Questions Of Intimacy Research Articles

First draft·ings

This practice-based essay explores the nuances of intimacy through the coming together of bodies – their gestures, languages and sensorial occupation within a (physical) space of sharing, socializing and reflecting in a pandemic and post-pandemic world. The initiative stems from first draft – a collaborative project that began in 2018 as an alternative art space initiated by a group of artist-friends. The process behind ‘drafts’ becomes essential in creating a playful space to invite a flux of dialogues, mistakes, accidents, revisions, incidents and receptivity among others, challenging the conventions of producing and displaying ‘artworks’/exhibition-making. The initiative has now evolved into a space of gatherings, called first draft·ings, where we meet in small groups at a residential/non-commercial space in New Delhi, India. These gatherings have provided a niche for people from varied fields to connect through conversations, involving performers, researchers, sound/visual-designers, engineers/makers, educators and others. It offers a space to come together, share, eat, drink, chat, play, rest, recuperate and perhaps create (/not) around a pre-decided collective prompt. How can we reimagine/question/provoke new forms of art making and its dissemination through these acts of coming together? The essay takes a closer look at these ongoing ‘slow’ gatherings whereby we do not necessarily create, yet reflect over the conversations that sprout into more connections, extensions, and leave/take forward its residues. In the essay, we follow a non-linear approach by revisiting the sessions through narrative writing, and oscillating between the expository two-folds of the binaries. We explore the methodologies of first draft·ings and touch upon the questions of intimacy through transmission as a performative strategy. We attempt to explore the methods and vocabularies of a gathering by responding to the specific prompts through actions of – storytelling, compassionate listening, walking, watching films, playing games, gifting, laughing and more. We propose to traverse the peripheral nature of gatherings through proximity, collaboration, improvisation, slowness, rest, thus partaking in the intimate act(s) of transmission.

Intimacy as Inquiry: Collaborative Reading and Writing With Deleuze and Guattari

This article performs the becoming intimacy of a reading (and, later, writing) group who met once a month for 2 years to discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Through this collaborative piece, we explore the question of intimacy as both a form of activism and a mode of inquiry. We ask, “Where is activism as we subvert the hierarchy of academia by meeting as an assemblage of differing perspectives and positions in the university?” Furthermore, we ask, “What does the intimacy that occurred, that is occurring, do for both inquiry and activism?.” This article contains two sets of writing from our monthly meetings that we offered as performative conference texts. We contend that it is affect that brings our theorizing to life, and transfers it meaningfully between each other. We are affected by Deleuze and Guattari, by A Thousand Plateaus, and by how we form linkages with our lives to these bodies. Intimacy is what sustains and gives life to our collective inquiry, without which our affect might be more constrained. The complexity of the becoming of “intimacy as inquiry” becomes twofold, as it is not only a becoming of intimacy, love, and care for those in our assemblage but also a reterritorialization of the act of inquiry. Through the act of disrupting power structures in the group of “We 5,” the act of writing and presenting this work in an academic context pushes against the striated spaces that exist in the academy, that course through the milieu we occupy, and provides the means and necessity for reterritorializing the epistemic space. “Epistemic intimacy,” then, becomes a manifestation of engaging with the inquiry process and embodies an active resistance to the business transaction that the act of inquiry has become in the neoliberal development of the academy.

Play, secrecy and consent: Theorizing privacy breaches and sensitive data in the world of networked sex toys

Based on a new materialist analysis of “vibrant matter” to understand the liveliness of sexual objects in toy-based sexual play, in this article I investigate the politics of thinking digital technologies as operating partly beyond human forms of agency and control. I use as my core examples privacy breaches and data leaks in the world of networked sex toys – such as a vibrator which allegedly audio recorded its clients’ play sessions without express permission – to engage with questions of intimacy and privacy in digital networks of humans and nonhumans. In particular, the discussion focuses on the consequences of new forms of publicness for how we can understand sexual intimacy and sexual play. What does it mean to have an intimate moment when connected to a device, a medium and a network that is by definition public, corporate and leaky? And how could we imagine other ways of being sexually intimate and exposed – yet safe – in public digital networks? Drawing on discussions of queer intimacy, sexual consent and queer BDSM, I suggest that current understandings of privacy and sensitive data (as per GDPR) may need unconventional sources to further ways of knowing what consent might mean, and how it feels.

