Against a backdrop of conditions of precarity and the ruins of finance capitalism, this study examines the manifestations of how the relationship of friendship manages to re-invent and re-define ...itself. Moreover, it asks whether new modes of relationality, companionship, and intimacy can be cultivated and practiced given the current neoliberal conditions of living. The questions that this study attempts to open up are focused on the re-workings, reconfigurations, and re-makings of practices of sociality and intimacy between friends.
Significant restrictions on movement outside the home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the importance of everyday digital technologies for communicating remotely with intimate ...others. In this article, we draw on findings from a home-based video ethnography project in Sydney to identify the ways that digital devices and software served to support and enhance intimacy and sociality in this period of crisis and isolation. Digital communication technologies had an increased presence in people's domestic lives during lockdown. For many people, video calling software had become especially important, allowing them to achieve greater closeness and connection with their friends and family in enacting both everyday routines and special events. These findings surface the digital and non-digital materialities of sociality and intimacy, and the capacities opened by people's improvisation with the affordances of home-based communication technologies at a time of extended physical isolation.
Drawing on and responding to the writings of theorists such as
Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Lisa Lowe, this book
proposes the notion of "precarious intimacies" to navigate a
...dilemma: how to recognize, affirm, and value love, touch, and care
while challenging the racialized and gendered politics in which
they are embedded.
Twenty-first-century Europe is undergoing dramatic political and
economic transformations that produce new forms of transnational
contact as well as new regimes of exclusion and economic precarity.
These political and economic shifts both circumscribe and enable
new possibilities for intimacy. Many European films of the last two
decades depict experiences of political and economic vulnerability
in narratives of precarious intimacies. In these films, stories of
intimacy, sex, love, and friendship are embedded in violence and
exclusion, but, as Maria Stehle and Beverly Weber show, the
politics of touch and connection also offers avenues to theorize
forms of attention and affection that challenge exclusive notions
of race, citizenship, and belonging.
Precarious Intimacies examines the aesthetic strategies
that respond to this tension and proposes a politics of
interpretation that identifies the potential and possibility of
intimacy.
The Belle Gibson scandal that broke in 2015 is a testament to the growing phenomenon of lifestyle gurus in the 21st century. In this article, our aim is not to explain the psychology behind Gibson's ...lies. Rather, we focus on the social, cultural and technological conditions that enabled Gibson's persona to flourish and their impact on contemporary understandings of the self. Lifestyle gurus embody the para-social, trading off the appeal of intimacy, authenticity and integrity. We demonstrate how social media have increased the levels of emotional investment, trust and attention capital in para-social relationships by providing ubiquitous access to native experts and creating the platform to achieve influence and micro-celebrity status. Finally, we contend that the growing number of lifestyle gurus providing the public with health advice and scientific knowledge points to the need to examine critically the social and cultural landscape that enables micro-celebrities to emerge.
An attempt to put an Asian woman on Canada's $100 bill in 2012 unleashed enormous controversy. The racism and xenophobia that answered this symbolic move toward inclusiveness revealed the nation's ...trumpeted commitment to multiculturalism as a lie. It also showed how multiple minor publics as well as the dominant public responded to the ongoing issue of race in Canada. In this new study, Christine Kim delves into the ways cultural conversations minimize race's relevance even as violent expressions and structural forms of racism continue to occur. Kim turns to literary texts, artistic works, and media debates to highlight the struggles of minor publics with social intimacy. Her insightful engagement with everyday conversations as well as artistic expressions that invoke the figure of the Asian allows Kim to reveal the affective dimensions of racialized publics. It also extends ongoing critical conversations within Asian Canadian and Asian American studies about Orientalism, diasporic memory, racialized citizenship, and migration and human rights. An original reconsideration of foundational concerns, The Minor Intimacies of Race focuses on the ephemeral and the nuanced to reveal the social hierarchies and power structures inherent in today's North America.
Interpersonal touch seems to promote physical health through its effects on stress-sensitive parameters. However, less is known about the psychological effects of touch. The present study ...investigates associations between touch and romantic partners’ affective state in daily life. We hypothesized that this association is established by promoting the recipient’s experience of intimacy. Both partners of 102 dating couples completed an electronic diary 4 times a day during 1 week. Multilevel analyses revealed that touch was associated with enhanced affect in the partner. This association was mediated by the partner’s psychological intimacy. Touch was also associated with intimacy and positive affect in the actor. Finally, participants who were touched more often during the diary study week reported better psychological well-being 6 months later. This study provides evidence that intimate partners benefit from touch on a psychological level, conveying a sense of strengthened bonds between them that enhances affect and well-being.
Women Writing Intimate Spaces Lindh Estelle, Birgitta; Duțu, Carmen Beatrice; Parente-Čapková, Viola
12/2022, Letnik:
5
eBook, Book
Odprti dostop
The messy and multi-layered issue of intimacy in connection with transnationality and spatiality is the topic of this volume on women’s writing in the long nineteenth century. A series of intimacies ...are dealt with through case studies from a wide range of countries situated on the European fringes. Within the field of feminist literary studies, the volume thus differs from other publications with a narrower scope, such as Western Europe or specific regions. More broadly, the chapters in this volume offer a variety of approaches to intimacy and generous bibliographical references for researchers in humanities and cultural studies.
PDF
