Intimate Practices Research Articles

Young people becoming intimate on social media: Digital desires and gender dynamics

Digital technologies are shaping young people’s intimate relationships in profound ways, yet we have little knowledge of these experiences from the Global South. Drawing from a qualitative study, this article examines how 16-19-year-old South Africans make meaning of gender and sexuality through digital intimate practices. The study finds that digital intimacies are facilitated through producing and sharing of sexual content through sexting, video calls, selfies, nudes and emojis. Together they serve as affective entities in enhancing intimate connections expanding what we know of young people’s online sexual activities. However, we also draw attention to enduring patterns of male dominance within digital practices where girls’ online activities are curtailed by heterosexual oppressive relations of power. We contribute to the emerging research in South Africa advocating for the need for greater emphasis on young people and digital sexual intimacies beyond the current framing of risk and danger in order to promote healthy young sexualities.

Creating Lasting Love: An Ethnographic Study of Sexual Pleasure, Intimacy and Contraception

Sexual pleasure and intimacy are key reasons why people have sex, yet it remains underexamined in our understanding of how people make decisions about contraception. This paper draws on ethnographic research of the intersections between sexual pleasure, intimacy and contraception among women using specialist contraceptive services in central London. I describe how contraceptive use and choices are intertwined with how women assess intimacy in their sexual relationship, and not solely a desire to avoid pregnancy. How and when women use contraceptives relays their concerns about creating and maintaining pleasure and intimacy in their sexual relationships. Moreover, this ethnographic account illustrates how women draw on various contraceptive methods in their decision making and use them to increase communication and trust, distinguish relationships and potentially enhance sexual pleasure, which is indexical and necessary for enduring intimate connections. Considering intimacy alongside sexual pleasure also allows us to consider the relational dimensions of contraceptive choice and how these are far from static, one-off decisions. These empirical insights into intimacy illustrate that contraceptive choice is both a reflection of the perceived intimacy in a relationship and is also a “practice of intimacy”, particularly when people are navigating the various forms of intimacies available.

Returning to and continuing the traditional Chinese family system via WeChat: Digitally mediated families in liquid China

This article rethinks digitally mediated family, contending that WeChat facilitates the integration of digitally mediated Chinese family units and family practices into an entire system within traditional patterns. WeChat can serve as the hub for this kind of family mediation, since it is the dominant mega-platform in the smartphone-based Chinese polymedia environment, possessing superior technological convergence and sociocultural affordances. Based on qualitative data from 48 Chinese internal migrants, this article characterizes the entire system of the traditional Chinese family mediated by WeChat. First, the static Chinese family units converged on WeChat inherit spatial and hierarchical structures from the traditional models. Second, individuals’ WeChat usage for dynamic family practices is guided by Chinese family ethics, particularly those related to intergenerational and gendered ethics. Lastly, intimacy practices within Chinese families are digitally mediated to maintain ethically guided features in the Chinese style. This article emphasizes the role of polymedia-mediated ambient co-presence in activating implicit Chinese-style intimacy practices in the digital family spheres. Overall, when Chinese people log in to WeChat, they experience a return to traditional Chinese families, playing roles that contribute to the continuity of the entire traditional Chinese family system. This article suggests that the digitally mediated traditional family system ensures family stability in a highly modernized society where population mobility has become normalized.

Intimacy and industry: the multiple heterosexual intimacies shaping cycle rickshaw men’s labor and migration in India

ABSTRACT Indian men who migrated circularly from their village homes to Delhi to pedal cycle rickshaws for work practiced intimate relationships with their wives, sex workers, and middle-class female customers. While the intimacy practiced by South Asian men who migrate is, in popular discourse, often framed as deviancy or assumed to be only about physical gratification, this article’s ethnography demonstrates that rickshaw men’s heterosexual/erotic intimacies took multiple forms which were variously characterized by sexual exchange, physical closeness, emotional connections, and/or the denial of gender and sexuality. The intimate practices were informed by intersecting identities and systems of social hierarchy, and it is argued that they had considerable bearing on the men’s migration decisions and labor performance. Although neither intimacy studies nor South Asian labor migration studies are in the habit of analyzing industries like the cycle rickshaw industry through the same lens as, for example, sex work or surrogacy and fertility work, a case is made that such industries that rely on South Asian male migrants’ manual labor and migration may, too, be profitably understood as intimate industries.