Questions of Intimacy and Distance in Three Films by Sarah Polley

Questions of Intimacy and Distance in Three Films by Sarah Polley

Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy by Jesse Wolfe (review)

Reviewed by: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy by Jesse Wolfe Alison L. Heney Jesse Wolfe. Bloomsbury, Modernism, and the Reinvention of Intimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. viii + 264 pp. Citing the recent trend in modernist studies toward the examination of “modernity (a social phenomenon) as the context for modernism (aesthetic responses to this phenomenon)” (1), Bloomsbury, Modernism and the Reinvention of Intimacy is an intriguing scholarly work that argues for a reconsideration of the famed Bloomsbury group and the centrality of intimacy’s radical reinvention in their literary projects. Although composed as six chapters, this book is divided thematically into three parts, with the first part focusing on the philosophical background of Bloomsbury group, the second part focusing on the battle between the sexes depicted in Bloomsburian novels, and the third part focusing on what Wolfe identifies as the problematic role of marriage in the modern period. Each of these three parts takes the form of a thoughtful, comparative approach to questions regarding the nature and transformation of intimate relationships in the modern period and to how the treatment of such questions in works by G. E. Moore, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, D. H. Lawrence, and Vita Sackville-West serve as theoretical, and perhaps practical, illustrations of the modern ambivalence toward Victorian precedents regarding sex, [End Page 860] marriage, desire, and friendship. Although Wolfe’s text is ambitious in scope, with gestures toward philosophical, psychological, sociological, and historical issues as themes both enriching and reflected in the work of six very different contemporaries, he effectively ties together these various threads into a clear and articulate discussion of intimate relationships within the context of modernist aesthetics. Beginning in part 1 with a detailed discussion of G. E. Moore and his influential treatise, Principia Ethica, Wolfe highlights Moore’s frequent philosophical shifts between the “essentialist attitudes” of his platonic assumptions and what some critics have suggested is the implicit “endorsement of homoeroticism” (34) in its final chapter. Identifying Moore’s coded ambivalence toward this issue of intimacy as a source of “anti-essentialist” inspiration for later Bloomsburians, Wolfe opens up his discussion of Principia’s “mitigated rebellion” (50) with a consideration of Freud’s morally ambiguous case study of Dora, where together, the two texts form a dynamic philosophical background from which the reader is invited to address the tensions concerning the question of intimacy as it is expressed in four works of fiction. In parts 2 and 3 of his study, Wolfe awards his selected authors the role of “cultural diagnosticians,” and by focusing on novels such as Howards End (1910), Women in Love (1920), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and All Passions Spent (1931), he demonstrates through examples drawn by close textual analysis and statistical research how their fiction poses ways to think about “historically informed questions” such as “What are men and women like?” and “How should we conduct our intimate lives?” (19). Although, as Wolfe notes in his introduction, the four authors he chooses to focus on can, and have been, debated by critics as to the degree of their involvement with the Bloomsbury group proper, each of these chapters clearly outlines his reasoning with meticulous detail and, more importantly, introduces another facet to the formulation of aesthetic experimentation in the modern period by emphasizing the value of their work as it exists in tension within members of his selected group. For example, while Wolfe argues that texts such as Howards End and All Passion Spent approach the question of gender and sexuality from a somewhat Victorian essentialism, he suggests that these texts, when considered alongside the predominantly “anti-essentialist” techniques of Freud and Woolf, become “illustrative of the group’s ambivalence about the reinvention of intimacy” (192)—an ambivalence Wolfe eloquently identifies as one of Bloomsbury’s “defining aesthetic strengths” (2). Within the discussion of each particular text, as with Mrs. Dalloway in chapter 5, for example, Wolfe supplements his comparative approach with the careful outlining of a number of interconnected components found in intimate social life during the modern period (from redefinitions [End Page 861] of sexuality to the volatility of marriage and divorce rates to the anxieties informing the proper...

‘to find a form that accommodates the mess: Truth Telling from Doris Lessing to B. S. Johnson

This essay takes Doris Lessing's criticism of the ‘Angry Young Men, and traces her account of them in relation to commitment in writing, politics, and relationships in The Golden Notebook. Moving away from the neo-realism of the 1950s to postmodern realism in The Golden Notebook, she integrated political, intellectual, and emotional layers, insisting on their commensurability. The essay then considers B. S. Johnson as ‘guilty of the bounded provincialism that Lessing derided, and suggests that both wrote from similar instincts in mapping commitment, form, and experience; that however ‘bounded Johnson's writing appears to be, it too integrates private experience with public and global events. The essay argues that both writers' work turns on questions of intimacy, both formal and experiential, and that attention to their interest in intimacy opens up alternative ways of looking at a period sometimes dulled by the critical generalizations that it produced.

