Public Intimacy Research Articles

Performing Religion in Public ed. by Claire Maria Chambers, Simon W. du Toit, and Joshua Edelman (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Religion in Public ed. by Claire Maria Chambers, Simon W. du Toit, and Joshua Edelman Roy Brooks-Delphin PERFORMING RELIGION IN PUBLIC. Edited by Claire Maria Chambers, Simon W. du Toit, and Joshua Edelman. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; pp. 304. Critically shifting Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, Performing Religion in Public turns toward performance, that “essentially contested concept” (17), to investigate the slipperiness of Habermas’s sequestering of the public sphere from religion. As an anthology, these essays contribute to recent conversations on religion and publics demonstrated by works like Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen’s The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (2011) and Christopher Balme’s The Theatrical Public Sphere (2014). Performing Religion in Public stands apart, however, by framing performance studies as equipped to engage the “un-translatability” between the sacred and the secular, asking: “How do we not understand each other?” (13; emphasis in original). Taking up Habermas’s assertion that religious speech ought to hold sway in public discourse only when rationally translated, Performing Religion contests the limitations of insider/outsider binaries, noting the inseparability of performance from public world-making. The bracketing of publics and self from experience disregards existence with and as the world (15). Performance studies, then, through reflexivity and its “use of an analysis of performative events and practices as a means to gain access to the network of relations” (16) engages untranslatability by troubling the disentanglement of the private from the public. Performance subverts conventional ways of thinking through its processes of knowing, producing, and encountering difference: “reason’s lack is supplied by performance” (18). [End Page 577] Drawing from a spectrum of religious traditions and theorists, Performing Religion boasts varied voices and topics, including generous discussions among contributors ending each section. The book is organized into four theoretically driven parts: “Publics and the Non-Democratic State”; “Visceral Publics”; “Publics and Commodification”; and “Ephemeral Publics.” Each part is made up of three chapters, and while a quarter of them treat geographically English religious practices or personalities, all chapters weigh factors of space, identity, world-making, and performative economies. The first part principally addresses how governing bodies regulate or appropriate religious discourse to maintain influence. Simon du Toit examines the sixteenth-century Puritan preaching of John Stockwood and Richard Greenham in “The Market for Argument,” contending that performances of spiritual interiority and prophetic (and anti-theatrical) speech produced a counter-public competing for religious authority, blurring boundaries of public and private, and essentially politicizing Puritan zeal. Similarly analyzing embodiment, Joy Palacios’s contribution on France’s early seminaries shows how seventeenth-century communal prayer carefully regulated publics to form religious community. South African political and racial conflicts come alive in Michael Lambert and Tamantha Hammerschlag’s chapter, “The Durban Passion Play,” which questions the publics that these performances sanction in the pluralistic and postcolonial nation. Part 2, “Visceral Publics,” investigates how performances generate fear, joy, and sacrifice in the service of religious rhetoric and public hailing. Challenging Habermas’s concept of public reason, each chapter illuminates how religious discourse functions beyond reason and agreement. Tom Grimwood and Peter Yeandle distinguish the “entextualizing” rhetoric of preacher and theatre director Stewart Headlam (1847–1924) from moral ontological structures of the fractured English Christian community. An outstanding project awaits them in addressing Headlam’s productions. Joshua Edelman’s essay on American street preaching probes the practice’s offensiveness and formation of “intolerable publics,” challenging the criteria of “willingness” in defining publics. He demonstrates the necessity of rejection, tracing the affective potential of street preaching’s awkward and ineffective means, and details how intimate publics can arise beyond public debate and consent. Kris Messer documents the intermixing of personal and public discourse in “Faith, Fright, and Excessive Feeling,” inviting deeper reflection on communities informing and performing idealized publics and identities through a look at three separate hell houses. Part 3, “Publics and Commodification,” presents three cultural contexts whereby capitalism, choice, and secularisms infiltrate and redefine religious publics. Jo Robinson and Lucie Sutherland expose the emerging fierceness of religious competition in “Congregations, Audiences, Actors: Religious Performance and the Individual in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Nottingham.” Mapping religious and...