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.

AN INTIMATE REVOLUTION: DIGITAL PRACTICES OF INTIMACY DURING COVID-19 AND BEYOND

This paper investigates the changes in digital practices of intimacy during the COVID-19 social distancing period in the UK, and whether these transformations have persisted in the ‘new normal’. The study employed a mixed-methods approach, collecting quantitative and qualitative data from 824 adults who used dating apps during the pandemic, and conducting 60 in-depth interviews. The study aimed to understand the digital intimate practices of heterosexual and LGBT+ communities during and after COVID-19. First, we describe (using both descriptive statistics and excerpts from participant interviews) the changes to practices of digital intimacy during COVID-19. Second, we will explore the distribution of these changes among communities. In particular, we describe the differences between heterosexual and LGBT+ respondents, and between white and ethnic minority respondents. Third, we explore how these changes have endured after COVID-19. In particular, we will explore how changes to what people look for in their app use endured or returned to ‘pre-covid’ The paper concludes by arguing that dating app's increasing status as health actors, particularly during a pandemic, necessitates more research in this area. This study provides insights into how digital practices of intimacy have transformed during COVID-19 and whether these transformations have endured in the ‘new normal’. Understanding these changes is essential to adequately support people’s emotional and sexual well-being during and after a time of crisis.

Consensual nonmonogamous relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic

With its emphasis on practices like social distancing and periods of intermittent isolation, the COVID-19 pandemic likely presented unique challenges for individuals who engage in consensual nonmonogamy (CNM). Interviews with 16 practitioners of CNM in the United States conducted in May–July, 2021 revealed five themes about how COVID-19 impacted their relationships: (1) slowing down relationship activity and progress; (2) speeding up relationship changes and milestones; (3) providing the opportunity for reflecting on nonmonogamous identities and relationships; (4) facilitation of clarifying intentions around nonmonogamous relationships; and (5) offering unique opportunities to apply skills from safer sex negotiations to navigating safety with precautions related to COVID-19. Findings illuminate how members of a community whose intimate practices were uniquely impacted in a time of limited sociality made meaning of their experience and charted the course for relationship trajectories.

Feeling close, disclosing feelings – family practices and practices of intimacy in youth–parent relations across three generations in Norway

ABSTRACT In this article we aim to understand how everyday family practices and practices of intimacy are connected in the formation of emotional ties in young people’s family relationships, by examining their relationship with their parents across three generations. The analyses draw on qualitative biographical interviews conducted with women and men in intergenerational chains of 24 sons/daughters (born 1992–1993), 23 of their fathers/mothers (born 1963–1970) and 21 of their grandfathers/grandmothers (born 1931–1945). By first exploring the narratives of the joint everyday practices between young people and their parents and, second, examining the emotional reflexivity in these relational narratives, we highlight differences in young people’s relations to their parents. Contrasting the oldest (1950s) and youngest (2010s) youth generations reveals joint activities and closeness to parents in both generations, while the degree of disclosing intimacy, individualised respect and shared interests marks the co-constructive nature of the youngest’ parental relations. The middle generation’s narratives are distinctive in describing themselves and their parents as living separate lives. This article contributes to the growing field of sociological youth research on family relations and the intimate aspects of the relationships between youth and their parents.

‘Let Us Hold Hands’: Lived Practices of Intimacy Among Gay Youth in Urban India

This article contributes to the growing literature on youth sexualities and intimacy, by centring the lived experiences of self-identified gay youth in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata. It draws on interview narratives of thirteen gay youth between the ages of 19 and 26, living in Kolkata, to unpack two inter-locking ways in which these sexual minority youth co-construct intimacy within the urban space: (a) intimacy as verbal and non-verbal disclosure and (b) embodied intimacy. The findings underline how studying gay youth’s practices of intimacy offer a unique window into sexual politics and urban life in twenty-first-century India.

