by intra-urethral way admission, as a frequency of 3-4/week, before each intimate encounter, was assessed at the recruitment (V1) and after 4 follow-up weeks (V2). They were compared to a 50 men control group, taking Sildenafil 100mg/tb. (Gr. B). Instruments: ED = IIEF-5, ≤ 20 points; PE (short Intravaginal Ejaculation Latency Time - IELT) ≤ 3 minutes (ISSM, 2014); Overall Satisfaction (OS) = EF domain from the IIEF. Global Assessment Question (GAQ): % of “yes” (Giuliano et al., 2008). IIEF-5 at V1: Gr. A = 12.72 ± 3.8, Gr. B = 11.96 ± 4.07 vs. V2: Gr. A = 19.56 ± 2.18, Gr. B = 20.21 ± 1.67; P = 0.5; IELT at V1: Gr. A = 2.47 (2 min. and 28 sec.), Gr. B = 2.15 ± (2 min. and 17 sec.) vs. V2: Gr. A = 6.78 (6 min. and 47 sec.) ± 2.33, Gr. B = 3.33 (3 min. and 20 sec.); P < 0.001. OS at V1 Gr. A = 6.81 ± 1.18, Gr. B = 6.62 ± 0.87 vs. V2: Gr. A = 12.33 ± 3.11, Gr. B = 8.22; P < 0.05. GAQ at V1: Gr. A = 14 subjects (20.89%), Gr. B = 12 subjects (24%) vs. V2: Gr. A = 54 subjects (80.6%); Gr. B = 24 subjects (48%); P(V2) < 0.005.

Periphery and Intimacy in Anti-Imperial Culture and Politics

In the late period of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French imperialism, French thinkers, artists, and colonists had long held a fascination with the “others” inhabiting France’s colonies. Intimate contact and cross-cultural encounters led to descriptions and often violent differentiations of these groups that helped define French identity. But what might we learn by employing a “postcolonial praxis” that seeks new ways of interrogating identity from anti-imperial actors? Taking the perspectives of three key anti-imperialists—Frantz Fanon, Ousmane Sembène, and Simone Lellouche Othmani—this article unearths their perceptions about France and French identity. For these figures, France could represent either an unfulfilled promised land or a place of exile. Frenchness, likewise, ran the spectrum from a set of desired if unattainable qualities, an immoral culture to be resisted at all costs, to a national identity to be deployed for political strategy. This radical approach turns Frenchness into an “other” while contributing to the emergence of new postcolonial identities. At the same time, it demonstrates how three important definitions of France and of Frenchness depended upon both peripheral positionality and intimate access to French culture.

Feeling good: humanitarian virtual reality film, emotional style and global citizenship

ABSTRACT Virtual Reality (VR) film has been described as an empathy machine. Filmmakers and producers have claimed that VR film’s immersive qualities can amplify empathy for victims of humanitarian crises and move the viewer to support humanitarian aid organizations. This paper questions these transformative assumptions about VR film. We call attention to how humanitarian VR films are techniques that promote emotional styles like empathy through the script of suffering and hope. Through analysis of humanitarian VR films, the use of character, narrative, and formal VR film devices, we show how empathy is created. Thereby, we focus specifically on the simulation of particular locales, intimate encounters with the suffering Other, and gratification of viewer needs. The paper concludes that humanitarian VR films simulate an engagement with global problems when, in fact, they are catering to the emotional needs of people engaging with those problems. The global citizen as a feeling self becomes caught in interpersonal affective textures, which obscure geopolitical causes of humanitarian crises. Hence, the paper questions empathy as a universal way to better the world and diverges from the celebration of humanitarian VR film as a universal empathy machine.

New ways of seeing, feeling, being: intimate encounters in virtual reality performance

ABSTRACT Robin Nelson has argued that intermedial performance has ‘elicited a new cultural way of seeing, feeling and being in the contemporary world’ (Nelson in Bay-Cheng et al. 2010. Mapping Intermediality in Performance. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 18). This extension of John Berger’s ‘ways of seeing’ to consider feeling and being in relation to visual art and performance becomes increasingly important in works that immerse the spectator’s body in physical and/or virtual environments. This article considers ways of seeing, feeling and being in three virtual reality performances staged in 2019: Jordan Tannahill’s Draw Me Close (Young Vic, Feb 2019); Marshmallow Laser Feast’s We Live in an Ocean of Air (Saatchi Gallery, 2018–2019); and my own practice-as-research explorations of VR and intimate performance, and our faces, my heart, brief as photos, that took place during a residency at the National Theatre of Scotland in August and September 2019. In this article, I argue that the specific modes of engagement produced in these works are the unique result of the meeting point between virtual reality technologies and live performance practices and that the forms of embodied spectatorship afforded can facilitate the movement between the actual and the virtual, intimacy and distance, immersion and making strange: producing very real and potent effects.