‘Getting Personal’: Contemplating Changes in Intersubjectivity, Methodology and Ethnography

‘Getting Personal’: Contemplating Changes in Intersubjectivity, Methodology and Ethnography

LAURA ENGEL and ELAINE M. McGIRR (eds). Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660-1830

The essays collected in Stage Mothers make a strong case for the importance of theatrical motherhood to the study of eighteenth-century maternity. The figure of the stage mother encompasses both the female performer, who was often (but not always) herself a mother, as well as the maternal roles she played on the eighteenth-century stage. The concept of stage motherhood, then, contributes to what Diana Solomon calls ‘betweenness’, the overlap between the actress’s persona and the character that she plays. Maternity, either in real life or in the world of the play, could also form part of the way in which an actress constructed her persona for an audience using what, in studies of female performers and celebrity culture, Joseph Roach terms ‘public intimacy’ and Felicity Nussbaum has named an ‘interiority effect’. Furthermore, the apparently inevitable sexualization of the actress by some of her audience gives new resonance to the erotic connotations of motherhood (a state which while idealized also draws attention to the woman as a sexual being). This volume provides a welcome addition to recent scholarship on motherhood in the eighteenth century by Toni Bowers, Marilyn Francus and Ruth Perry, amongst others. The editors and contributors acknowledge their indebtedness to this work, with Francus’s concept of the ‘spectral mother’, a figure absent yet haunting, applied frequently in the case studies offered here. The essays also extend research on the topic in important new directions. Engel, McGirr and their contributors demonstrate that stage mothers are uniquely positioned to provide insight into the various dimensions of maternity because of the complex interplay between their on-stage and off-stage identities.

Hoax Politics: Blogging, Betrayal, and the Intimate Public of A Gay Girl in Damascus

Blogs can connect disparate “others,” or focus attention on certain events, moments, or histories, but to what extent does the blog function within (or trouble) the paradigms of identity politics that also frame autobiographical narration in online contexts? This paper is a close analysis of A Gay Girl in Damascus, a fast moving case of online imposture that emerged in conjunction to the “Arab Spring” and catalyzed a host of issues connected to the representation, articulation, and circulation of marginal identity in online spaces.

WhatShouldWeCallMe? Self-Branding, Individuality and Belonging in Youthful Femininities on Tumblr

WhatShouldWeCallMe? Self-Branding, Individuality and Belonging in Youthful Femininities on Tumblr

Intimate Publics, Public Intimacies: Natural Limits, Creation and the Culture of Mahremiyet in Turkey

This article offers an ethnographic account of the culture of mahremiyet [intimacy and privacy] in Turkey, not only as an institution of intimacy regulating everyday sexual relationships between individuals in public, but also as a system enabling the operation of social normalcies through the creation of boundaries and privileges. By probing the concepts of mahremiyet and fıtrat [creation or natural disposition], the article investigates how intimacy operates in religious, mundane and political registers, and delves into the intricate relationship between the intimate and the shared. It suggests that the culture of mahremiyet is deeply rooted in the ways individuals construct their sense of selves in relation to others, and imagine mahrem boundaries as natural, God-given, or fıtrî laws in their entanglement with gender. The use of the language of mahremiyet in contemporary politics not only enables what can seem to be a meta-cultural intelligibility that guarantees popular support, but also distances any critique as strange or foreign.

Girls on film: Affective politics and the creation of an intimate anti-trafficking public in Singapore through film screenings

The interstices between film and politics occupy a prominent place in recent scholarship in political geography and cognate disciplines, focusing on the ways film establishes relations between viewers and characters. Such processes often utilise affective referents to create ‘intimate publics’. This paper focuses on the relations human trafficking films establish between ‘victims’, viewers and anti-trafficking stakeholders in creating an intimate anti-trafficking public in Singapore. I argue that the third world girl is rendered a moral object of sympathy both through trafficking film and performances by anti-trafficking stakeholders in the cinema. However, in comparison to both film viewers and anti-trafficking stakeholders she is cast as muted and lacking agency. Intimate anti-trafficking publics can emerge through the harnessing of negative emotions that, in this case, privilege the plight- but not the agency – of the female child trafficking victim and are inculcated through film storylines and cinematic performances.