BDSM in North America, Europe, and Oceania: A Large-Scale International Survey Gauging BDSM Interests and Activities

ABSTRACT BDSM bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism is a widespread and highly prevalent yet stigmatized practice of intimacy and sexuality. In recent years, international interest in BDSM research has grown, mainly resulting in prevalence studies in various countries. To date, however, no research has investigated international and intercontinental differences in the nature of BDSM interests and fantasies, BDSM roles and practicing contexts among BDSM practitioners. In order to explore international discrepancies in BDSM identity, fantasies, and activities among self-identified BDSM practitioners, a group of FetLife (a social network website for BDSM and kink interested individuals) members (N = 1,112) originating from North America (n = 458), Europe (n = 566), Oceania (n = 46), and Other (n = 42) completed the survey. Europeans reported an earlier age of onset of fantasizing about BDSM than did North Americans. More North Americans indicated practicing BDSM in a public context than did Europeans and Oceanians. These differences could in part be explained by different cultural backgrounds, higher levels of religiosity, and current stigmas toward non-traditional sexual interests. Future research should focus on clarifying whether cultural mechanisms underlie these dissimilarities.

Reminiscences of Kothas: Exploring Spatial Intimacies in Ruth Vanita’s Memory of Light

This paper aims to study the representation of same-sex desire in Ruth Vanita’s Memory of Light (2020) and analyze how the socio-spatial dynamics of the kotha helps to reconstruct female-to-female intimacy and convey a different idea of community and a sense of belonging in history. The novel, which traces the relationship between two courtesans, is also a recreation of the pre-modern Lucknow and its vibrant kothas with distinct architectural features. Beyond its overt function of entertaining the male patrons, the kothas as all-female establishments also served as a space of security and intimacy for women. The paper outlines the politics of situating same-sex desire in the historical backdrop of pre-colonial era. It uses concepts from Feminist Theory, Cultural Geography and Memory Studies, to examine the importance of kothas as a material and an ideological space, in facilitating discourses on gender variance, intimacy, and friendship that entered the cultural production of the time. In particular, the analysis intends to emphasize the frequent entanglement between the spatial features and women’s intimate practices as a distinct way of articulating same-sex desire that dissolves the binary understanding of hetero/homosexuality. Therefore, by insisting on the remembrance of kothas, the paper delineates how the ‘memory of places’ carves out two functions in the context of lesbian politics. On the one hand, it generates a ‘symbolic continuum’ to the history of women loving women to reframe postcolonial categorical understanding of ‘lesbian’ in contemporary times, and on the other, by infusing strategic use of metafictional elements, it emerges as a subversive mode of narrating stories of same-sex love while negotiating with the historical erasure of spaces of female-to female desire.

Infrastructure at home: Technology, intimacy, and ageing in China

This study adopts an ethnographic approach to examine how digital technology used at home ‐ mobile platforms and smart devices ‐ shaped the intimacy of ageing adults (aged 55 to 65) in Beijing. China’s fast-ageing population and its ambition to be a high‐tech superpower are some of the conditions that have necessitated the mobilisation of governmental ideas that link population management to technology development. This study built on Ara Wilson’s (2016) essay “The Infrastructure of Intimacy” by including critical infrastructure studies to examine how practices of intimacy are translated and operationalised through daily technology use at home. Data analysis was conducted using three frameworks: (1) making intimate: familiarising and reconnecting; (2) materialising intimacy: gifts, bonding, and avoidance; and (3) self‐intimacy (re)structured: choices, self‐love, and empowerment. The ethnographic data unveils the pivotal role of intimacy in the use of technologies and platforms by the ageing informants in managing their relationships between the self and their family and social relations. With its profound functionality in broadening the practices of intimacy, such as strengthening self-worth and self‐realisation, the daily use of digital technology at home also made it easier for the ageing informants in this study to deter, replace, and lessen their need for physical interactions. The findings suggest that normalising older adults’ active use of technology at home will further advance the technologisation of Chinese society while enhancing intimacy in the ageing population.

