Public Intimacy Research Articles

‘The gendered film worker: Women in cinema collective, intimate publics and the politics of labour’

‘The gendered film worker: Women in cinema collective, intimate publics and the politics of labour’

More Flailing in Public

More Flailing in Public Anna Poletti (bio) There has been an outpouring of tributes to Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Chicago, in response to their passing in June this year. Some tributes, like those published in The Nation or n+1 (Butler et al.; Bordowitz et al. ), focus on Berlant's intellectual legacy, often prioritizing the importance of Cruel Optimism as an analytic frame for understanding the contemporary moment. Others, such as those published on the blog of the journal Berlant coedited, Critical Inquiry (Ferguson and Brown), are closer to forms of digital life writing. The personal, often intimate and confessional, tone of many of these tributes seem entirely appropriate ways of memorializing a thinker, teacher, interlocutor, collaborator, and (for some) friend, who was a leading figure in developing a rigorous approach to studying a cluster of related phenomena: affect, publics, intimacy, sexuality, gender, genre, and form. Many of the tributes are a testament to what Berlant helped us think and say about the work of the intellectual ( "Affect is the New Trauma"; "Genre Flailing"), and how Berlant's way of engaging with their colleagues was often intellectually generative, as well as personally surprising or unsettling. In what follows, I offer my perspective on the worlding Berlant engaged in (Poletti and Rak 262; Berlant and Warner), and offer a sketch of some of the elements for worlding they left behind. For me, Berlant's publications and their way of speaking with colleagues enacted and theorized core tensions that preoccupy lifewriting studies: what it means to be a person in public—sometimes alone, sometimes in a collective, sometimes in search of collectivity. Always thinking from, and beyond, psychoanalytic insights into the disorganizing experience of desire (largely through object-relations), Berlant explicated the kinds of stories about the good life that permeated American culture, and explored what happened to people's belief in culture, politics, and themselves when they tried to live those narratives, or discovered those narratives were structurally unlivable ( The Female Complaint; Cruel Optimism ). Berlant's early work on trauma ("Trauma and Ineloquence" ) and their interviews (with Jay Prosser, and with Julie Rak and me) are the places where the relevance of their deep attention to the politics of "fantasies of the good life" are most clearly connected to lifewriting scholarship. Margaretta Jolly's special issue of Biography on "Life Writing and Intimate Publics," published ten years ago, shows us how productive Berlant's theory of the importance of being and feeling intimate in [End Page 2] public can be for studying life writing, particularly online. A thinker preoccupied with genre ( The Female Complaint ; "Genre Flailing"), Berlant was ambivalent about autobiography per se. They made that ambivalence available as a tool, rather than a judgment. When they invited Julie Rak and me to present at the University of Chicago, they responded to my speculative paper, an attempt to connect Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of the periperformative utterance to the importance of the performative in theorizing of life writing, by asking openly: Isn't all autobiography periperformative? Luckily, I had read enough Berlant by then to know that their use of all was not an attempt to collapse everything together in order to control or dismiss it, but an invitation to shift the object or my position in relation to it. In a footnote to a later publication, Berlant summarized the periperformative as "Sedgwick's term for the context-extending effects of performative actions" ("Genre Flailing" )—a statement that usefully condenses a core element of Sedgwick's concept, while also being an apt descriptor of Berlant's intellectual legacy. Through a slow unfolding of specific genres that give form to Americans' investment in the good life (such as the couple form and the nation), Berlant's scholarship (a performative action) radically extended the applicability of feminism and queer theory's interest in ideologies of proper desire. When we interviewed Berlant the day after our presentations, they spoke from their commitment to creating deep context through attention to "the scene," and with characteristic honesty about the goals they had set themselves as a writer and thinker with their blog, Supervalent Thought. For...

Public intimacy. Architecture and the visual arts

Public intimacy. Architecture and the visual arts

Public intimacy. Architecture and the visual arts

Public intimacy. Architecture and the visual arts

Hooking up with friends: LGBTQ+ young people, dating apps, friendship and safety

Research exploring digital intimate publics tends to consider social media platforms and dating/hook-up apps separately, implying distance between social and sexual communication practices. This paper troubles that delineation by drawing on LGBTQ+ young people’s accounts of negotiating safety and risk in dating/hook-up apps, in which friendship practices are significant. We explore four key themes of friendship that arose in our analysis of interviews and workshop discussions: sharing mutuals (or friends-in-common) with potential dates/hook-ups; making friends through apps; friends supporting app negotiations; and friends’ involvement in safety strategies. Through analysis of these data, we firstly argue that friendship is often both an outcome and an organising force of LGBTQ+ young people’s uses of dating/hook-up apps, and secondly, that media sites commonly defined as social (e.g. Instagram) or sexual (e.g. Tinder) are imbricated, with friendship contouring queer sex and dating practices.