Growing intimate privatepublics: Everyday utopia in the naturecultures of a young lesbian and bisexual women’s allotment

The Young Women’s Group in Manchester is a ‘young women’s peer health project, run by and for young lesbian and bisexual women’, which runs an allotment as one of its activities. At a time when interest in allotments and gardening appears to be on the increase, the existence of yet another community allotment may seem unremarkable. Yet we suggest that this queer allotment poses challenges for conventional theorisations of allotments, as well as for understandings of public and private. In this article we explore how the allotment project might be understood to be intensely engaged in ‘growing intimate publics’, or what we term ‘privatepublics’. These are paradoxical intimacies, privatepublic spaces which are not necessarily made possible in the usual private sphere of domestic homes. Here we focus on the work involved in materialising the allotment, which we understand as a queer privatepublic ‘natureculture’ ( Haraway, 2008 ) which appears as an ‘everyday utopia’ ( Cooper, 2014 ).

Crossing the Red Line: Public Intimacy and National Reputation in Saudi Arabia

In July 2009, the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) aired via satellite an episode of the talkshow Bold Red Line titled “Sexual Pleasure,” in which a Saudi man bragged about his sexual exploits. A wave of protest broke out in Saudi Arabia clamoring for the punishment of the man who would heretofore be known as the “LBC sex braggart.” Saudi authorities brought suit against him and prosecuted two Saudi women who worked for LBC. Drawing on a rich corpus of primary, Arabic-language source—119 articles, most from Saudi newspapers—this article uses the Bold Red Line controversy and Lauren Berlant's work on the “intimate public sphere” to analyze the articulation of patriarchy and nationalism in Saudi public discourse. The controversy, we conclude, reflects how the redefinition of political-economic issues in moral terms depends on an intentional re-articulation of the private-public nexus.

Sarah Cowan. Review of "Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa" .

Sarah Cowan. Review of "Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa" .

Zombie porn: necropolitics, sex, and queer socialities

This essay examines two gay zombie films by Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. I look to the ways LaBruce brings together the already intimate genres of horror and porn to paint an ambivalent picture of contemporary gay life and what he calls ‘the death of gay culture’. Zombies and zombie sex are deployed to level an anarcho-punk critique at contemporary queer collusions with necropolitical power. At the same time, explicit scenes of zombie sex gesture toward an always immanent political potentiality lodged within necropolitics. Rather than herald only a dead or failed future, LaBruce's gay zombies express disaffected, impersonal socialities, and especially forms of sex and politics that are deemed retrograde but that paradoxically suggest undead presents and futures. These necropolitical socialities are stubbornly animate, undying efforts that improvise intimate publics appropriate to contemporary precarities.

Public Intimacies: Frances Burney’s and Jane Cave Winscom’s Accounts of Illness

This article argues that, in a culture that focused on either essentializing or universalizing women’s bodies, Frances Burney’s 1811 Mastectomy Letter and Jane Cave Winscom’s 1793 Headache Odes utilize physiologically specific language to challenge these dominant ideals. By giving their readers graphic accounts of their procedures and pain, these authors bring their specific bodily experiences to light. Circulating their accounts, respectively as letters and in a local newspaper, Burney and Winscom also negotiate between the intimate sphere of their bodies and the more public space of letters and print.

Es ist bereits besser geworden. Zum Versprechen von Intimität im It gets better-Projekt

The online video-project It gets better aims to »give hope to LGBT youth«, by promising experiences of intimacy, both, in the sense of future intimate relations as well as collective feelings of belonging within »intimate publics« (Berlant 2008). Intending to explain the project’s productivity I am interested in its appeal for an empathic audience. Starting from queer critique of the project’s homonormative message, I focus on the underlying logic of generalized suffering, making it plausible to relate to it without necessarily identifying as LGBT oneself. With the purpose to further qualify this logic I refer to an attenuated example of sentimental culture, the TV-series Glee, which is particularly illustrative for the conditions of today’s intimate publics.

