Public Intimacy Research Articles

Performing intimate publics in academia: speak-writing as affective politics for sustainability transformation

ABSTRACT Ecological and social systems are in poly-crisis, whose present is mediated not only materially but also affectively. This article introduces the concept of speak-write – a form of writing to be performed for an audience – to address affective states that belong to processes of transformation but are silenced in organisational structures and professional practices, including academia. To contribute meaningfully to a sustainability transformation, this article argues, scholars have to include their conditions of work and what kind of responses they enable or disable. Reflecting on an experience with performing speak-write, this article shows how speak-write can perform an intimate public that might enable finding out what is collective and conventional in the affective atmospheres that circulate and organise our crisis present. Queering academic conventions, speak-write is part of an affective politics in the margins of conventional academic practices that gesture towards how to be home in a world yet-to-come.

Managing Unpredictability

While research has delved into the political and protest potential of memes, the analyses have largely left out political memes of marginalized communities. This article provides an analysis of Finnish trans memes on Instagram, focusing simultaneously on their political arguments and on the intimate public formed around them. Based on 18 media diaries and interviews with Finnish gender minorities, this article explores how Finnish trans memes on Instagram articulate how unjust social infrastructures create vulnerability and unpredictability in trans lives, while at the same time creating feelings of connection between and across identities, and alleviating feelings of vulnerability through laughter and care. The article challenges the traditional notion of politics as being outside of intimate publics, arguing that Finnish trans memes’ articulation of the vulnerability and unpredictability resulting from unjust infrastructure is, in fact, the connecting glue of the intimate public.

‘Real’ Reel Poetry: Examining Co-Digital Motherhood Communities Through Reel Instapoetry

ABSTRACT The original wave of Instapoetry, typically recognised by its typewritten font and generic axioms, was instantly divisive, with some decrying its linguistic simplicity as banal and others praising this same trait for its universal accessibility. Regardless of their controversial reception, however, the incessant production of today’s digital economy has required Instapoets to continuously adapt to their shifting environment. While a few Instapoet-influencers may have achieved true celebrity status, removing their original online posts and transcending to solely print publications, most Instapoets have continued to evolve with the platform in their practices for creating, managing, and presenting content. Surprisingly, however, such entrepreneurial adaptation does not necessarily contribute to disassociated intimate publics, where users are only vaguely connected by a loose exchange of likes. As evidenced by this case study on motherhood Instapoets, marginalised voices may sometimes build niche counterpublics where individuals mutually support each other for the good of the entire gift economy. Certain new hypertextual features, such as reels, not only contribute to increasing interpersonal user connections but even encourage more fluid co-digital collaborations. This survey particularly notes how content creators and consumers tag, share, and adapt reels to mutually strengthen the overarching motherhood Instapoetry community.

Omar Kasmani, Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan

Omar Kasmani, Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan

Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan by Omar Kasmani (review)

Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan by Omar Kasmani (review)

“This Honestly Breaks My Heart”: Black Lives Matter and Reshaping Post-Feminist, Post-Racial Intimacy in Girls’ Influencer Economies

Young women’s digital networks have been structured through a carefully cultivated sense of connection and relatability, allowing users to brand themselves as “influencers” and create lucrative beauty and lifestyle content for viewers. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s theory of the “intimate public,” wherein closeness among women is engineered through the implicit mutual attachment to a shared feminine culture, girls’ studies scholars can consider how influencer content enables girls’ digital intimate publics in a post-feminist media culture wherein girls work to cultivate this sense of shared experience. This article explores the challenges, ruptures, and renewals in one such “digital intimate public” in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. A close analysis of a response to this crisis from a popular “girl-y” YouTuber seeks to understand to how dynamics in this space could directly negotiate these shifts through the utilization of online affordances, girl-oriented vernacular, and commercial strategies. It analyzes intersections of post-racial and postfeminist ideology may intersect in cultivating and renegotiating the affective norms in these girl-oriented spaces.