ПРАКСЕ ИНТИМНОСТИ ДЕЦЕ У ПОРОДИЧНОМ ДОМУ

As the family home is a gathering place for the whole family and as it best expresses the ways of family communication, family cohesion, solidarity and the routine of family life, it is the family home that can reveal more about the practices of intimacy. The subject of this paper is the intimacy practices of children in the family home with the aim of revealing the influence of the spatial organization of the family home on the relationships between family members and intra-family dynamics. The basic research questions concerned the personal perception of intimacy, the ways of its manifestation, the experience of home and the relationship between personal and shared space, as well as the connection between space and emotions, which was contributed by the method of emotional maps.

Towards care-ful distraction: Digital well-being and a politics of care during pandemic lockdowns in the U.S.

This paper conceptualizes digital well-being during July of 2020 as an emergent, situated experience which was particularly influenced by the spatiotemporal conditions of lockdown and the affordances of digital platforms and technology. I take up two key heuristics of lockdown digital well-being—attention and intimacy—and draw upon feminist political geography to examine the alignments between attentional and intimate practices by means of digital technology during lockdown. Through four in-depth interviews conducted during this time, I focus on the connections between participants’ political intimacies, emotional geographies, and (self-)care practices. The paper identifies a disconnect between experiences of unwell-being and practices of (self-)care emerging from popular conceptions of digital well-being, specifically regarding practices of ‘doomscrolling.’ Drawing upon Sarah Atkinson’s (2011) work on the discontinuities between scales of care and responsibility, I argue for a reworking of discourses and practices of digital well-being through care-ful distraction: the unruly use of our increasingly co-constituted attentional capacities and intimate relations to practice care within, and for, the sociotechnical systems which bind us together.

"Comforting, Reassuring, and…Hot": A Qualitative Exploration of Engaging in Bondage, Discipline, Domination, Submission, Sadism and (Sado)masochism and Kink from the Perspective of Autistic Adults.

There is a lack of research on autistic intimacy; however, a small body of research suggests that bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism and (sado)masochism (BDSM)/kink may be appealing to autistic people. We aimed at exploring how engagement in BDSM/kink related to autistic identity, using a phenomenological approach. We recruited six autistic adults through purposive sampling on social media. All participants took part in a one-to-one spoken interview about their engagement in BDSM/kink and how it related to their sense of identity. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis to analyze the data and found three key themes. Theme 1, "Practicing safe 'sex'" highlighted how the clear communication and explicit focus on consent present in BDSM/kink facilitated a feeling of safety. Theme 2, "So many ways to touch and be touched" was focused on the sensory draw of BDSM/kink, and how it provided exciting ways to explore sensory joy (and sometimes revulsion). Theme 3, "Subverting (neuro)normativity" showed how autistic people can find pleasure in intimate practices that transgress normative expectations. Our findings highlighted the importance of exploring the perceptions of autistic adults in relation to their own intimate practices. Autistic intimacy is an emerging area of research, with very little focus on lived experience. Although engagement in BDSM/kink may appear niche, our findings suggest that there are aspects which are inherently appealing to autistic people. These findings can be used to destigmatize both autistic intimacy and engagement in alternative intimate practices more broadly.

Mobile intimacies? Uncertainty, ambivalence and fluidity in the intimate practices of dating app users in Germany and the UK

Research on dating app practices has drawn on a dichotomous conception of love and sex, with users viewed as seeking either casual sex or a committed relationship. Drawing on qualitative interview data with dating app users in Germany and the UK, our analysis suggests the that the love/sex dichotomy fails to fully account for participants’ experiences. We argue that rather than imposing a normative framework, we should recognise the potentiality of movement and openness in app-based dating practices. We also challenge the critique of dating apps as entirely transactional, and instead argue that the emergence of what we identify as ‘mobile’ intimate practices demonstrate the diverse forms that intimacies can take within different relationships.