The New Diversity and the New Public: Impressions of dOCUMENTA (13)

Author(s): Wolbert, Barbara | Abstract: Long before dOCUMENTA (13) opened in 2012, designated documenta director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev pledged that “her” documenta would stay clear of what she called the “Biennale-Syndrome.” What was the Biennale-Syndrome, and why did she want to avoid it? What seemed to be the challenge here? The Venice Biennale - the first art biennale founded in 1895 – has traditionally defined itself as simultaneously a spectacle and as a representation of nation states through works of visual art. Is it possible for an international art show of its size and prestige to avoid the trend of further festivalization, and can it divest itself of re-mediations of cultural, racial, ethnic, and, in particular, national categories as artistic and aesthetic criteria for includson or exclusion? dOCUMENTA (13) became a record breaking show, visited by 860,000 people in 36 places in Kassel. As such, this 100-day show was, without any doubt, the most popular European art spectacle of the summer of 2012. It appeared, however, remarkably unspectacular. Although featureing the work of 188 international artists hailing from more than 50 countries, nationality did not seem to be a relevant issue. This article takes the reader on a journey back in time, reviewing the past 60 years of the documenta in order to diagnose its paradigmatic shifts. We will tour the 2012 documenta to determine what made Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s show stand out from previous documenta exhibitions and the ubiquitous biennials. Drawing upon Levent Soysal’s concept of “Public Intimacy,” and relying on his idea of the “new individual” who engages accordingly with her surroundings and her social environment, the article will discuss how dOCUMENTA (13) enticed its visitors. In turn, Bruno Latour’s “thing theory” will help explain how this most recent documenta rendered nationally defined diversity an obsolete analytic for the presentation of art.

Exemplary Lives and the Omnipresence of Autobiography

This article reviews the past three decades of autobiography studies in the context of the expansion of the autobiographic corpus. After distinguishing two interpretations of the omnipresence of autobiography, it moves on to describe through a couple of examples how scholarly discourse has addressed the proliferation of self-narratives and the problem of the exemplariness of the lives narrated. Beside autobiography studies, a field rooted in literary scholarship, it also renders the influential criticism of the interpenetration of the and the public, an argument suggesting that the cultural significance of autobiography has been utterly shaken. In the end the article quotes Laurent Berlant's concept of intimate publics, and argues that this notion has been inspiring for autobiography studies because it offers a complex framework for the interpretation of the current obsession with self-narratives.

A study on the expression of interactive experiential space for public intimacy

A study on the expression of interactive experiential space for public intimacy

Politicized Spaces and Public Intimacy: The Cookery Books of Henrietta Maria and Elizabeth Cromwell

Throughout the periods of the Protectorate and Restoration, images and texts concerning Henrietta Maria and Elizabeth Cromwell were widely circulated for public consumption. Two such documents, themselves examples of royalist propaganda, took the form of recipe books entitled, Queens Closet Opened and The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth, commonly called Joan Cromwel. These books were published within the same decade, within which the Protectorate failed and the Restoration began. Both highlight the failures of Elizabeth, as representative of the protectorate, and praise Henrietta Maria as an emblem of the monarchy, both past and present. This article examines these cookery books in relation to the political movements the two women inevitably came to represent.