Intimidad pública en los medios sociales -extimidad como presencia conectada

The modern experience of intimacy and sociality is being radically transformed, impacting not just the quality of social relationships but also the experience of the self and the borders between private and public expressions of the self. Social media are prime aspects of today’s intimacy practices. They fulfil a need and desire for (remote) communications and a feeling of (mediated) connection. The contemporary transformations regarding intimacy are presented in this paper. It is stated as a hypothesis that a reordering of the private and public realms has been happening since the 20th century, requiring a new theory of publicity and publicness. Only a reconceptualization of the modern notions of “public” and “private” enables us to fully understand the mutations in public intimacy provoked by social media. The objective is to demonstrate that media modulates intimacy, and concepts such as extimacy and connected presence are needed to fully comprehend and evaluate it. This work begins by recounting the transformations in modern intimacy and its contemporary redefinition. Then, a characterization of the contemporary articulations of intimacy is drawn, and the implications of extimacy for the individual in the context of highly mediatized societies are presented. It is argued that extimacy involves a complete reformulation of modern intimacy in direction or a malleable, fluid, and negotiated, public intimacy. It is even more important today as growing differentiation and performativity in social life demand the management of social relations.

Frembgen, Jürgen Wasim: “We are Lovers of the Qalandar.” Piety, Pilgrimage, and Ritual in Pakistani Sufi Islam / Kasmani, Omar: Queer Companions. Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan

Frembgen, Jürgen Wasim: “We are Lovers of the Qalandar.” Piety, Pilgrimage, and Ritual in Pakistani Sufi Islam / Kasmani, Omar: Queer Companions. Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan

Fire in the Hole

Drawing on the letters female fans submitted to Motion Picture Magazine between 1914 and 1918, this article seeks to center negative feelings as a constitutional part of Hollywood reception during the World War I years. Emergent at this time, the language of affective film reception took up a combative tenor reflective of women’s lived experiences: anger, derision, and dissent pervade the first-person writings submitted by self-identified movie-loving “misses” and “girls.” Reading their published correspondence as proto-manifestations of feminist “troublemakers” and “killjoys” helps in historicizing early Hollywood fandom as an “intimate publics” commercially centered on women’s culture, but communally appropriated by female consumers as a means to express antisocial responses.

Cruel, Convenient, and Intimate Publics

Lauren Berlant’s contributions chart innovative conceptual frameworks to help us understand how affect and emotion, desires and hopes traverse the public and private realms. However, rather surprisingly, Berlant’s work does not engage directly with explorations of digital culture and its effects, nor has it been used extensively in the analysis of digital culture. We begin by updating Berlant’s descriptions of how we think about the contemporary culture of ‘crises’ (2011), drawing on recent documentations to illustrate the interconnected phenomena of “epidemics of loneliness” and isolation in the face of uncertainties of the historical present. To address those gaps, we then explore how cruel optimism and intimate publics have been taken up in studies of digital and social media. We will conclude by addressing how these concepts, as well as Berlant’s most recent work on the inconvenience of others, can best be engaged to help navigate and theorize digital culture. Finally, we take up their 2022 work to explore the crises of polarization as a manifestation of loneliness, through the lens of inconvenience. In conclusion, we will suggest how Berlant’s concepts provide valuable insight for further studies of digital culture.

Intimacy and Failed Solidarity in the Teen Girl Film Lollipop Monster (2011)

Abstract: In this article I analyze the 2011 German indie film Lollipop Monster as a contemporary model for what Lauren Berlant calls "intimate publics." This film twists the genre of the teen girl film by portraying female friendship as a catalyst for unleashing suppressed emotions and subverting oppression. Instead of directing their aggression internally as self-harm, the protagonists of Lollipop Monster use violence against others to reinforce their strong social bond. By employing cinematic techniques from the popular multimedia genre of the music video, Lollipop Monster harkens back to the imagined sisterhoods of Riot Grrrl culture. In its nostalgic celebration, the film fails to address the racism of this movement, ultimately remaining focused on whiteness and failing to fully explore possibilities for solidarity between Black and white women. Overall, Lollipop Monster updates Berlant's cautionary theory, illustrating how gendered intimate publics co-create neoliberal landscapes of digital, multimedia music and social media stardom.