Love’s labour’s cost? Gendered migration and intimate labour in Asia

Recognising the need to expand research on intimate labour beyond the predominant focus on intimate occupations in which low-waged migrant workers are often engaged, we highlight in our editorial the processes and exchanges taking place in the provisioning of intimate work. We juxtapose existing research with the articles in this themed section to engender a deeper understanding of how intimate practices and relations are mediated by the orderings of power, gender and class. By examining the nature, conditions and obligations of intimate exchanges within domestic and public spheres located in both urban and rural contexts, the editorial further emphasizes the interplay of power and global neoliberal conditions in (re)producing uneven intimate exchanges.

Gendered Interaction and Practices of Intimacy Among Emirati Young Spouses: Exploring the Experiences of Wives

This study aims to explore the practices of intimacy among Emirati spouses in a society where gender discrimination persistently governs the private space of family relationships. Participants include 41 young Emirati working wives aged 24–30 who have jobs and are enrolled in graduate studies and research degrees (PhD and MA). In-depth interviews were used to collect data. Line-by-line coding, thematic coding, and constant comparison method were employed to analyze and interpret data. Analyses revealed seven interrelated categories associated with the gendered practices of intimacy. They were influenced by factors such as the wives’ status, the gap of age, and the wives’ religiosity. These themes are suppressed self-disclosure, restricted self-disclosure of wives, not sharing responsibilities, not sharing time, unequal mutual reciprocity, not solving problems, and not thinking together. Narratives highlighted gendered interaction and low quality of intimacy between spouses. The findings of this study show that empowering women in the public sphere has not impacted their position in the patriarchal structure of the family, which is reproduced by traditions and religious interpretations. This study’s findings can inform social policymakers aiming at bridging empowerment between the public and private spheres.

The Emotional (Un)making of the Family in Cross-European Parent–Child Relations

Abstract This essay examines the emotions that make and unmake transnational families, drawing on interviews with migrant parents living in Scotland and separated from their children abroad. First, it explores the meaning of distance and its role in stimulating emotional connections and disconnections between family members. It emphasises the significance of separation for emotional well-being and the necessity of absences in stimulating different intensities of transnational emotional labour. Second, the essay broadens the conceptualisation of the ‘emotional’ to include emotional work and emotional worklessness. It highlights emotions of ‘longing’ and ‘hope’ that unwork the structures of intentionality and reveal passivity at the heart of familial relations. Emotional lives of transnational families are permeated by the imaginaries of co-presence and potential future. Exploring the simultaneous production and fragmentation of emotional connections, the essay suggests the reworking of the contestable family idea(l)s and attending to intimate practices beyond utility and familial normativities.

Doing Intimacy in Pandemic Times: Findings of a Large-Scale Survey Among Singles in Japan

Abstract Singles—here understood as unmarried or never married individuals—are a growing subset of the Japanese population that has not received discrete attention in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article addresses the ways in which the pandemic and its associated interventions—calls for social distancing, self-restraint, or the avoidance of the ‘3Cs’—affect singles’ (non)familial personal relationships and practices of intimacy (platonic and romantic), as well as perceptions of singlehood and ‘solo activities’ (sorokatsu). Based on exploratory analyses of data from an original cross-sectional online survey conducted in early 2021 (n = 4.000; unmarried residents of Japan aged 25–49 years), we show that while practices of intimacy are changing throughout the pandemic, the changes are less dramatic than we anticipated. In addition, changes are highly gendered and seem to support contemporary media and public discourse on how individuals are managing COVID-life and its concomitant uncertainties. We see two diachronic developments: an increase in social isolation and distress on the one hand, and an increase in acceptance of being single and doing ‘solo activities’ on the other. Our findings contribute to an understanding of the ways that singlehood, marital status, and extra-familial relationships are shaped, and shape the experiences of this pandemic.