Preface

preface In fall 2000, Feminist Studies published a special issue on gender studies in India and the South Asian diaspora, reviewing the trajectory of women's movements and identity formations and offering potent writing on citi zenship, community, and nationalism. Over ten years later, this special issue presents important advances in feminist scholarship on the region. In a decade that has witnessed the official decriminalization of homosexu ality, a vibrant sex workers' movement, female politicians holding the reins of state and national governments, expanding markets, and horrific violence against religious minorities, feminists have both refined and recast the scope of their analyses. Some of the most important contribu tions are found in scholarship on sexuality and intimate relationships, offering alternatives to standardized binary formulations of sexual desire and subjectivity. Whereas the forms and ramifications of marriage—its minimum age, its property, and status implications—have long been objects of critique in Indian feminism, recent scholarship moves the debate forward by de-centering the heterosexual couple, tracing desires and identities that flourish beyond hegemonic dictates. This special issue covers archival, ethnographic, filmic, and case law sources that underline the instability of the heterosexual couple. It presents a range of conjugali ties by documenting various arrangements of procreation and household economies: from devadasi women gifted to goddesses, to lesbians who wed, to rapists who marry their victims as a means to atone for their violence. It offers scholarly and creative reflections on the place of sexuality in the formulation of gender categories, the nuclear couple, and caste differ ences. Drawing on the rich historical and anthropological record in India, the essays and artistic works in this issue provide an engaging set of refer ence points and a new politics of visibility on questions of intimacy, conju gality, and sexuality. Feminist Studies37, no. 1 (Spring 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 7 Preface In our first essay, titled "Abundance and Loss: Queer Intimacies in South Asia," Naisargi Dave provides a clear sense of the shifting terrain of sexuality studies in South Asia. Reviewing a set of recently published books that demonstrate and examine the inventive fecundity of queer life," Dave argues that what these books contribute is not merely their documentation of these extraordinary moments of queer presence but also their "tentative embrace of loss that lies at the heart of liberatory poli tics, if not of (queer) love itself." Through this embrace, this active—and Dave argues, enabling—grappling with loss, the four books chosen, namely, Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, Maya Sharma's Loving Women: Being Lesbian and Unprivileged in India, Ruth Vanita's Love's Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West, and Gayatri Reddy's With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India, illuminate these very tensions, between presence and absence, between "the will to know and a willingness to acknowledge some things as unknowable." Tracking a range of entitlements—the entitlement to seek (Arondekar); to speak (Vanita); to be respected, to care and be cared for (Reddy); and to love (Sharma)—these four books occupy, even "constitute," the space of inti macy, a space that is "driven by a tension between presence and absence, one made manifest in the desire to both have the other and to love the other from a distance that enables human flourishing." And it is precisely this intimate space, and these productive tensions, that the books—and Dave's essay—capture so well. Lucinda Ramberg, in "When the Devi Is Your Husband: Sacred Marriage and Sexual Economy in South India," presents an ambitious agenda for recasting marriage and sexual exchange. Instead of focusing on objectification and agency, their most common conceptual girders, Ramberg focuses on how value is produced through marriage. Reflecting on her ethnographic work among devotees of the goddess Yellamma in southern India, as well as classic texts in feminist political economy, she argues that marriage is a technology for producing particular kinds of persons and value. Rather than placing married women and devadasis in opposition, as many conventional accounts do, she locates them within a single system. In noting that both daughters and devadasis are gifted by...

Sorglig television: affekter, omdömen och känsloarbete

Many of the existing debates about Reality TV overlook some of the obvious ways in which questions of intimacy are implicated in gender relations. In this article we want to open up a debate about how Reality TV’s creation of mediated intimacy induces a type of emotional labour through the performance of femininity. The realm of intimacy is one that has traditionally been associated with the feminine private sphere, but various commentators have marked out how public worlds, institutions and market forces have marshalled the intimate terrain into public spaces, using it to reinforce arguments of ‘normalcy’. We want to assess whether the blurring of the public/private distinction can offer a straightforward route to viewing pleasure through locating some of our findings from the 40 women that we interviewed about their own lives and the place of Reality TV within their broader life experiences. What we see on Reality TV is a visualisation of different performatives and demands. The distance between the practice of the viewer and the performer is minimised because both are subject to the requirements of feminine performances, particularly at the level of caring. The emotional labour of empathy is also bound up within moral judgements of value, especially visible in the use of the word ‘sad’. The ambiguity over ‘sad’ draws the female viewers of our study into an immanent emotional labour relationship at the same time as offering a space to critique.

Disability Rights and Wrongs

Over the last thirty years, the field of disability studies has emerged from the political activism of disabled people. In this challenging review of the field, leading disability academic and activist Tom Shakespeare argues that the social model theory has reached a dead end. Drawing on a critical realist perspective, Shakespeare promotes a pluralist, engaged and nuanced approach to disability. Key topics discussed include: dichotomies - the dangerous polarizations of medical model versus social model, impairment versus disability and disabled people versus non-disabled people identity - the drawbacks of the disability movement's emphasis on identity politics bioethics in disability - choices at the beginning and end of life and in the field of genetic and stem cell therapies care and social relationships - questions of intimacy and friendship. This stimulating and accessible book challenges orthodoxies in British disability studies, promoting a new conceptualization of disability and fresh research agenda. It is an invaluable resource for researchers and students in disability studies and sociology, as well as professionals, policy makers and activists.

Revisando o passado e construindo o presente: o movimento gay como espaço educativo

Análise preliminar de uma pesquisa de doutorado que está sendo desenvolvida com cinco grupos gays organizados no Brasil, entendendo o trabalho realizado como processo educativo, já que estão produzindo novas formas de conhecimento para além dos seus integrantes e para além da homossexualidade. Baseando-se nas observações, foi possível centralizar a análise desse trabalho na questão da intimidade e sua relação com passado-presente e público-privado. Costurando essas relações, chega-se à conclusão que a herança moderna está mais presente do que se supõe.