The “Psychologization” of Self-Images: Parents Views on the Gendered Dynamics of Sexting and Teen Social Media Cultures

This paper reports on data from interviews conducted with parents of high school-aged teens as part of a study which was aimed at better understanding the gendered dimensions of youth sexting and social media use, and the community responses to it. Here, we outline the findings on parents’ key concerns around digital and social media, their perceptions of the gendered dynamics of youth self-imaging practices, and their attitudes towards sexting and potentially “sexualized” self-images. Echoing other research in this area, parents were not overly concerned about sexting, nor sexual image-sharing or sexual media use among teens. Rather, their key concerns were more generally about the intensities and pressures of constant contact with peers in the digital era. They did, however, articulate key gender differences and socialization processes around youth self-imaging practices. We discuss the gendered cultural “attunements to sexualization” that parents negotiate in relation to social media image-sharing practices and suggest that the perspectives and experiences described can be understood as part of a broader cultural “psychologization”, and often psycho-pathologizing, of youth self-images in digitally networked intimate publics that is particularly intense around the vectors of gender and sexuality.

Examining the Double Bind of anti-Racism in (U.S.-Based) Communication Programs’ Statements against Racism

In this study, we critically analyze statements published by doctoral degree-granting Communication programs throughout 2020 and 2021 in response to racism against Black Americans and Asian American/Pacific Islanders. Because anti-racist discourses are intertwined with social practices in that they help create the spaces for equitable policies, we seek to understand the ideological struggles in the discourses around institutional racism during a moment of racial reckoning, as produced through these statements. We frame our analysis around the concept of the double bind, through which discourses of anti-racism simultaneously invoke colorblindness and, as we demonstrate, is further complicated by the need for these statements to address multiple, overlapping publics within their institutions that are defined by different racial identifications. In this regard, we draw upon Lauren Berlant’s notion of intimate publics to demonstrate how the anti-racist double bind operates as a form of (an)othering to construct sentimental communities of sameness and difference among these overlapping audiences. Using this framework, we analyze how the statements demonstrate tensions between discourses, reflecting how the transition from “diversity” to “anti-racism” is mediated by discourses of “solidarity.” We offer future directions for the development of institutional anti-racist discourse within the discipline.

Everything Everywhere All at Once and the Intimate Public of Asian American Cinema

The multiple Academy Award winning sci-fi absurdist multiverse film Everything Everywhere All At Once (Daniels, 2021) uses transpacific film genre conventions to represent the possible life variations of its Asian American immigrant family protagonists. An exception to the seeming incommensurability of commercial feature filmmaking and the anti-capitalist and anti-racist traditions of Asian American cinema, the film highlights how the conventions of transpacific genre films condition the intimate public of Asian American audiences. To be legible as an Asian American, the film shows, is to be attuned to the conventions of its dominant, often hegemonic and repressive, representations. By illustrating how genre conventions condition the sense of belonging amongst its Asian American protagonists, the film offers new ways of imagining and relating with Asian America Cinema.

Sensemaking and public intimacy on TikTok: How viral videos influence interpersonal relationships offline

Digital communication technologies transform social relationships by networking strangers into mediated intimate publics. Guided by the question of what happens when displays of public intimacy go viral, I analyze communicative methods within intimate publics on TikTok through an exploratory, qualitative case study of the viral “couch guy” meme. Results indicate that users on TikTok participate in intimate publics through the uploading of original content, duplication and replication of content, commenting, and lurking. Utilizing sensemaking as an analytic, first, I demonstrate how TikTok’s platform affordances transform displays of public intimacy into public extimacy, transforming TikTok into a space where social scripts and relationship expectations are negotiated. Second, I offer a preliminary organizational structure of communicative actions within the “couch guy” public on TikTok. Overall, this article concludes that participation in mediated publics has the potential to influence interpersonal relationships offline.