Light infrastructures and intimate publics in the vertical city

ABSTRACT This paper explores how the uneven distribution of light and darkness in the vertical city conditions residents’ capacities to form meaningful attachments to the places in which they dwell. Drawing on ethnographic material collected on a recent high-rise development in London, the paper explores how residentsilluminate their homes in improvisatory engagement with the basic infrastructures that support their domestic lives and with the wider urban context. Four biographic vignettes reveal how people alter, adapt to or overturn the inadequacies of domestic infrastructures to carve out intimate spaces of inhabitation. The paper advances the idea of “light infrastructure” as a conceptual proposition for attending to the affective, esthetic and performative compositions of infrastructures in the night, and as an analytical proposition for developing a more hopeful and inclusive outlook on the ways people come to dwell, inhabit and feel at home in the vertical city at night.

Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James

Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James

Physically Distant – Socially Intimate

In the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic situation, physical interaction and public performances became difficult, while use of digital media for public and private purposes was extended and intensified. This affected citizens’ right of assembly and led to new forms of collective sociality. This article analyses how social intimacy was re-arranged during lockdown through a thick description of mediated performances circulating on Italy’s Day of Liberation from Nazi fascism. It examines how a politicised commemoration of resistance echoed fears and desires relating to the virus and enabled the production of subjectivities in a transnational techno-social environment. Combining Lauren Berlant’s concept of intimate publics with theories of media, social movements, mediation and national identity, it offers an analytical framework detailing three layers of social intimacy: spatial/corporeal materiality, biography and mediation.

Review Essay: “Music in a Time of Social Distancing and Public Intimacy: Lessons from Contemporary Japan”

Review Essay: “Music in a Time of Social Distancing and Public Intimacy: Lessons from Contemporary Japan”

Building community, one swipe at a time: hook-up apps and the production of intimate publics between women

ABSTRACT Hook-up apps are an increasingly popular way for women to meet other people for sex, dating, relationships, and more. As a mundane and habitual form of media, the multiple uses of hook-up apps allow for the production of intimacy in surprising and complex ways. This paper draws on narrative interviews with 15 self-identifying women to explore how dating and hook-up apps help produce ‘intimate publics’ for women. The field of intimate publics available to women users of hook-up apps is broader than those afforded by in-app interactions; there is an entire network of intimacy, sociality, and publicity that forms around hook-up apps. Our findings show that while both queer and straight women use hook-up apps to find sex, hook-ups, dates, and relationships, they are also central to building community, friendship, and sociality between women.

The Muslimah Intimate Public: Re-Considering Contemporary Daʾwa Activists in Indonesia

Abstract This article reconsiders contemporary digital activism in an increasingly pious Indonesia and responds to Eva F. Nisa’s 2018 paper on young Muslim women as daʾwa (proselytization) activists published in this journal. This paper asks: How have today’s socially mediated publics in Indonesia influenced the figure of the daʾwa activist? How are these daʾwa activists different from those in the past? I argue that the daʾwa activists are the products of a Muslimah intimate public, part of a networked public within which young women discuss, engage with, and express how they ‘feel’ about issues that interest them, and celebrate self-improvement and self-enterprise, combined with religious self-cultivation. Within this public daʾwa activists have two key characteristics. First, market logics and commercial interests are fundamental to their daʾwa. Second, the daʾwa accounts frame controversial and political issues through specific visual ethics that engender a sense of intimacy with their followers.

Intimacy and Isolation in Jen Silverman’s Gothic Worlds

As a genre, the gothic deals frequently in loneliness, isolation, and paranoid orientations toward others. These characteristics make the gothic a productive lens through which to explore the effects of neoliberalism, particularly the way neoliberalism structures intimate human connection. I analyse three plays by Jen Silverman, demonstrating how her use of gothic conventions illuminates the promotion of isolation within neoliberal discourse as well as the exchange of emotional intimacy for public intimacy and the commodification of intimacy within the attention economy. By reframing familiar gothic tropes, Silverman draws parallels between the rebellious nature of gothic villains and the hyper-individualism promoted by neoliberal discourse. She further reworks the gothic heroine’s struggle against patriarchal authority, utilizing it to interrogate the role of family life within neoliberalism. Through these techniques, Silverman highlights the anxious tension that lies at the heart of neoliberalism: between fearing others and needing them to affirm our existence.

Public Intimacy and Kinship in the Korean Adoption Community

Abstract Korean children represent the largest group of international, transracial adoptees in the United States, and the majority of these children enter white families. Since the 1980s, adoptive families and children have become engaged with one another through culture (or heritage) camps, local and national adoption organizations, adoption agency postadoption services, adoption list-serves, and adoption-related Facebook groups. The emergence of an adult adoptee community coincided with these connections between adoptive parents and their children. Yet these communities—adoptive parents and adult adoptees—do not exist in isolation from one another. To better understand how the two communities operate in concert and conversation together, this essay examines the role of the annual Korean Adoption Conference (KAC)—operated by a national organization dedicated to supporting the Korean adoption community—in the lives of Korean adult adoptees and the adoptive parents of Korean children. Drawing from survey data of adult Korean adoptees and adoptive parents of Korean adoptees and a collection of oral histories of those involved in the KAC as attendees, speakers, and/or leaders, this article explores the implications of forging community across the adoption constellation. By placing these voices in conversation with one another, this essay contributes to new knowledges concerning the value of listening and learning from one another as a mechanism to engender change in mainstream conversations and debates concerning adoption. I elucidate how the KAC is a site for adoptees and their adoptive families to contest what it means to be in community or kinship with one another through the development of public intimacies. In doing so, I explore what it means to cultivate an intentional space for adoptees and adoptive parents to engage one another and disentangle assumptions that there is a monolithic adoptee or adoptive parent experience.