Another Look At Orientalism: (An)Othering in Slumdog Millionaire

This article uses Lauren Berlant's conception of the intimate public, as constructed through commodification and fantasy, to argue that Edward Said's (1979) well-known notion of Orientalism has undergone a transformation in contemporary global representations. This version of Orientalism effectively erases the historical and economic factors of colonialism that created the “other” in favor of a construction of “(an)other,” a global sentimental community of sameness and difference. It explores this move through the analysis of the popular and critically acclaimed Slumdog Millionaire, which paradoxically presents the desolation and reality of the Mumbai slums in India within stories of romance and triumph. Outlining the various intimate publics created through the film, this article contends that this process of “(an)othering” ultimately makes the experience of watching the “other” more comfortable by commodifying the Oriental subject, reconciling the temporary experience of the film's foreignness with audience expectations and perceptive frameworks, and maintaining the Oriental subject as intelligible to Western subjectivity. By absolving the audience from any responsibility for the colonial legacies that created the contemporary realities, colonial legacies are elided by a more universal fantasy of achieving wealth and romance.

Intimidad y «extimidad» en las redes sociales. Las demarcaciones éticas de Facebook

The current paper aims to analyze how certain Facebook settings, model of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), have turned into an infringement of some existing privacy Ethical principles. This totally changed and modern paradigm has its clearest expression in recent Web 2.0., and omnipotent Communication Technology, and implies the reconsideration of each Ethical Principles, especially those related to Intimacy and Image Protection. Our research explains not just how these areas are affected by technological changes but also the way these imperative ethical principles are violated because users ignorance and confidence. This carefree attitude and the increasing communicative relevance have given networking precedence over Intimacy protection. The result of this action has been denominated «Extimacy» according to the author Jacques Lacan, a concept which can be translated as public Intimacy through networking activities, namely, exposed Intimacy. The goal we aim to achieve is to illustrate the different ways our Privacy can be damaged by some Facebook measures (as Privacy Policies Change, collecting tendencies of consumption, the use of private data and revealing users confidence). Likewise these arguments will be endorsed by international researches focused on Facebook privacy violations, which we are going to expose to understand how citizens can carry out different actions to defend our Intimacy and Image Rights. El presente trabajo analiza cómo ciertas herramientas de Facebook, modelo de las nuevas tecnologías de la información, han derivado en la vulneración de algunos planteamientos éticos vigentes hasta el momento. Este paradigma comunicativo que encuentra su máxima expresión en las redes sociales y la tecnología 2.0, implica un replanteamiento de los principios de la ética informativa relativos a la salvaguarda de la intimidad, la protección de la vida privada y el resguardo de la propia imagen. Esta investigación estudia cómo estas áreas no solo se ven afectadas por los cambios tecnológicos y la propia naturaleza de la fuente informativa, sino por la confianza y desconocimiento de los usuarios, quienes dan primacía a la comunicación por encima de la intimidad. Este fenómeno denominado «extimidad» por Jacques Lacan, se traduce como la intimidad hecha pública a través de las nuevas redes de comunicación o intimidad expuesta. En nuestro análisis expondremos los resortes a través de los cuales se quebranta nuestra privacidad en Facebook, especialmente por medio de la captación de pautas de comportamiento, el empleo de datos derivados de los perfiles, los cambios en la política de privacidad y el reconocimiento facial, avalando su transgresión con documentación derivada de investigaciones realizadas por organismos internacionales. En resumen, analizar la vulneración de la intimidad en las redes sociales y entender qué medidas pueden implementarse para defender nuestros derechos son el objetivo de esta comunicación.

Staging the Interior: The Public and Private Intimacies of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle's Domestic Lives

‘Home’ is one of the most evocative and comforting words in the English language. It produces, at least in its idealized form, notions of safety, comfort, privacy, individuality and communion with family and friends. The supposed autonomy or permanence of home, however, is undermined frequently throughout one's life course revealing instead spaces of interactionism, public disturbance, discomfort, conflict, labour, stress and even violence. Reading Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle's voluminous letters one reads the emotional and psychological importance of ‘home’ and the vital necessity of the ideal world apart. The middle-class home was meant to stage a domesticated and comfortable private haven, withdrawn from public view and distant from the imperatives of the economy and politics, however, the house was also the physical representation, the outward ‘sign’, of the Carlyles' public identity. How the House looked and functioned – externally and internally – represented the Carlyles to the outside world. Hom...