Black Poetics of Affect: Intimate Public Encounters with Strangers in Claudia Rankine’s Just Us (2020)

This article aims to explore how Jamaican-born writer Claudia Rankine displays the ways in which, as a black woman and a first-generation migrant settled in the United States, she ‘regularly has to negotiate conscious and unconscious dismissal, erasure, disrespect, and abuse’ (Rankine [2020] Just Us: An American Conversation, New York: Penguin, p. 23). Just Us: An American Conversation is a genre-defying work that includes poems, essays, photography, visual art, posts from social media, and academic and journalistic sources that tackle the discursive constructions of whiteness in cultural and political life in the United States. In this volume, the private and the public merge through conversations with white strangers and friends at the airport and the train station, in the classroom, in the backyard, in the street and in social distancing interactions via Zoom. Berlant ([2011] Cruel Optimism, Durham: Duke UP.) writes about public spheres as ‘affect worlds’, where emotions precede rational or deliberative thought, attaching strangers to each other and defining the terms of the state-civil society relation. I also use Sara Ahmed’s idea of ‘encounter’ (2000, 2012), defined as a meeting with others that surprises and involves conflict, because it shifts the boundaries of the familiar or assumed knowledge. In this sense, Rankine creatively looks for traces of racialized and gendered experiences in encounters that involve bodies or texts, including the devastating effects of Covid-19 on marginalized black communities. The volume completes a vital trilogy that includes the hybrid book-length poems Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004) and Citizen (2014). This lyrical series conform what I call ‘a black poetics of affect’, shaped by intimate public encounters with racism and sexism that disrupt the fantasy of a post-racial society. Rankine’s sustained reflections on ‘the affective dimensions of Black life’ (Palmer [2017] ‘“What Feels More Than Feeling?”: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect’, Critical Ethnic Studies 3:2, pp. 31–56.) provide new and situated insights on affect theories and feminist studies.

THE CIRCULATION OF FEELINGS ON POLITICISED INSTAGRAM

In recent years a growing number of Finnish social media influencers have started to discuss political questions and even actors known for light lifestyle content have become vocal about social justice issues. In this paper, we explore how popular Finnish influencers experience the new expectations set for them and how they handle the mixture of intimate and algorithmic logics of Instagram. Our analysis draws from online observations of a wide range of lifestyle influencers and eight semi-structured, in-depth interviews with influencers and influencer agency representatives. Theoretically, we use Lauren Berlant’s (2008) analysis of ‘intimate publics’ to examine Instagram as a platform for vague intimacy, where feelings and commercial exchange flourish and circulate in proximity to the political. Our investigation into influencers’ experiences of politicised Instagram through the concept of vague intimacy reveals the complex interplay of authenticity, politics, values, commercialised exchange, intimacy and feelings. Our study shows that influencers’ social media engagement comprises mixed feelings and ambiguity as they struggle to manage their visibility and meet followers’ expectations. Their politically oriented content on Instagram intertwines with their everyday lives but not without a cost: their inboxes overflow with DMs from followers seeking meaningful discussion. Although influencers seek to make politics look easy and engage in meaningful conversations with their followers, balancing between inclusive politics, commercial visibility and protecting one’s own boundaries is hard work.

:Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsQueer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan. Omar Kasmani. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022, 224 pp. $25.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-1803-2.Katherine Pratt EwingKatherine Pratt EwingColumbia University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Anthropological Research Volume 79, Number 1Spring 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723075 Views: 15Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan by Omar Kasmani (review)

Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan by Omar Kasmani (review)

Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689–1800

Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, 1689–1800