Note passing as gendered practices of public ambiguity in a hyper‐masculine organization

This article explores a surprising and seemingly mundane organizational practice: passing notes during professional meetings. Based on 34 in‐depth interviews with women in a hyper‐masculine organization — the Israeli military — this study focuses on what I term gendered practices of public ambiguity. It demonstrates how these practices shed light on three interrelated paths to power at work: (i) practices of public intimacy between men; (ii) practices of women's degradation by men; and (iii) practices of recognition claims by women. The tension between the publicity inherent in the routine passing of notes and the ambiguity of their contents calls for a more nuanced theorization of gendered power practices, which transcends the accepted dichotomy of doing and undoing gender, reproducing or challenging the symbolic gender order. The findings show that gendered micro‐practices can become polysemic symbolic spaces in which women redirect the flow of power, if only temporarily and locally, and turn it into a multidirectional and multi‐agentic resource. The conceptual contribution of these findings is discussed in terms of the positioning of women in hyper‐masculine environments as pragmatic subjects who (re‐)construct mechanisms of power out of the restricted repertoire available to them.

Servicing “intimate publics”: Johannesburg and Baltimore department stores in the 1960s

ABSTRACT Based on archival and interview research in the US and South Africa, this paper examines two moments of public debate around access to the space of department stores in Johannesburg and in Baltimore in the 1960s. In Baltimore, African American students organized a sit-in protest at lunch counters and restaurants of major department stores to contest not being served. In Johannesburg, the National Union of Distributive Workers (NUDW), campaigned against job reservation in service and clerical work in stores in Johannesburg to argue for black workers’ access to employment. The paper contends that as “intimate publics,” department stores offer a site to compare the affective articulations of race, class, and gender in both places, which track differing political imaginaries at a moment when consumption was expanding and workforces were changing.

A Gender Gap in Literacy? Exploring the Affective Im/materiality and “Magic” of Allure with/in a First Grade Classroom

Within this article, I think with (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) posthumanist theories of affect and assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) to argue that literacy learning within a first grade classroom (NYC) involved allure (Thrift, 2008), or more-than-human technologies of public intimacy that were affectively contagious and seemed to take on a life of their own. By doing so, I contribute a new dimension to literacy-gender debates by exploring how the im/material practices of allure emerge to produce entanglement, bliss, and even violence. While male students’ entangled reading practices disrupted popular assumptions of “failing boys,” thereby making new gendered and literate subjectivities possible, these practices, at times, further reinforced rigid heteronormativities. Ultimately, attending to literacy learning as alluring invites more ethically response-able (Barad, 2007) considerations that take seriously how the forces of gender, sexuality, and race work to animate/contain bodies, spaces, and things, as well as shape the un/making of students as “successfully literate.”

The gendered film worker: Women in cinema collective, intimate publics and the politics of labour

Although Indian cinema studies as a discipline has long been involved in various theoretical elaborations of film production, not until recently has it engaged with the question of the gendered nature of film work. In this piece, I attempt to develop a framework centred around the politics of labour to provide a useful case to highlight how thoughtful engagement with these categories provides immense value for both contemporary film scholarship and feminist histories of media. In trying to situate Women in Cinema Collective, the first collective of women film workers to be formed in India, in the larger history of labour politics and women workers collectives of the recent past, I try to disaggregate a larger episteme of women’s work that emerges across the flexible labour economies of the neo-liberal present. Through examining the Women in Cinema Collective’s social media campaigns, advocacy work, petitioning and legal counselling, I argue that Women in Cinema Collective emerges as a tenuous collective whose work moves across the porous boundaries of a new social movement, workers collective and an autonomous women’s group.

Cinema as Prosthesis: Errol Morris’s Use of the Interrotron in <em>Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.</em>

Cinema as Prosthesis: Errol Morris’s Use of the Interrotron in <em>Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.</em>

Book Review: Amy Shields Dobson, Brady Robards and Nicholas Carah, Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media

Book Review: Amy Shields Dobson, Brady Robards and Nicholas Carah, <i>Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media</i>

Cultura popular, redes sociales y nuevas tecnologías: cambios en las subjetividades a través de los consumos culturales

El artículo expone una reseña del libro La intimidad p´ública de Beatriz Sarlo, reconocida ensayista argentina, licenciada en letras por la Universidad de Buenos Aires y especialista en el ámbito de la crítica literaria y cultural. El texto propone un recorrido a través de los géneros literarios centrales de la Argentina moderna para interesarse así por los cambios en la sexualidad, la sensualidad y las subjetividades que proponen el mundo del espectaculo mediático, las nuevas tecnologías y las redes sociales. A su vez, se hace hincapie sobre los distintos modelos de felicidad construidos por la literatura sentimental de principio del siglo XX y los géneros mediaticos del escándalo y el idilio de la maternidad. &#x0D;